And On The Seventh Day, He Rested (Updated)

(Image created by Darleen Click)

This has been a busy week for the would-be Messiah, a man who he himself claims is motivated by only the highest of moral and ethical concerns. In this past week, he made the "difficult decision" to break his repeated pledges to accept public funding for the general election; he has stated a vision of America that is multicultural; he has stated that America is no longer a Christian nation; he unveiled a pseudo Presidential seal; and, he didn't just play the race card, he played 52-race card pick-up.
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Let's begin with Obama articulating a view of America as multicultural rather than a Judeo-Christian melting pot and top that off with an Obama CBN interview in which he displays mind-bending hypocrisy:

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama tells CBN news that "America is no longer just a Christian nation" and laid out ways both religious conservatives and liberals can begin to find common ground."

. . . "I think that the right might worry a bit more about the dangers of sectarianism. Whatever we once were, we're no longer just a Christian nation; we are also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation, a Buddhist nation, a Hindu nation, and a nation of nonbelievers. We should acknowledge this and realize that when we're formulating policies from the state house to the Senate floor to the White House, we've got to work to translate our reasoning into values that are accessible to every one of our citizens, not just members of our own faith community."

In a speech last month to a church convention, Senator Obama told the audience, "Somehow, somewhere along the way, faith stopped being used to bring us together and started being used to drive us apart. It got hijacked. Part of it's because of the so-called leaders of the Christian Right, who've been all too eager to exploit what divides us." Obama explained to CBN's Brody what he meant by that comment.

Read the entire article. One, America has proven over the life of its existence that the melting pot works. Yet the view Obama espouses is a pure multiculturalism - possibly the most discredited and unworkable theory (outside of the economic theory of marxism) ever to come from the cauldron of marxism and socialism. Two, our laws and our fundamental beliefs are driven by the Judeo Christian ethic. When we start to change that to make room for the wholly incompatible Sharia law of Salafi and Khomeinist Muslims, our society will inevitably start to crumble. Three, how could anyone let Obama get away with charging the religious right with hijacking Christianity after this deeply hypocritical man attended Rev. Jeremiah Wright's Church for twenty years and allowed his children to be exposed to the incredibly racist, anti-American and divisive Black Liberation Theology. And just in case you don't remember:



Give me a break. (H/T Gateway Pundit)

At least as troubling if not more, Obama himself dropped a preemptive race bomb this week, equating criticism of him, his horrendous history of associations, and his naive and ridiulous policies with racism. This from Bookworm Room:

I’ve reminded you to be proud of your new age racism — a racism firmly based, not on Obama’s skin color, but on his political views, scary associates, corruption and incompetence. It’s becoming more and more clear that we all need to hang onto the fact that our Year 2008 racism problem is grounded in Obama’s policies, not his race at all. Why? Because Obama himself (as opposed to his various spokespeople) is coming out from under cover and being very blatant about calling average Americans really bad names:

“We know what kind of campaign they’re going to run. They’re going to try to make you afraid,” Obama said at the fundraiser. “They’re going to try to make you afraid of me. He’s young and inexperienced and he’s got a funny name. And did I mention he’s black?”

Read the entire post. And there is more on this from Rick Moran at Rightwing Nuthouse. I wrote six months ago, when it became clear that Obama's campaign team was playing the race card:

. . . [I]f liberals choose to vote for Obama on the basis of his race, that is their right. And if liberals choose to affirmatively campaign for him on those grounds, that's fine also. But its the next logical step down that road that portends the real danger for our country. It is using charges of racisim to protect Obama from criticism.

. . . If Obama supporters are allowed to make this next election an unspoken referendum on race and liberal guilt, than this is going to be a bloody Presidential election season indeed. It will be a tremendous disservice to an America where racisim is very much on the wane and equality, imperfect though it may be, is the rule, not the exception.

Read the entire post. Obama's speech, though it has gotten little play in the press, confirms my worst fears about the damage he is prepared to do to this nation in order to gain the White House. LTC Allen West (ret.), a black candidate running for office in Florida, had this to say:

. . . It also seems rather humorous that the Presidential candidate who was supposed to be such a "uniter" and transcend race is the one talking about it the most. If Senator Obama was confident in his abilities and character, he would not need to create a crutch for failure. Senator Obama has just tipped his hand, any criticism of him and his policies will be directly attributed to racism. I congratulate Senator Obama for taking race relations in America back some 30 years.

Read the entire article.

Obama displayed more of that audacity of his, hoping apparently to portray himself as "presidential," by rolling out his own version of the presidential seal in front of the podium. This from Beldar Blog:

Nevertheless, the junior senator from Illinois, who's yet to complete his first term in the United States Senate, apparently feels entitled to rip off the most familiar elements of the official Seal of the President of the United States for his campaign use — and then to combine it with some of his own campaign artwork:

Interestingly, Obama changed the words on the scroll held by the eagle. On the Presidential seal, it says E pluribus unum - "Out of Many, One". Clearly such a non-multicultural motto would not be acceptable to Obama. He replaced E Pluribus Unum with his own meaningless catch phrase, "Vero Possumus" - "Yes we can." As Beldar goes on to note:

Us God-loving, bitter, clinging gun-owners in the fly-over country have an expression for the kind of arrogance required to appropriate the seal of a public office to which one hasn't quite yet been elected: "He's dang sure gotten too big fer his britches," we'd say.

Read the entire post.

Update: The seal now becomes the latest of things tied to Obama to be tossed under the bus.

Update 2: Heh. Via Instapundit, "is it true that Obama killed a seal that was less then a week old?"

And lastly we come to Obama's decision to break his promise, long standing and oft repeated (so long as there was political advantage to be had in doing so), that he would accept pulbic financing for the general election campaign, a decision you can see ridiculed to highly nervous and subdued laughter on the Daily Show:



(H/T Hot Air, who also note that Huffpo bloggers are highly offended at this blasphemy questioning the motivations of their messiah.)

What truly made Obama's decision to toss public financing under the bus a travesty were his laughable justifications, attempting to paint this decision as taking the moral highground in order to fight the Republican attack machine and John McCain. That drove Mark Shields at PBS to call this a "flip-flop of epic proportions." After watching Obama try to justify his decision, Shields further opined that Obama could not possibly "pass a polygraph test."

I wrote on Friday that this whole situation showed in stark relief that Obama is a man driven by his own self interests and political expediency rather than any set of principles. [Update - Bonnie Erbe, at U.S. News & World Report, has written a scathing attack on Obama on precisely this topic - "Barack Obama, Serial Flip-Flopper." It is well worth a read, as is this cataloguing of twenty five major flip flops to date at Weapons of Mass Discussion. H/T Bizzy Blog]

Whatever he says is subject to change based on the next days weighing of the costs and benefits to himself personally. This man's whole schtick about "cleaning up Washington" and bringing about change from the old ways is wholly empty rhetoric. He has shown himself to be nothing more than a typical hypocrite of the kind found all over Washington, lacking in both political courage and moral fibre, but having an excess empty rhetoric. And as I wrote in that post, we are in desperate need of the opposite in our next President.

Fellow blogger Soob pointed out a David Brooks column in the NYT that does an exceptional job of capturing the essence of "Fast Eddie" Obama:

. . . [A]s recent weeks have made clear, Barack Obama is the most split-personality politician in the country today. On the one hand, there is Dr. Barack, the high-minded, Niebuhr-quoting speechifier who spent this past winter thrilling the Scarlett Johansson set and feeling the fierce urgency of now. But then on the other side, there’s Fast Eddie Obama, the promise-breaking, tough-minded Chicago pol who’d throw you under the truck for votes.

This guy is the whole Chicago package: an idealistic, lakefront liberal fronting a sharp-elbowed machine operator. He’s the only politician of our lifetime who is underestimated because he’s too intelligent. He speaks so calmly and polysyllabically that people fail to appreciate the Machiavellian ambition inside.

But he’s been giving us an education, for anybody who cares to pay attention. . . .

Back when he was in the Illinois State Senate, Dr. Barack could have taken positions on politically uncomfortable issues. But Fast Eddie Obama voted “present” nearly 130 times. From time to time, he threw his voting power under the truck.

Dr. Barack said he could no more disown the Rev. Jeremiah Wright than disown his own grandmother. Then the political costs of Rev. Wright escalated and Fast Eddie Obama threw Wright under the truck.

Dr. Barack could have been a workhorse senator. But primary candidates don’t do tough votes, so Fast Eddie Obama threw the workhorse duties under the truck.

Dr. Barack could have changed the way presidential campaigning works. John McCain offered to have a series of extended town-hall meetings around the country. But favored candidates don’t go in for unscripted free-range conversations. Fast Eddie Obama threw the new-politics mantra under the truck.

And then on Thursday, Fast Eddie Obama had his finest hour. Barack Obama has worked on political reform more than any other issue. He aspires to be to political reform what Bono is to fighting disease in Africa. He’s spent much of his career talking about how much he believes in public financing. In January 2007, he told Larry King that the public-financing system works. In February 2007, he challenged Republicans to limit their spending and vowed to do so along with them if he were the nominee. In February 2008, he said he would aggressively pursue spending limits. He answered a Midwest Democracy Network questionnaire by reminding everyone that he has been a longtime advocate of the public-financing system.

But Thursday, at the first breath of political inconvenience, Fast Eddie Obama threw public financing under the truck. In so doing, he probably dealt a death-blow to the cause of campaign-finance reform. And the only thing that changed between Thursday and when he lauded the system is that Obama’s got more money now.

And Fast Eddie Obama didn’t just sell out the primary cause of his life. He did it with style. He did it with a video so risibly insincere that somewhere down in the shadow world, Lee Atwater is gaping and applauding. Obama blamed the (so far marginal) Republican 527s. He claimed that private donations are really public financing. He made a cut-throat political calculation seem like Mother Teresa’s final steps to sainthood. . . .

Read the entire article. Brooks ends up asking whether this might not actually be a good thing, having such a "ruthless opportunist" as President given the challenges we face. But being ruthless to gain power does not mean that Obama has the moral courage to make the right decisions if they would be unpopular, or to stick with them if they prove unpopular. If history teaches us anything about meeting challenges in troubled times, it is that just the opposite is what is needed.

And that is another thrilling weak of lows and lowers in Messiah watching.

[Update: Victor David Hanson adds his own retrospective on Obama's eventfull week.]