President Barack Obama talks with residents on Cedar Grove Avenue during a walking tour of Hurricane Sandy storm damage in Staten Island, N.Y., Nov. 15, 2012. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
I had an activist unfollow me on Twitter today because I tweeted a simple fact:
Our Community-Organizer-in-Chief, while a law professor must not have read Dale http://news.yahoo.com/obama-encourages-boy-scouts-america-end-ban-gays-011020254.html … http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boy_Scouts_of_America_v._Dale …
And the reason I said this is simple: because Obama said he believed the Boy Scouts should admit gays.
As I've explained at length, I suppose gay marriage and gay rights -- I think the solution for gays who are not allowed into a conservative organization is to form their own. Eventually either the conservative organization will die out as people don't want to be associated with it, or it will convert (which is maybe what we are seeing).
But I don't want to achieve this change through coercion and doing damage to the right of freedom of association and freedom of speech. And I see far too many LGBT activists and influencers like Mike Arrington willing to throw freedoms of speech and association overboard for other people to get their own way. This is troublesome.
Regardless of one's opinions on this or other issues, there's a larger problem of the Community-Organizer-Chief as I always disdainfully call him becoming too involved as the executive branch of power in affairs that should be left to the private sector or civil society (the third sector) to resolve, or the independent judiciary, or the Congress.
Time and again, we're seeing a pattern whereby radicals demand change by overthrowing society, Congress, and the judiciary (on things like SOPA), and getting directly with their "direct democracy" to the executive, and forcing through changes via executive fiat. People might argue that the history of the presidency reveals other presidents "setting the tone" and the agenda in this way, but it doesn't matter; this president is using executive powers on more essential issues of freedom of speech and assocation with far-reaching changes than has been the case in the past.
I never recall in my lifetime presidents trying to undermine free speech and impose a "civility code" of their own device on the public before like this, and I find it very troubling.
Here's a list of cases where Obama has done this:
On the Sandra Fluke case, when Obama intervened to chastize Rush Limbaugh for his crude harassment on talk radio, and to celebrate Fluke's rebellion against her Jesuit university for not covering her birth control, he made her into a national celebrity articulating the new "progressive" strategy . Now we learned the "progressive" tactic had changed as they felt "they had won" it was now don't stress "choice" anymore, but stress "health".
Obama even invoked his daughters in this intervention.
The Catholic Church is still not happy with the proposed modification of Obama's original hardline decision on this, which I view as merely a tactic to do some demographics-smashing and make sure that Obama disrupted Catholic support and made some Catholics fearful of allignment with the religious right if they didn't go along. This is not over yet.
Then, Obama said that he felt Trayvon Martin was "like a son". I actually take Trayvon's side in this story, as I don't see anything in his behaviour that would justify going after him with a gun and shooting him. The whole vigilante/neighbourhood watch thing doesn't move me, as I think the police have to handle suspects.
But Obama could have said "any parent knows what it is like to lose a child" rather than racializing it, and he could have refrained from taking sides seemingly on racial affinity grounds when the trial wasn't over yet. His words influenced the trial and may have led to an arrest when it wasn't warranted.
There is just too much interference from the executive in the workings of society.
All that did was rile the right and get their backs up against this case.
This followed on from the beer summit, whose messaging I always found muddled. Yes, it was a terrible thing that a black professor, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., was stopped from entering his own home because neighbours were suspicious of him on racial grounds and called the cops. Why does this need presidential supervision?
The community can handle it at their level, either reprimanding or even firing the cops if warranted or at least making sure in editorials that neighbours who do this sort of thing ought to be less fearful and get to know their neighbours better. You sense that the death of the town newspaper editorial as the Internet homogenizes things might be at fault here and in other stories -- the president fills the gap. With the decline of religion, with groups like Boy Scouts seemingly discredited if they don't want to discuss sexual affiliations at their meetings as they don't feel that's their role, obviously there is no moral center locally, and that's why, perhaps the Community-Organizer-in-Chief steps in.
Since I view a lot of the community organizing movement as stealth socialism deliberately planned in the 1980s as a tactic, I'm not interested in him or the movement having this role in society -- it's bringing state socialistic national/central planning to problems that should be decided by real civil society, not just Soros-funded front groups.
Then there was the Koran burning issue. Obama might have been justified in apologizing publicly to avoid bloodshed and attacks on our people in Afghanistan. I actually thought about it at the time and figured that was the right thing to do.
But it was an "apology tour" -- one of many -- and it wasn't ever coupled with some coherent explanation of why we don't prosecute these things at home or abroad. There was no robust nod to free speech, just as there wasn't in the Cairo press release after the anti-Muslim hate video that then preceded that evidently planned terrorist attack on the consulate in Benghazi.
Again, this enabled the right to say Obama was wrong -- Allen West was furious -- and as it turned out, there was no need for his apology. After an investigation, the army released the soldiers who had burned the Koran because they didn't do it to mock anybody; they had seized Korans that prisoners used to pass messages as "contraband" and disposed of them on that basis, not thinking of its repercussions.
But Allen West basically got this message right: "When tolerance becomes a one-way street it leads to cultural suicide." I never feel we are at the point of "cultural suicide" that the right does when they pass laws against Shariah law in local states (!) or rage about the Islamification of public life in America. All you have to do, however, is read the news about the Muslim morality squads terrorizing people now in England -- which some are trying to morally equivocate with the Hasidic morality squads in Brookyln also implicated in intimidation and control of women -- to realize that people will not be impressed if you keep apologizing. You need a more robust and sophisticated policy. You can't have Obama apologizing for burning the Kremlin, but not condemning the murder of a female Taliban official who worked on women's issues, or the shooting of Malala by the Taliban.
The socialism is there to be found in Obama's Inauguration Speech, once you realize that the talk of "collective action" and priorities of equality before rights are there to be seen as codes elaborated back in the 1980s at the Socialist Scholars' Conference (which I also attended). That coupled with the intrusive new role for the executive in trying to counter every single free speech or freedom of religion case is very worrisome.
If you're going to make claims that this president isn't doing anything new or troubling with his intrusive net-nannying of civil society in coercive ways, then you have to explain how you solve the problem of erosion of rights: what, you're going to feel protected under the First Amendment to burn a Koran when the president of the United States has told you not to?
It's not about a reprehensible and stupid act that you can condemn on moral and religious grounds; it's about whether or not you have a living and effective First Amendment or not and whether you leave the courts -- not your presidential sense of propriety -- to decide.
And it's selective. When is Obama going to use that presidential magic to get things right and tell off those freaks at the Westboro Baptist Church? Courts have ruled again and again in their favour as a matter of principle. Wouldn't some people love the law professor to tell them courts don't matter and those idiots should shut up? But doesn't that leave the First Amendment in tatters? And why, then, is it okay in all the other cases? Obama several times condemned Pastor Jones in burning the Koran. What happens if he does burn it -- doesn't that undermine the presidency? There's a reason why the prestige of the president of the United States shouldn't be squandered on every little thing. There are other civic leaders in society for this purpose!
It's never enough, Obama's community organizing. The left is furious at his limpness in not being left enough. But those who care about civil liberties and executive overreach have to push back as well on this over-organizing of the community. No one needs Obama to organize the community -- let him focus on his own job.It's understood that presidents visit people in floods, comfort families of massacre victims, inspect oil spills, visit schools and bowling alleys. But these pronunciations from the bully pulpit about how to enact free speech and association have got to go -- they are overreach.
In that respect, these awful Komsomol type emails and organizations and subbotniks to do community service streaming from the White House are all the sort of awful artifacts of Soviet culture that should have no place in this country. That they do is a function of Obama's youth among people who worshipped this culture.
It's easy to belittle Barack Obama for being a community organizer, but he's the one who got the last laugh on November 6, 2012. Community organizing is key to not only winning a campaign but changing a country, which is exactly what the Obama's plan to do moving forward. Today Michelle Obama helped launch President Obama's "Organizing for Action," a massive community organizing project geared towards pushing through Obama's second term agenda and changing how voters think about issues for the long term.
This community organizing isn't a style of culture; it's not even just boosterism; it's a mode of governance that undermines Congress and the judiciary, and the normal grassroots civic groups of all types that have made up the country's political life in history. The DSA types really believe that the job is merely to feign a "front group" of civil society long enough to get into power, then take over the state and use its power to smash reactionaries. It is not a vision of pluralism.
Even if we are mercifully still far from that, there's an awful hollowing out of civil society that takes place when Obama's lieutenant can organize everybody on a Saturday clean-up or send them messaging on the economy to mouth like parrots -- and then tell them to write [email protected] if they spot their neighbours blogging untruths.
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