Witness for the Prosecution

Witness for the Prosecution
By John R. Coyne, Jr.
Crimes Against Liberty: An Indictment of President Barack Obama
By David Limbaugh(Regnery, 503 Pages, $29.95)

Here’s attorney David Limbaugh’s opening salvo, fired in the first sentence of this strongly written and thoroughly researched bill of particulars: “This book is about a young presidency— young, but already the most destructive in American history.”

“Since his first day in office,” Obama has worked to “‘transform’ the country into a land consistent with his socialist, secular, multicultural vision.” He views America, writes Limbaugh, as a country that has failed “sufficiently to atone for its racial sins,” subscribes to “an antiquated and discriminatory system of values,” has an economic system “that fosters an ‘inequitable’ distribution of wealth,” consumes “a disproportionate share of the world’s resources,” and exercises its power in the world “imperialistically.”

In pursuit of his vision for a transformed country, Limbaugh charges, Obama is wreaking havoc with “America’s culture, its Constitution, and in every sector of the American economy (save the public sector)”; and while “holding himself out as a post-partisan, post-racial president, he has exacerbated racial tensions, inflamed partisan divisiveness, engaged in acrimonious class warfare, and demonized anyone to the political right of the late Ted Kennedy.”

Limbaugh proceeds to lay out the particulars of his indictment, attacking with strength and a gusto lacking in much current conservative writing, documenting Obama’s offenses against the law, including his administration’s concept of race-based justice, as witness “his stunning protection of the New Black Panther Party”; his attempts “to redistribute wealth among Americans in ways he believes are fair”; pushing through “socialized medicine against the will of the people”; and attempting a “redistribution of America’s resources to other nations to further settle what he perceives as our injustices toward the world.”

Moreover, Limbaugh writes, Obama “has apologized for and condemned America at almost every turn,” and “his worldview leads him to scorn American exceptionalism and American sovereignty in favor of a globalist approach.” This worldview was reflected in Obama’s “international apology tour,” which took him to London, where he declared, “I would like to think that with my election and the early decisions that we’ve made, that you’re starting to see some restoration of America’s standing in the world.”

He told the French that America failed “to appreciate Europe’s leading role in the world,” and that we’d been “arrogant,” “dismissive,” and “derisive” (music, no doubt, to French ears). He apologized to Latin America for our failure to pursue “sustained engagement with our neighbors” (which his administration shows no sign of doing), and repeated in Trinidad that we’d been “disengaged” and “dictatorial.”

In May of this year, writes Limbaugh, the administration actually apologized for Arizona’s immigration law to the Communist Chinese, of all people. And in a Rose Garden press conference with Mexico’s president Felipe Calderon, he stood by without comment as Calderon, in a breach of common courtesy and diplomatic good manners, attacked Arizona for passing that law.

And in his ill-advised speech in Cairo, says Limbaugh, Obama gave legitimacy to Muslim grievances, inflated the number of Muslims in America, exaggerated Muslim contributions to American and world history, and implied that the war in Iraq was the result of unjustified American aggression. Limbaugh quotes international studies professor Fouad Ajami, who put it this way: “No one told Mr. Obama that [in] the Islamic world, where American power is engaged and so dangerously exposed, it is considered bad form, nay a great moral lapse, to speak ill of one’s own tribe in the midst, and in the lands, of others.”

Obama’s odd concern for Muslim sensibilities can take bizarre turns, as when he directed the administrator of NASA to refocus the space agency’s mission. As the administrator, quoted by Limbaugh, told the Arabic TV network al Jazeera, “Perhaps foremost, [Obama] wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science...and math and engineering.”

“Making Muslims feel good,” Limbaugh comments, “—a very strange charge for the head of America’s space agency.” (Although, if you consider where flying carpets originated, it might make some space-age sense.)

In contrast to this concern for the feelings of Muslims, his dealings with the Israelis are much less delicate. Obama’s unprecedented public attempts to force the Israeli government to bend to his will prompted this response from former New York City mayor Ed Koch: “I weep as I witness outrageous attacks on Israel....I weep today because my president, Barack Obama, in a few weeks has changed the relationship between the U.S. and Israel from that of closest of allies to one in which there is an absence of trust on both sides.”

Limbaugh puts it this way: “The Obama administration’s heavy-handed treatment of Israel... bespeaks a pre-planned policy. Obama’s approach to the Israeli-Palestinian issue has been completely one-sided and strikingly unfair—as if he has inflexible, preconceived notions about the conflict and is impervious to the facts and history.”

“How can an objective witness to Obama’s behavior fail to conclude that he has bought into Palestinian propaganda and its skewed view of history?” Limbaugh asks.

THE GREAT STRENGTH of Limbaugh’s indictment lies in part in the wealth of material he amasses in building his case. By so doing, he not only provides opponents of the administration with a rich source of campaign material, but also creates a series of topical sections that in themselves could provide the basis for numerous full-length books.

In a chapter called “The Narcissist,” for instance, Limbaugh lays out the particulars for an indictment of Obama’s enthusiastic aiders and abettors in the national media, who simply swallowed the idea of an idealized Obama whole, and burnished it. The resulting media-enhanced image may have had little to do with reality. But in this case reality wasn’t important. In fact, perhaps better to ignore it.

As the world knows, members of the national media are overwhelmingly liberal/left, and in Obama they saw—finally, after decades of waiting, and in an anticipation fueled by intense Bush hatred—the fulfillment and personification of those old liberal/left sociological dreams and ideals that today carry little contemporary currency west of the Ivy League and a few other selected college campuses where old tenured professors doze in the libraries and dream fading dreams of dialectical materialism, Ho Chi Minh, Che, and Bernardine Dohrn.

And in fact, Obama could well have been created in a test tube in an Ivy League social sciences lab. He proved that affirmative action (aka racial preferences), long an apparently unfilled liberal/left ideal, actually worked—at least once. He was a man of color, but not too much. To be sure, he affected a passion for basketball, but he walked, talked, and dressed like any Caucasian writer of thought pieces or any of the regular Newsweek guests on the Charlie Rose show. To quote Vice President Biden, who summed it up succinctly, he was “clean.”

(Unfortunately, excessive Obama worship combined with a lack of serious journalistic effort torpedoed Newsweek as a news magazine, and as it sinks beneath the waves its editors, who have deserted the ship en masse, could well find their reservations at the Charlie Rose table canceled. Rumor has it that to maintain his TV presence, Jon Meacham, the unctuous former Newsweek editor and chief cheerleader of the Obama media fan club, may have to negotiate for a spot on Dancing with the Stars.)

But best of all, from the national media’s point of view, Obama was a writer—one of us, they believed; and those claims that he may have had a great deal of help in writing his best-selling memoir were thus invariably met with a fierce and emotional response. He had to have written it himself. If not, he isn’t one of us. The press has drunk the Kool-Aid that they themselves helped to mix, and they’re determined to keep it down.

INTERESTINGLY, THE RESPONSE is equally fierce and emotional whenever the discussion turns to matters involving the source and nature of the beliefs and ideologies that have shaped Obama’s thinking, and particularly, as happened most recently, when questions are raised about his father’s influence. Without judging the father, anyone who has actually read Obama’s memoir, Dreams from my Father, in which, among other things, Obama searches for his Kenyan identity, would be hard-pressed to deny the influence of his father’s attitudes.

But that aside, it requires no great analytic ability or expertise to understand that in 2008 a large number of Americans, who rely on the media to keep them informed, bought into his act. And the media certainly provided the stage, and continue to provide it to date.

According to the Washington Post’s media critic Howard Kurtz, writes Limbaugh, “during Obama’s first few months as president, the networks gave him more coverage than George W. Bush and Bill Clinton combined in their first months—and more positive assessments as well.” As Limbaugh notes, “His name or face appeared in half of Time magazine’s covers in 2008. As of the August 2009 edition, he had appeared on seven Time covers since his election....One of those covers celebrated him as ‘Person of the Year,’ and another as the reincarnation of FDR. Newsweek featured Obama on twelve of its 2008 issues.”

In addition to the stage, the media has also provided the applause, and at times even the adoration. Limbaugh quotes the erstwhile Newsweek editor, pontificator, and Charlie Rose regular Evan Thomas, appearing with fellow worshipper Chris Matthews on MSNBC: “Reagan was all about America....Obama is—we’re above that now. We’re not just parochial, we’re not just chauvinistic, we’re not just provincial. We stand for something. I mean in a way Obama’s standing above the country, above the world, he’s sort of God.”

At any rate, questions of divinity and possible exorcism aside, Limbaugh’s primary purpose in this book is to chronicle “the words and policies of President Barack Obama and his Democratic Party and their devastating effect on America and its founding principles. Unless stopped—and reversed—the casualties of Obama’s systematic assault on this nation will be our prosperity, our security, and ultimately, our liberty.”

To this end, Crimes Against Liberty should serve as a thorough and hard-hitting indictment of Barack Obama and his administration. And for readers in general, it will not only provide a good read, but will also help explain why The One may really be The Other.
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