Some have mockingly called Barack Obama “Dear Reader” for his reliance on a Teleprompter. But considering that while speaking extemporaneously he has uttered comments such as Middle American voters “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them” and women shouldn’t be “punished with a baby,” his recourse to such technology is no mystery. And now we learn that, again, when the Telee’s away Obama’s tongue will play.
The latest revelatory comment was made during a conversation the president had with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Marilynne Robinson for a New York Review of Books piece published Monday. While discussing Gilead, the author’s book about a 1950s Iowa pastor, Obama asked, “How do you reconcile the idea of faith being really important to you and you caring a lot about taking faith seriously with the fact that, at least in our democracy and our civic discourse, it seems as if folks who take religion the most seriously sometimes are also those who are suspicious of those not like them?” The president also said, “Sometimes Christian interpretation seems to posit an ‘us versus them [mindset].’”
Perhaps Obama got this impression attending Trinity United Church of Christ for 20 years and listening to the man he called his mentor, friend, and uncle — Jeremiah Wright — call our nation the “US of KKKA” and spew venom such as “God d*** America!”? Then again, many critics would aver that Obama was merely projecting.
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After all, there was that 2010 Univision radio interview in which the president stated that Hispanic voters needed to say, “We’re gonna punish our enemies.” Even worse, though, was a speech Obama gave to a mainly black audience at Hampton University in Virginia on June 5, 2007. As Dr. Thomas Sowell reported in 2012:
In his speech — delivered in a ghetto-style accent that Obama doesn’t use anywhere except when he is addressing a black audience — he charged the federal government with not showing the same concern for the people of New Orleans after hurricane Katrina hit as they had shown for the people of New York after the 9/11 attacks, or the people of Florida after hurricane Andrew hit.
Departing from his prepared remarks, he mentioned the Stafford Act, which requires communities receiving federal disaster relief to contribute 10 percent as much as the federal government does.
Senator Obama, as he was then, pointed out that this requirement was waived in the case of New York and Florida because the people there were considered to be “part of the American family.” But the people in New Orleans — predominantly black — “they don’t care about as much,” according to Barack Obama.
Except that none of this was true. As Sowell explained, “Less than two weeks earlier, on May 24, 2007, the United States Senate had in fact voted 80-14 to waive the Stafford Act requirement for New Orleans, as it had waived that requirement for New York and Florida. More federal money was spent rebuilding New Orleans than was spent in New York after 9/11 and in Florida after hurricane Andrew, combined.”
Us versus them?
Yet there’s a kicker, too — and it’s a shocker. As Sowell pointed out, Obama could claim to not have been present in church during even one instance when Wright used hateful rhetoric. But the U.S. Senate actually takes attendance.
And Obama was present for the May 24, 2007 Stafford Act vote.
In other words, either Obama had a serious case of amnesia, or, as Sowell suggests, he was engaging in demagoguery, dividing people, and rubbing resentments “raw” in the name of political power and “fundamental change.” Sowell certainly has drawn his conclusion — he dubbed the president “Phony in Chief.”
Transitioning from how Obama talks to “us” to how he treats “them,” quite telling is a story related by economist and gun-rights advocate Dr. John Lott on Mark Levin’s October 2 radio show. Speaking about the time he and Obama were both in the University of Chicago’s employ, Lott mentioned that Obama didn’t attend the gatherings at which the staff exchanged ideas; he seemed wholly uninterested in what others had to say. The one exception, however, was an instance when he showed up and asked a fairly unintelligible question. Lott then saw Obama after the event and, trying to make friends and conversation, said (I’m paraphrasing), “You know, your question was interesting, but I think more people would have understood it if…” Lott never got to finish.
Because Obama, cold as ice, just turned his back.
Lott reports that when he would occasionally see Obama in the street at future times and extend a greeting, the reaction was the same. For the sin of having disagreed with president-to-be, Lott was dead to him.
Us versus them?
Perhaps Barack Obama has a religion all his own.
