Obama

Obama clarified what liberalism is

October 29, 2011 by Don Surber

AS president, Barack Obama has shown liberalism’s true colors. I thank him for that. Let us begin with campaign finance reform. Oh, this happened before he was president, or to be more exact, while he was running for president. Obama accepted a whopping $750 million in campaign contributions — a half billion of the money coming from large donors, including the two richest men in America. That was double the money Republican John McCain collected.

If liberals had any qualms about big money influencing the election, they remained silent. The dogs that did not bark were all those self-appointed campaign reformers. Forgotten were their complaints when George Walker Bush raised $100 million to self-finance his primary races. Once Obama was safe and president, the campaign finance complainers were back in action.

Oh, how they hate the fact that corporations can now criticize politicians outright in TV ads. It is particularly entertaining to read those New York Times editorials that decry corporations being involved in politics. Isn’t the New York Times part of a corporation?

Then there is fiscal responsibility. On the campaign trail, then-Sen. Obama complained about profligate spending. “The problem is, is that the way Bush has done it over the last eight years is to take out a credit card from the Bank of China in the name of our children, driving up our national debt from $5 trillion for the first 42 presidents — No. 43 added $4 trillion by his lonesome, so that we now have over $9 trillion of debt that we are going to have to pay back — $30,000 for every man, woman and child,” Obama said.

“That’s irresponsible. It’s unpatriotic.”

On Obama’s watch, the national debt will have increased by another “unpatriotic” $4 trillion in just three years.

Throughout the Bush presidency, liberals loved to quote socialist Howard Zinn’s line, “Dissent is the highest form of patriotism,” often misattributed to Thomas Jefferson. However, when people protested against Obamacare in the summer of 2009, then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called their protests “un-American” in a column in USA Today. Two years later, Pelosi is back to backing protest in the Occupy Wall Street movement.

I guess dissent is patriotic only when the target is a Republican administration or a private company.

Then there is war. President Bush got congressional approval and a resolution from the United Nations before sending troops to Iraq. Liberals later described this as illegal and unconstitutional. Likewise, in 1986, liberals opposed President Reagan’s decision to bomb Libya in retaliation for terrorist acts that were sanction by Muammar Gadhafi. Innocents would die, was the fear. Lo and behold, 25 years later, President Obama shelled Libya without congressional approval or even a U.N. resolution.

While certainly I agree that getting rid of Gadhafi was worth the billion or so it cost, the Libyan mission clarified liberal views on war once and for all. Indeed, like neo-cons, liberals now want to remove any and all dictators. Suddenly, it is cool to be the world’s policeman. All right!

What is particularly amusing to me is how all these previously held political positions were couched in morality. It was immoral to collect money from large donors until Obama did it. It was immoral to borrow $4 trillion until Obama did it. It was immoral to bomb the hell out of a tiny country just to remove a dictator until Obama did it.

Thank you, President Obama, for clarifying just how principled liberals are these days.