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Obama Mobilizes His Leftist Base

Ever since I dared criticize the Obama administration and its partisans, I’ve been getting less than friendly email messages. Supposedly I work slavishly for the GOP and spend every waking hour listening to Rush Limbaugh or trying to imitate his verbal outbursts. For the record, I’ve been attacking the GOP at the national level ever […]

Ever since I dared criticize the Obama administration and its partisans, I’ve been getting less than friendly email messages. Supposedly I work slavishly for the GOP and spend every waking hour listening to Rush Limbaugh or trying to imitate his verbal outbursts. For the record, I’ve been attacking the GOP at the national level ever since the neoconservatives came to refashion the Republican Party’s foreign policy, while taking over and reprogramming America’s misnamed conservative movement. And those things happened thirty years ago. Since that time I’ve stood athwart the GOP, as a relentless critic of how its advisors and politicians have defined America’s role in the world.

I’ve denounced in print for all to see the boasting engaged in by Republican presidential candidates and by Fox News talking heads about “American exceptionalism.” One has a right to like one’s country but not a duty to proclaim that it’s morally superior to the rest of mankind and that our state should impose its human rights ideology on everyone else. Pride goes before the fall, as Proverbs teaches.

Because of my objections to this vainglory and its foreign-policy implications, Republican and conservative movement activists have carefully avoided discussing my books; and they have written prospective publishers suggesting I would bring disgrace on those who disseminate my ideas. Moreover, those who know me can testify that I haven’t spent more than five minutes in the last twenty years listening to Rush. I view him as contemptuously I do Bill Maher, Ann Coulter, and other vulgarizers of political discussion.

This is not an effort at self-justification but an indication of how ludicrous the charges are that I am a GOP lackey and a Rush Limbaugh copycat. The problem is what I’ve said it is in the past, namely that American politics have become polarized around two national parties, and as soon as you take up the talking points of one party, then the partisans of the other one come after you, as a shill for their opponents.

As a non-Republican who admits to being a social, cultural and aesthetic traditionalist and who also believes in very limited government and a restrained foreign policy, I see no reason to cut Obama any more of a break than I would his Republican opponents. On voter IDs, the Sandra Fluke incident, and the lamentable, deliberate failure to secure American borders, it seems that Obama is mobilizing his leftist base to divert attention from his palpable economic failures.

Contrary to the charge I see coming from my Democratic critics, and even more dishonestly, from a less than factual account of the new Pennsylvania voter-ID law in a blatantly one-sided Associated Press story on March 15, there have been hundreds of documented cases of voter fraud in Texas, Missouri and other states, all of them submitted to Eric Holder’s Justice Department and none of them acted on. Holder and his assistant Julie Fernandes worked to cover up an outrageous scandal in 2009, when there was evidence that the radical revolutionary Black Panthers were intimidating voters in Philadelphia. That of course took place conveniently for Justice Department leaders, during the election that swept Holder’s boss into the presidency.

The charge that Limbaugh’s insult of Sandra Fluke represents the ultimate in misogyny is false and hypocritical, as Peggy Noonan shows in a WSJ-syndicated column. Noonan cites the multiple insults coming from numerous liberal Democratic performers and celebrities against Sarah Palin and other female Republican politicians, none of which seems to have registered with feminist groups. The spokespersons for “women’s issues” only became selectively angry at sexist outrages following Limbaugh’s bashing of an ideological soul mate. By the way, contrary to what Fluke said in her expressions of concern about a friend at her university who had to pay for birth-control pills to treat a cyst, Georgetown does cover the costs for such medication. But even if it didn’t, the $9 monthly charge for having to purchase the pills at Walmart would strain no one’s finances. Fluke’s grievance was intended to serve a double purpose, pushing a religious institution into acting against its conscience while helping to energize Obama’s presidential campaign. Nothing I’ve read would lead me to believe otherwise.

Finally, if the Republicans intend to win the presidency, then they’ll have to stay tough. Staging another McCain-Dole campaign will produce the same dismal consequences as in the past. The value of the undecided voters may be vastly exaggerated. The Obamaites are being smart by not depending on a wishy-washy center. They are drumming up minority gripes and exciting the social left. Romney has been well advised to appeal to those who are unhappy with the growing problem of illegals and to take on the teachers’ unions. There will be need for an activist counter-base to the one Obama has in place.

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