A cogent argument can be made for calling Obama the most dangerous man in the world were he to be elected president.

Here is why. 

 Read this ominous prediction of the damage Obama could do with appointments to the Supreme Court.

William J. Brennan, Jr., like many of his colleagues then and now (today, think Justices Stevens, Kennedy, Souter, Ginsburg, Breyer), and countless other federal and state judges throughout the United States, are not just liberals, which would be bad enough. They are, philosophically, collectivists and statists who believe with the orthodoxy of zealots that “rights” are created by society and its Platonic guardians, the judges, and that through the exercise of government power utopian goals can be achieved without regard to constitutional principles or the moral code that underlay them at the Founding.

 

In short, Brennan and his ilk are utterly indifferent to the proper role of judges, and see themselves as uber-legislators imposing their personal policy preferences on the unwashed in the guise of constitutional interpretation.

 

Which bring us to the current election and presumptive Democrat Party nominee, Barack Obama.

 

There are some serious concerns if the fate of the federal judiciary, let alone the Supreme Court, falls into Obama’s hands (especially with a compliant Senate). Let’s take a look at the words of Obama himself:

 

On July 17, 2007, Obama made a speech in Washington, D.C. to the country’s leading abortion-meisters, “Planned Parenthood.” In the words of NBC reporter Carrie Dean, Obama not only “leveled harsh words at conservative Supreme Court justices,” but “he offered his own intention to appoint justices with ‘empathy’.”

 

“Empathy,” according to Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American Language, is “the projection of one’s own personality into the personality of another in order to understand him better; ability to share in another’s emotions or feelings.”

 

Thus, we have been unmistakably warned that Obama will appoint Supreme Court justices who will not honestly interpret the Constitution, Bill of Rights, and Fourteenth Amendment—let alone on the basis of what they say and meant to those who wrote them—but who, instead, will project their own personalities into others to understand them better; justices who can share in those others’ emotions or feelings.

 

And who might Obama’s empathy-receivers be?

 

Obama himself told us in that same 2007 Planned Parenthood speech: “We need somebody who’s got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it’s like to be a young teenage mom. The empathy to understand what it’s like to be poor, or African-American, or gay, or disabled, or old. And that’s the criteria by which I’m going to be selecting my judges.” (My emphasis.)

 

So much for the classical liberal philosophy that was at the founding’s core and in its fundamental documents. From now on, constitutional interpretation Obama-style is to be through the eyes of whom he sees as society’s alleged victims.

 

Obama’s confession drops Brennan’s Living Constitutionalism into yet a lower rung of hell. His confession reveals that while the Brennanites fed the Living Constitution’s voracious appetite in order to achieve the amorphous goals of “social justice, brotherhood, and human dignity,” Obama will nurture the beast with what’s left of limited government and individual rights, all in the name of “empathy”—a code word for something much darker: sacrifice of constitutionalism to the needs of society’s perceived victims.

 

This perversion of America’s essence—individuals as supreme, with government as their servant—is Brennanism squared. While our Nation has been able to survive Brennanism—though with the recent Guantanamo decisions, especially Boumediene v. Bush, who knows?— will it be able to survive Obama-appointed Supreme Court justices?

 

 The founder of ‘Code Pink’, which vilifies the US and undermines the war effort, has an official page on Obama’s website.

‘She sees her savior in Barack Obama.’

Read about it here. 

 This from Power Line:

Speaking at a town hall meeting in Pennsylvania last Saturday, Obama addressed the Supreme Court’s Boumediene decision granting Guantanamo detainees the right to challenge their confinement through habeas corpus proceedings in federal court. Obama asserted that the "principle of habeas corpus, that a state can’t just hold you for any reason without charging you and without giving you any kind of due process – that’s the essence of who we are." He explained:

I mean, you remember during the Nuremberg trials, part of what made us different was even after these Nazis had performed atrocities that no one had ever seen before, we still gave them a day in court and that taught the entire world about who we are but also the basic principles of rule of law. Now the Supreme Court upheld that principle yesterday.

John and I derived some precepts for trial lawyers from the Nuremberg trial in "Lessons from the cross-examination of Hermann Goehring." In the course of researching that article I was reminded that the Nuremberg trial was conducted before a military commission composed of representatives of the United States, Great Britain, France and the Soviet Union. The most prominent surviving Nazi leaders were brought for trial before the Nuremberg tribunal in late 1945. Winston Churchill had proposed, not unreasonably, that they be summarily shot. The victorious allies nevertheless subsequently agreed that they would be brought before a military commission to be convened pursuant to the London Agreement of August 8, 1945.

 

In Boumediene, the Supreme Court disapproved of the system of military commissions Congress had adopted at the Supreme Court’s urging. Obama to the contrary notwithstanding, the Nuremberg defendants’ "day in court" occurred before the kind of tribunal the Supreme Court found constitutionally inadequate in Boumediene.

The Nazi war criminals were given no access to American courts. Their rights were governed by the charter annexed to the London Agreement. Here is the fair trial provision of the charter:

In order to ensure fair trial for the Defendants, the following procedure shall be followed:

 

(a) The Indictment shall include full particulars specifying in detail the charges against the Defendants. A copy of the Indictment and of all the documents lodged with the Indictment, translated into a language which he understands, shall be furnished to the Defendant at reasonable time before the Trial.

(b) During any preliminary examination or trial of a Defendant he will have the right to give any explanation relevant to the charges made against him.

(c) A preliminary examination of a Defendant and his Trial shall be conducted in, or translated into, a language which the Defendant understands.

(d) A Defendant shall have the right to conduct his own defense before the Tribunal or to have the assistance of Counsel.

(e) A Defendant shall have the right through himself or through his Counsel to present evidence at the Trial in support of his defense, and to cross-examine any witness called by the Prosecution.

The charter provision on the appeal rights of the Nuremberg defendants was even shorter and sweeter. There were no appeal rights. Article 26 provided: "The judgment of the Tribunal as to the guilt or the innocence of any Defendant shall give the reasons on which it is based, and shall be final and not subject to review."

 

In short, the procedural protections afforded the Guantanamo detainees under the statute before the Supreme Court in Boumediene substantially exceed those accorded the Nuremberg defendants. Obama’s unfavorable comparison of the legal treatment of the Guantanamo detainees with that of the Nuremberg defendants suggest either that he does not know what he’s talking about, or that he feels free to take great liberties with the truth.

 Read about them here. 

 Power Line explains:

In a speech to senior citizens in Ohio yesterday, Obama unveiled his new position on Social Security. The Associated Press tries to make sense of it, with the assistance of Obama staffers, here.

Obama proposes an increase in Social Security taxes. Here is how he described it to his audience in Ohio:

Here’s where I would start. Right now, the Social Security payroll tax is capped. That means that most middle-class families pay the payroll tax on every dime that they earn. But, once you get to $102,000 per individual, then you’re no longer paying the payroll tax.

And what that means is, is that while you, most of the people here, paid Social Security on every dime you ever earned, you’ve got billionaires and millionaires who are paying only a tiny fraction – paying payroll tax on only a tiny fraction of their income.

I’ve got a friend in Omaha – you may have heard of him – named Warren Buffett. He’s worth $56 billion. You know, if he’s only paying the first $100,000, that is .000001 percent of his income is he paying Social Security. I may have lost a couple of zeroes in there.

The point is, it’s negligible to him. It’s not even noticeable. Now, I think that’s why the best way forward is to first look to adjust the cap on the payroll tax so that people like me – because I’m earning more than $102,000 – pay a little bit more and people in need are protected.

 

There is a reason, of course, why the income on which we pay Social Security taxes has always been capped. The Social Security program was intended as a safety net, not as a wealth redistribution program. Since the amount of benefits one can receive is capped, it has always been considered fair to cap the income on which the tax is paid as well.

Obama, of course, is not a courageous enough politician to follow his own logic if it will cost him votes. So, weirdly, he goes on to create an exemption from his own tax increase:

And, by the way, I think that we should exempt anyone making under $250,000 from this increase, so it will not burden the middle class. Anybody under $250,000 would not be affected whatsoever; 97 percent of Americans will see absolutely no change in their taxes under my proposal, 97 percent.

This makes no sense. If it is unfair for someone making $100,000 to pay Social Security taxes on all of his income while "billionaires" likewise pay only on their first $100,000 of income, then why isn’t unfair for the $100,000 guy to pay taxes on his whole income, while the $200,000 earner pays Social Security taxes only on the first half?

The answer, of course, lies in politics rather than logic. There are relatively few voters who earn more than $250,000, while there are a great many earning between $102,000 and $250,000. In fact, this income demographic corresponds with remarkable precision to Obama’s core supporters, the only Americans to be singled out for a tax preference under Obama’s plan. A "new kind of politics," indeed.

The incoherence of Obama’s approach to Social Security doesn’t stop there. He rails ritually against private accounts:

Now, my opponent in this general election, John McCain, his idea on Social Security amounts to four more years of what was attempted and failed under George Bush. He said that he supports private accounts for Social Security, in his words, along the lines that President Bush proposed. *** But let me be clear: Privatizing Social Security was a bad idea when George Bush proposed it; it’s a bad idea today.

When Obama goes on to outline his own plan, however, it turns out that the centerpiece (along with a tax increase) is nothing other than private accounts:

Finally, we’re not going to help people reach a secure retirement unless we encourage savings. But today, personal savings is at an all-time low, as the average American has seen their wages or incomes flat-line or even decline, at the same time as costs for everything are going up. *** And that’s why I’ve proposed an automatic workplace pension. There’s going to be no red tape or complicated forms. Employers will provide a direct deposit of a small percentage of each paycheck into your account. You can add to it, or you can opt out of it at any time. And so it’s going to be optional. *** And employers will have an easy opportunity to match employee savings. If you switch jobs, your savings will roll over into your new employer system. If you become self-employed, you’ll be able to control your account. *** And we’ll also help middle-class families start their own nest egg by matching 50 percent of the first $1,000 saved, a match that will be directly deposited into your savings account, a tax cut that will truly encourage savings….

Are private accounts a good idea? Of course they are. Obama is planning for his own retirement through his 401(k) plan and related private accounts, not Social Security, as is probably every single person with whom Obama is acquainted. But it is incoherent and dishonest, even by Obama’s standards, to denounce private accounts in one breath and propose them in the next

Read about his hypocrisy, and how he fumbled to explain it, here.

 A pro-Stalin Communist is a strong influence on him in his formative years. Later he writes about this appreciatively. In his adulthood he associates with extreme-left radicals and unrepentant terrorists.  

The mainstream media do not consider these facts to have any significance.  

Read about it here.   

 Read Thomas Sowell on this theme here.

Judging by the letter which Sowell quotes, and statements that the presidential candidate has made in his speeches, one gathers that Obama thinks soldiers should never have to come up against any unpleasantness like fighting and killing and being shot at. If they do, they should have instant access to that left-wing panacea, ‘counseling’. 

We have commented earlier on his statement that an uncle of his was among the troops who liberated Auschwitz. Apparently he meant some other death camp. But in any case it wasn’t what happened in it that he was concerned about. He seemed to think what was really bad about the Nazi concentration camps was that American soldiers, after suffering the trauma of seeing what went on in them, never got counseling to deal with such a shock. 

(By the way, I have known counsellors who received just two days of training – one weekend – before being sicked upon some hapless ‘clients’.)   

The US military under a Commander-in-Chief of the Obama stamp would probably be reduced to a social service abroad, distributing goodie-bags to the Third World and entertaining our enemies. Troupes rather than troops.    

Has there ever been a candidate for the presidency as unqualified to be elected as Barack Obama? 

Since he is so completely unqualified, one is compelled to ask: ‘Why do so many people want him to be President?’ 

Is it because he is black? 

I have a suspicion that for many people this is true.  

In which case, they are plainly racist.

Do many Americans feel (one cannot say ‘think’) that if they vote for a black man to be President it will somehow prove to themselves that they are good people? Is their need to feel that they are good people a strong motivation in their political choices?

I have a suspicion that this too is true.

In which case, they are full of moral vanity and not good people at all.  

If their votes  do give Obama power, all the chickens of the Left will come home to roost: blame-America-first, affirmative action, political correctness, Leftism trumps any other political consideration …

They will pay a terrible price for their foolishness, but so will the rest of us in America and everywhere else on earth.