The Post-Freedom Presidency

As I transported my daughter aboard a gas guzzling sedan to middle school Wednesday morning, even one the of the local FM rock stations was getting in on the Veterans’ Day spirit. We sang along to the Lee Greenwood classic, “Proud to be an American”.

The central lyric is so familiar it just rolls off the tongue: “And I’m proud to be an American where at least I know I’m free.”

As we coasted through suburbia on a sun-washed autumn morning that line hit me like a brick wall. At least I know I’m free? Do I? Am I?

In the age of Obama, we were promised the post-racial Presidency. Looks like we were handed the post-Constitutional, post-Declaration of Independence Presidency. For now, we’re still essentially “free” but the scope of that freedom no longer feels like it has infinite boundaries.

It begins with speech. With words. With meaning. And with manipulation of meaning in the name of political correctness and the crushing Socialist agenda sweeping across Washington, D.C.

Consider the following list I drew up in just a matter of minutes. It could be much lengthier for sure, but I fear it demonstrates where we are in the post-Lee Greenwood era.

Not Islamic radicalism … religious diversity.

Not terrorism … alleged shooting incident (Ft. Hood).

Not free-market capitalism … unregulated wealth building.

Not death counseling … an affordable health care option.

Not politically correct … tolerant and fair-minded.

Not Socialist … transformational.

Not a War on Terror … routine law enforcement.

Not freedom of speech … hate-crime speech.

Not productivity … greed.

Not Communism … redistributive justice.

Not Tea Party patriotism … angry white people.

Not Commander in Chief … Campaigner in Chief Barack Hussein Obama.

As Veterans’ Day 2009 slips into history, I am proud to be an American because our brave men and women who wear the uniform make me proud. And because civilians who rise up in the face of violent Jihadist insanity make me proud. I’m thinking about the NYFD and NYPD on 9/11, and about the brave Ft. Hood police officer, Kim Munley, who last week gunned down the terrorist Nidal Hasan.

I’m proud, but I no longer know I’m free. In 2009, my fellow Americans and I are left to pray that we are.

The Rock Star and a Hard Place

I heard a Chicago television reporter this week refer to U.S. President Barack Hussein Obama as an “international rock star”. This was not overheard at a Starbuck’s. She said it live, on the air.

Her gushing characterization came during a segment explaining why leaders of Chicago’s bid to host the 2016 Olympic Games are hanging on a thread of hope. They are said to be hoping Obama, for whom Chicago is an adopted hometown, will travel to Copenhagen ahead of the International Olympic Committee’s decisive 2016 vote on Oct. 2. So far, he hasn’t decided what to do. The IOC must choose between four cities — Chicago, Madrid, Rio de Janiero and Tokyo — then sit back and pray they’ve done the right thing seven years from now.

Chicago’s campaign team and, by extension, the public continue to view Obama as an earthly God who can enter a room and change the course of history by reading scripted words. Essentially, they are employing the logic of a crack cocaine addict. Just one more fix, man, and we can make the world right. If Obama shows up in Denmark, it’s game, set, match for Mayor Richard Daley’s All-Star Team. Never mind that Chicago’s bid is technically sound — in some areas superior — and is led by a widely regarded business icon, Patrick Ryan, and a famous mayor (Daley).

This Obama obsession prevails even though the former junior Senator from Illinois has not managed to end Washington gridlock or turn a massive U.S. economic tanker clear of jagged shores. He keeps reading the scripted words and rolling out his transformational agendas but the only tangible result is that more than 50% of the nation disapproves of his job performance.

The accidental President (by virtue of being an accidental Illinois Senator) is emerging, not as a Great Messiah, but as the reckless force behind an economic tsunami that threatens the influence and reputation of the United States. That’s why I am dumbfounded by those who insist Obama is Chicago’s trump card in its pursuit of the 2016 Games.

To believe he can be a game changer just by showing up is to demonstrate a fundamental lack of understanding of the IOC’s membership, and there has been precious little reporting by Chicago mainstream media that answers the question, “Who are these guys?”

The membership of the IOC is more than 54 percent European, along with roughly 22 percent North and Latin Americans (including just two U.S. members) and 19 percent Asians.

The people who decide where the Olympic Games go are a conflicted lot, to say the least. Many are U.S.-educated professionals who returned to Socialist, even Communist, homelands, using their intellect, family names and political savvy to secure lives of wealth and influence. The most powerful patriarch within the global Olympic movement is Spain’s Juan Antonio Samaranch, IOC Honorary President for Life. He once was an operative in the brutal monarchy of Gen. Francisco Franco (and son Juan Jr. is now an IOC member/voter). The current President of the IOC, Jacques Rogge, is a surgeon from Belgium, a heavily unionized nation under a constitutional monarchy.

Additionally, more than a few IOC voters from Africa, Asia and Latin America have risen through the ranks of deeply rooted, tyrannical/dictatorial political systems, enriching themselves in societies where the world’s material and monetary spoils are not accessible to the masses, and where sports administrators wield great power.

Loyalties among IOC members are wildly fractured, which often causes balloting for Olympic host cities to be skewed by block voting and side deals having nothing to do with the merits of the candidates, or their elected political celebrities. If you don’t believe it, research the circumstances under which Lillehammer (Norway) won host city rights to the 1994 Olympic Winter Games, or Sochi (Russia) the 2014 Winter Games.

While the American Entitlement Class remains drunk on Obama Kool-Aid, cheering as Newsweek declares we’re “all Socialists now”, do not be too sure that IOC members will be enamored of a United States flirting with hope and transformational change.

The dirty little secret among IOC voters is that the privately financed, Capitalism fueled 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games saved the Olympic movement from financial collapse. Does anyone think IOC members voted to put the 1996 Games in Atlanta because they were turned on by the Coca-Cola museum, CNN Center or obsolete Fulton County Stadium? The Games were here in 1996 for the same reason they were in Salt Lake City in 2002. Free market capitalism and multinational U.S. corporations with deep pockets (not to mention General Electric’s National Broadcasting Company and the hundreds of million of dollars it has paid for U.S. broadcast rights) work wonders on the IOC’s bottom line. Plus, when the Games are here, IOC members have an excuse to squeeze in a visit to the Mayo Clinic, or Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, or Cedars Sinai Medical Center, or any number of other beacons of America’s envied private health care system.

So, then, can anyone truly articulate the upside to a live Barack Obama pitch in Copenhagen? By 2016, this nation might well be a severely diminished Obamerica. Will it still be the go-to venue for the Olympic Games? Will these United States that IOC members rely on to prop up their increasingly irrelevant global sports event still be an economic superpower with world-class military and security personnel to protect the athletes and visiting dignitaries?

If Chicago really believes it needs an international rock star to prevail in next month’s voting maybe it should think about finding one that has memorized the words and sings from the heart.

Hail to The Confiscator

Of course, Barack Hussein Obama was giddy in the clubhouse at last night's All Star Game. The Jock Sniffer in Chief must have sensed the potential tsunami of tax revenue in the presence of all those rich Major League professionals. Those guys, and non All Stars alike, ultimately are paying for Obamacare. As reported Monday by Reuters:

WASHINGTON - A sweeping overhaul of the U.S. healthcare system to be announced on Tuesday in the U.S. House of Representatives will include a surtax on millionaires of 5.4 percent, congressional sources said. The tax rate is higher than the 3 percent surtax lawmakers had been discussing earlier and would be imposed on those making more than $1 million a year, the sources said.

But what I can not understand is all of the fawning by these players or, for that matter, millions of their fellow Americans, over this Radical Socialist POTUS amid mounting evidence that Obama's agenda specifically seeks to confiscate billions of dollars from productive citizens, be they pro athletes, business owners, educated professionals in fields such as law and finance, or others justly compensated based on exemplary performance.

If you want a sense of where household earning power is headed, watch replays of that limp-wristed first pitch Obama tossed from the pitcher's mound at Busch Stadium. It was delivered on a strictly downward trajectory. In addition to the new looming surtax, a higher ceiling on income tax rates is forthcoming as well as the return of the crippling 55% death tax.

In fact, the pitch looked a lot like some of the softball questions Obama entertained during an interview by Fox Sports' Joe Buck when he joined Buck and commentator Tim McCarver in the booth Tuesday night.

Buck opined that the poor sleep deprived POTUS must have been happy to attend a baseball game, recounting Obama's recent trip to Russia, Italy and Africa. Had Buck been able to reel in his tongue from the floor, he might have chosen a different line of questioning for the peculiar looking world leader, he of the White Sox jacket (on a 79-degree night), blue jeans and sneakers.

Buck: "You've just come back from Russia, where you made dangerous concessions on missile defense, and from the G8 in Rome, where you met with the Pontiff, and later checked out the backside of a 16-year-old Brazilian girl while photographers feasted, before going to Africa because, well, Michelle and the girls thought it would be fun".

White Sox pitcher Mark Buehrle, in a later on-camera chat, lamented he had not had a chance to pose for a photo with the former Chicago street organizer and occasional Illinois Senator. "That's OK," Buehrle said. "He has a lot more important things to do."

Obama could not agree with you more, young man. It is very important that he and his Socialist disciples get their hands on an additional 5.4% of your $14,000,000 salary, just as soon as possible.

With BHO in the house, Buehrle needed a bodyguard and a safe, not a camera.

The Inconvenient Oath

We know Barack Hussein Obama stumbled over the Presidential Oath on Inauguration Day last January, but who among us (other than George Soros and Rahm Emanuel) could have known the depths of his simmering contempt for the Office he swore to “faithfully execute” or the Constitution he swore to “preserve, protect and defend”?

More apparent with each passing day is that Obama spent most of his adult life resenting American prosperity at home and influence abroad, and now, the Oath be damned, is moving at warp speed to exact his revenge. He has awaited this opportunity for a very long time.

Why do Obama and his compliant comrades on Capitol Hill desire to move so fast, to pass bill upon bill before they’ve been contemplated and debated, let alone read? It is a question more people are asking. The only logical answer is that he (and they) knows the Socialist Liberals can’t possibly get away with this tyrannical agenda forever.

The trends Obama’s Mission Irresponsible are establishing, while reversible, will not be easily undone. And behind his thin veil of sincerity, he knows it.

The “Cap and Trade” Climate legislation is a massive scam based on faulty premises about so-called global warming and rooted in a massive generational wealth shift, from the productive to the “entitled”. The heavy hand this bill would impose if it became law is almost incomprehensible (except to those indoctrinated in the Obama Wealth Redistribution Society).

History might indeed prove that Obama’s only rival in the realm of wealth confiscation is the soon to be imprisoned Bernie Madoff. The Heritage Foundation’s respected Center for Data Analysis has run the numbers on Cap and “Tax”, and they are about as appealing as Madoff’s prison sentence of 150 years.

While Obama’s Teleprompter insists the bill delivers reduced dependence on foreign oil, combats the consequences of “climate change”, promotes profitable “clean energy” and creates jobs, the reality is quite the opposite.

The Cap and Trade tsunami will cripple the American economy and leave every walk of life vulnerable to passing some bogus environmental worthiness test, lest it be a target for increased taxation. The Heritage center projects unfathomable increases, including 90% spikes in residential electric bills, 74% jumps in gasoline prices and GDP reduction of around $9.6 trillion by 2035.

Obama is probably smart enough to know that government-run energy and health care programs are destined to fail, which is why he supports them. He has lusted for a lifetime for an America gripped by chaos, taken down a notch, and ridiculed by the world.

On the foreign policy front, the same twisted logic prevails. Obama stands back, tongue tied, as a dictator terrorizes the people of Iran, but then quickly and bluntly admonishes Honduras for sending its president into exile though he boldly ignored the nation’s constitution in order to extend and strengthen his power.

Obama has Secretary of State Hillary Clinton condemning the Honduran military for unseating the renegade President Mel Zelaya, yet Clinton has been all but silent on the fraudulent Iranian election and the violence that has followed in response to uprisings in the streets.

The most unsettling part of the recent developments on Capitol Hill and in far-away lands is that we can’t know for sure which scenario Obama envisions for his own future. When America has finally awakened, will he be the equivalent of arrogant dictator Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, backed by powerful forces in the shadows and restored to his reign against the will of a population grieving the random deaths of its sons and daughters in the streets, or will Obama be a Zelaya who has no use for his own Constitution even if it thrusts the nation into political instability, pitting the military against the corridors of the political status quo?

This weekend, I would advise contemplating America’s Independence Day solemnly and celebrating it respectfully.