The Lincoln-Obama Debate: Straight out of the Alinsky’s playbook...news analysis not found in the main stream media

The Alinsky President Plays The Lincoln Card:
Obama Attempts To Invoke Greatness To Sell His Suicidal Economic Plan

Posted By Chris Queen On April 14, 2011

By now you’ve heard all about President Obama’s speech on reducing the budget deficit. If you, like me, weren’t able to listen to it live, chances are you’ve heard enough of the speech (or maybe you read the text of it), as well as some sort of commentary on it, to form an opinion. After all, it’s been chopped into sound bites, parsed, and analyzed to death by both sides.
It’s actually pretty easy to have an opinion on Obama’s words. It’s easy to look at the ideas and plans the president laid out in the speech and make a decision on whether you agree with them or not. Let’s face it: the vast majority of analysis of the speech has centered around the specifics of it.  But let’s take a look at one aspect of the speech that hasn’t been spotlighted much: Obama’s quoting of Abraham Lincoln.

Here’s where the 44th president invoked the 16th:

From our first days as a nation, we have put our faith in free markets and free enterprise as the engine of America’s wealth and prosperity. More than citizens of any other country, we are rugged individualists, a self-reliant people with a healthy skepticism of too much government.
But there has always been another thread running throughout our history – a belief that we are all connected; and that there are some things we can only do together, as a nation. We believe, in the words of our first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, that through government, we should do together what we cannot do as well for ourselves.

It’s worth noting here that President Obama either badly summarized a much longer quote from President Lincoln, or misused it, or possibly even attributed a completely new meaning to it. Here’s what Lincoln wrote in 1854:

The legitimate object of government is to do for a community of people whatever they need to have done, but cannot do at all, or cannot so well do, for themselves, in their separate and individual capacities. In all that the people can individually do as well for themselves, government ought not to interfere. The desirable things which the individuals of a people cannot do, or cannot well do, for themselves, fall into two classes: those which have relation to wrongs, and those which have not. Each of these branch off into an infinite variety of subdivisions.
The first—that in relation to wrongs—embraces all crimes, misdemeanors and non-performance of contracts. The other embraces all which, in its nature, and without wrong, requires combined action, as public roads and highways, public schools, charities, pauperism, orphanage, estates of the deceased, and the machinery of government itself.
From this it appears that if all men were just, there still would be some, though not so much, need of government.

Next: Where have we seen this before?
Fascinating, isn’t it? To read the complete Lincoln quote, it appears that he viewed the role of government as limited to certain tasks that individuals cannot effectively undertake themselves. Yet President Obama cherry-picks and paraphrases to give Lincoln’s words a seemingly innocuous communitarian spin.
Why is this significant, rather than just mere nitpicking? The answer lies in the fact that Obama used a tried and true Alinskyite tactic in his speech: wrapping communitarian and statist ideas in language that invokes the country’s great leaders of the past. It’s a time-honored tradition among radicals like Alinsky and Obama.
Stanley Kurtz lays out this aspect of stealth socialist strategy well in his book Radical-In-Chief: Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism. Yes, we’ve gotten plenty of mileage out of it here at NewsReal Blog, but the book’s searing truth is worth pointing out time and time again. Please do yourself a favor and get your hands on a copy of it. (Get it for Kindle here.) According to Kurtz, one key tactic used by communitarians is:

…to use the language and ethos of traditional American communities…to promote a “populist” version of socialism.

Obama’s “we’re all in this together” reading of Lincoln on government, as well as going all the way back to his “Yes, We Can” campaign slogan are fine examples of radicalism in the guise of populist rhetoric.
Kurtz notes that this type of strategy hearkens back to the “Popular Front” days of American Communism, in which Communists worked hard to appear as patriotic citizens.

During that period, America’s communists dropped their openly revolutionary language and presented themselves as ordinary Americans instead. The Popular Front embraced American icons like Abraham Lincoln and the Founders, but moved to redefine them in de facto communist terms. The result was the greatest expansion the part had ever seen.
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Never before were so many Americans drawn to socialism as during the Popular Front…

It’s easy to look at Obama’s loose quoting of Lincoln as just a gaffe or a slight lapse in judgment, or to give him a mere slap on the wrist for paraphrasing rather than directly quoting, as Neil Hrab appears to do in the Washington Examiner. However, the truth seems much more likely to be that Obama intentionally picked those words to quote as an attempt to invoke Abraham Lincoln for communitarian, statist, and even stealth socialist purposes.
Given what we’ve learned from Kurtz about Obama’s political heritage, history, and associations, it makes perfect sense that pretty much everything the president says and does serves to advance a radical Left-wing agenda. Using one of America’s greatest statesman to do so is straight out of Alinsky’s playbook. After all, Obama learned from the best.
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Chris Queen hails from Covington, GA. Check out his blog, Random Thoughts From The Revolution, and follow him on Twitter.

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Article printed from NewsReal Blog: http://www.newsrealblog.com
URL to article: http://www.newsrealblog.com/2011/04/14/the-alinsky-president-plays-the-lincoln-card-obama-attempts-to-invoke-greatness-to-sell-his-suicidal-economic-plan/

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More from Chris:

This Report Brought To You By The Obama Administration: CBS & WaPo Dip Into Obamacare Slush Fund

Posted By Chris Queen On April 7, 2011

These days, it’s hard to believe that anybody still falls for the fallacy of objective reporting from the mainstream press. For over half a century, media bias in favor of the Left has been a problem. And it seems to have gotten worse during the Obama years. From skewed reporting of events, to fawning, softball interviews with the president, to the insertion of the Obamas into otherwise apolitical situations, it is abundantly clear that the mainstream media is firmly planted in the Obama camp.
Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse, it has. Two influential media corporations are now receiving money from an Obama administration program, to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars. (But don’t worry: their coverage of health care reform will be unbiased, won’t it?)
This week, The Daily Caller reported that the Washington Post Company and CBS are among the many large companies to dip into an Obamacare fund which uses taxpayer money to pay for health insurance for early retirees:

Two mainstream news organizations are receiving hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars from Obamacare’s Early Retiree Reinsurance Program (ERRP) — a $5 billion grant program that’s doling out cash to companies, states and labor unions in what the Obama administration considers an effort to pay for health insurance for early retirees. The Washington Post Company raked in $573,217 in taxpayer subsidies and CBS Corporation secured $722,388 worth of Americans’ money.
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The ERRP, which Republicans call a slush fund, provides taxpayer money to Obama administration-selected states, companies and labor unions with already-in-place early retiree health insurance programs, and aims to make certain that their employees who retire early still have health insurance coverage before they reach Medicare eligibility age. Almost $2 billion of the $5 billion fund, which was supposed to last until 2014, has already been distributed to corporations. New projections expect the funding to run out before the end of 2012, if not sooner.

So, to make a long story short, two media organizations supposedly reporting in an objective, even-handed fashion are now on the receiving end of an Obamacare slush fund. That’s right: two large, Left-leaning news outlets have firmly entrenched themselves with the administration by lining up for Obamacare handouts. Is this a conflict of interest? Apparently not, according to either organization. When contacted by The Daily Caller, both companies’ spokespeople got a little testy, offering curt, snippy responses:

CBS Corporation spokesman Gil Schwartz told TheDC that newsroom employees, like any other CBS employees, are indeed allowed to take the taxpayer subsidies.
“Yes they are,” Schwartz said. “Why wouldn’t newsroom employees be allowed access to that money like all other CBS employees?”
The Washington Post declined to comment. “We have no additional information to provide you other than what you have,” Post spokeswoman Rima Calderon told TheDC.

Can either the Washington Post or CBS genuinely believe that the American people can expect objectivity from either organization? Is it remotely possible for these companies to treat the Obama administration — particularly the fiery, ongoing debate over Obamacare — without even a trace of bias? It’s easy to see why many people, especially on the Right, would view this information with more than a bit of cynicism. One congresswoman offered a witty response to the news:

“It is fine with me if they continue covering the ObamaCare debate,” said Rep. Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee, in an e-mail to The Daily Caller. “When NBC used to cover energy issues, they identified themselves as a subsidiary of General Electric. CBS and Washington Post just have to disclose that they are subsidiaries of the Obama Administration.”

All joking aside, the issue of media organizations receiving Obamacare money is a serious one. After all, neither company has shied away from supporting the Obama administration, going back even to the 2008 campaign. CBS has very recently proven its track record of bias in favor of Obamacare, and the Post has its share of cheerleaders for Obama’s grand plan to socialize medicine as well. So now, why would either the Washington Post or CBS report anything that would bring a negative light on the very program from which they benefit?
Now that the Obama administration almost literally has these media outlets in its back pocket, I think we can absolutely throw all claims of objectivity out the window. CBS and the Washington Post can easily be seen as more than mere cheerleaders for the Left. As direct beneficiaries of a program that is the capstone of President Obama’s radical plans, the two organizations are now shills for the administration. It’s despicable and disgusting, but we shouldn’t expect anything different. This type of behavior is par for the course for the Left.
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Chris Queen hails from Covington, GA. Check out his blog, Random Thoughts From The Revolution, and follow him on Twitter.

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Article printed from NewsReal Blog: http://www.newsrealblog.com
URL to article: http://www.newsrealblog.com/2011/04/07/this-report-brought-to-you-by-the-obama-administration-cbs-wapo-dip-into-obamacare-slush-fund/