This past Monday (August 15th, 2011) Ryan Rhodes, a Tea Party organizer in Iowa, asked Barack Obama how Obama could call for more civility when “your vice president is calling people like me, a Tea Party member, a ‘terrorist.'”
Barack Obama — who, as you no doubt remember from his debates with Hillary, was against “forcing” (in his entirely apposite words) the individual healthcare mandate before he was so emphatically for it — this past Monday said:
“As someone who’s been called a socialist, not born here, taking away freedoms because I passed a healthcare bill, I’m all for lowering the rhetoric.”
To me, the most interesting thing about Obama’s comment here is the paradoxical nature of it: in actual point of fact he is a socialist, and until fairly recently he made no secret of this. (You can watch him on video here. Or, if you can stomach them, read his poorly written books, one of which I’ve excerpted here, and you’ll see that he’s not only an explicit socialist but, like his “friend and mentor” Jeremiah Wright, he’s a socialist of the black nationalist variety.)
Obama has also made no secret of the fact that he is all for taking away freedoms in order to nationalize healthcare — which is of course called socialism — and so the only real rhetoric here, still, is Barack Obama’s.
Because he’s told so many blatant lies, and because it would be so painfully easy to catch him up in all his circumlocutions and contradictions, Barack Obama would be much better off, in the important months to come, avoiding confrontations like this:
