Vincent J. Curtis
3 Aug 2016
Yesterday, at a press conference with the Prime Minister of
Singapore, that was aimed at promoting the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade
agreement, President Obama used a planted question to launch a savage attack at
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.
Obama claimed that Trump was unfit to serve as
president. He listed Trump’s attack on
the Khan family, and that he lacks “basic knowledge around critical issues…” as reasons.
Obama then turned his attack on Republicans for supporting
Trump, yet denouncing many of his statements.
“Why are you still endorsing him?”
Obama asked. “There comes a point
in which you say, ‘this is not somebody I can support for President of the
United States, even if he purports to be a member of my party.’”
This Obama turn is a classic example of Rule 12 of Saul D.
Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, “Pick
the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. Cut off the support network and isolate the
target from sympathy” As well as of Rule 4, “Make the enemy live up to its own
book of rules.”
Trump has so far succeeded in the race against the
Alinskyites at the head of the Democrat party machine by tearing up books of
rules. Being so unpredictable made it impossible
for Democrats to freeze him as a target.
Now that Trump is the head of the Republican Party, Obama is
going after Trump’s erstwhile support network and isolating Trump from
sympathy. Obama is trying to make the
establishment leadership of the Republican Party – Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan,
John McCain – to live up to their book of rules, which would cast Trump out of
the Republican Party.
If Obama’s wishes were carried out, it would reduce the
presidential election to a one party race.
Only Hillary Clinton would be the nominee of an uncrippled major party
running for president. This is the
method by which Barack Obama himself was elected to the Illinois senate and to
the US Senate from Illinois. Somehow, by
dark forces not related to the Obama campaign, Obama’s strong opponents were eliminated
and he was fighting against diminished cripples by the Election Day. This is what the effect of his wishes would
amount to, cripple the Republican Party.
If Obama were a serious democrat (note: small d) his answer
to the planted question at most would have condemned Trump and then leave the
matter up to the electorate to decide. He
ought to have dismissed the question as wrong to discuss. He would not apply the pressure of his office
to the outcome of the election to succeed him.
But he did. And this raises again
the question of Obama’s own fitness for the highest office of the greatest
democracy in the world. Presidents of
banana republics stoop to antics like savaging the other party’s candidate in
an election, which in other countries
would raise the question of the fairness of the outcome. (i.e. rigged system.)
To be sure, there is bad blood between Obama and Trump. Trump led a birther movement that forced
Obama to release his long-form birth certificate showing that he was born in
Hawaii, and therefore constitutionally qualified to be president. At a Whitehouse correspondent’s dinner in
2011, Obama arranged for Trump, who was in the audience, to be humiliated by
speaker after speaker. That does not
justify Obama trying to turn America into a one party republic. Restraint in using undoubted power is the
sign of a mature leader and a mature democracy, and Obama is not restraining
his hatred of Trump.
Today, it was revealed that Obama authorized the shipment of
$400 million in banknotes to Iran in exchange for four prisoners held by that
country. Banknotes allow Iran to carry
on funding of its terrorist organizations without having to use the
international banking system. They got
Obama to make the withdrawals for them.
Would Trump have done this?
In addition, later in the same press conference, Obama
admitted to having messed up in Libya for having failed to plan for the
aftermath of the fall of its former dictator, Muammar Gaddafi. He did try to cover himself by referring to
the many lives he saved by deposing the dictator in the first place. This admission is remarkable because Obama
criticized George W. Bush for failure to plan for the aftermath in Iraq. How much smarter Obama is over everyone else
is his point of pride, and here he makes the same mistake that he noted Bush
making! To say nothing of his many dignified
uses of his powers of office to do undignified things.
Political revolutions are messy. The Republican Party is in the birth-throes
of an internal political revolution. The
Democrats were in one also, with the insurgency of Bernie Sanders; but by a
miracle of partial-birth abortion, the Bernie Sanders movement was killed off
at the very end, and the ultimate establishment candidate, Hillary Clinton,
emerged the one alive.
Obama’s smarter than thou attitude, and his Alinskyite
tactics, may succeeded in carrying Hillary over the finish line, as he said had
to be done in his speech to the DNC. But
it would be at the price of a genuine democratic decision.
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