“Now I’m truly scared.”

A friend wrote this after she watched Fox News’ Glenn Beck’s series on the “alarming number of far-left radicals the President is surrounded by” – referring to some of the President’s special advisers and “czars.” President Barack Obama, my friend tells me, is “a true left-winger.”

So, now she knows.

She didn’t know after the President signed the $800 billion so-called “stimulus program.” She didn’t know after government takeovers/bailouts of banks, insurance companies and auto companies.

She didn’t know after Obama campaigned in favor of protectionism by promising to unilaterally change free trade agreements, such as NAFTA, or after the inclusion of “Buy American” provisions in the “stimulus package.”

She didn’t know after Obama campaigned on government-run health care or after he said during the campaign that “if starting from scratch,” he’d implement the Canadian single-payer system.

She didn’t know after Obama stated his goal to impose job-killing and price-hiking “cap-and-trade” business taxes to fight “man-made global warming.” (Never mind the vigorous debate in the scientific community about the degree to which – or even whether – human activity is the cause and whether it makes more sense to deal with the effect of a slight warming than to undertake costly and likely ineffective measures to stop it.)

She didn’t know after Obama’s plans to “invest” to “create green jobs” of the future or after he moved oversight of the next census from the Department of Commerce to the White House (in order to increase the number of minorities so that government money can follow).

She didn’t know after Obama sided with black Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates and turned the professor’s altercation with Cambridge police into a microcosm of the alleged widespread problem of unlawful “racial profiling” against blacks; after Obama spent 20 years in a church led by a smoke-coming-out-of-the-nose, America-bashing “spiritual adviser”; after Obama’s selection of an attorney general who called America “cowardly” on matters of race; after the AG’s refusal to indict members of the New Black Panther Party for seemingly clear voter intimidation; or after Obama’s selection of a Supreme Court justice who many times claimed her gender and ethnicity make her superior to a “white male.”

She didn’t know after a proposal by Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., to cap executive pay – for both those businesses that receive taxpayer money and those that don’t; after Obama’s promise for a government-provided “world-class education” to all who want it; or after the Cash for Clunkers program, under which A helped pay for the purchase of a car for B.

She didn’t know after Obama promised to sit down “without preconditions” with enemies like the president of Iran and the head of North Korea; after Obama slammed Israel for building or expanding settlements, with nary a word about the daily rockets landing in Israel from the Gaza Strip; after proposals to reduce spending on missile shield defense; after the AG appointed a “special counsel” to determine whether workers at the CIA – during the Bush administration – should be prosecuted for using Justice Department-approved techniques to interrogate terrorists (despite a previously undertaken investigation by career prosecutors and over the objection of the current CIA head); or that the term “war on terror” would no longer be used.

She didn’t know after the public support of leaders in the Democratic Party – including Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and former presidential candidate John Kerry – for the reinstatement of the so-called “Fairness Doctrine” to provide ideological “balance” over the airwaves; or after Obama, while publicly opposing the reinstatement of the doctrine, appointed an FCC “diversity czar” to pursue the same objective: squelching conservative talk radio.

What does it take for some to wake up?

When Obama publicly asserts that some corporations, including “Big Oil” and medical insurance companies, make “obscene profits” (they don’t compared with many other industries) and that his “compensation czar” will look into executive compensation, what does that tell you? When he argues that medical insurance companies need a “public option” (before public opinion forced him to back away from it) to keep them “honest,” what does that say? When he arrogantly claims that fighting “global warming” and tackling the “health care crisis” are not just moral imperatives but also necessary to keep our economy robust (?!), what does that show?

Voters last year elected a left-wing former “community organizer” with one of the Senate’s most liberal voting records. He seeks to take the country – over the growing resistance of even those who voted for him – to an idealized world of government-guaranteed equality of outcomes. He wants a government-guaranteed “level playing field” of wealth redistribution via taxing those deemed to have too much.

Obama’s goals are open, blatant and confidently asserted, backed by a filibuster-proof, supermajority, Democratic-controlled Congress. There is no Big Secret, no subterfuge, no bait-and-switch.

This is who and what he is.

COPYRIGHT 2009 LAURENCE A. ELDER
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