In this second essay of The Crisis, I present an open letter to Barack Obama. As you would expect, few punches are pulled.
by Michael Naragon
II
TO PRESIDENT OBAMA,
“What’s in the name of lord, that I should fear
To bring my grievance to the public ear?” – Thomas Paine
Sir, a writer is not a commander. I cannot, in my fashion, order men to do my will. However, I can describe to them their intellectual heritage and duty to preserve it against usurpers and tyrants. The Mayflower Compact, Declaration of Independence, and Constitution all pre-date your reign, as do the writings of Locke, Montesquieu, Rousseau and the other philosophes who inspired our Founding Fathers. Some in the press have attempted to label those who oppose your policies and simply desire our government to follow our Constitution as racists and rebels. As Paine wrote in 1777, those who rebel against reason are true rebels. Those who rebel against tyranny in favor of justice deserve the title of “Defender of the Faith.”
It is this Faith that we do, indeed, defend. Throughout your presidency, still in its virtual infancy, you have continued to campaign your Leftist policies, disguising them as reasonable ideas with moderate rhetoric. Meanwhile, your Congress has given you trillions of dollars to enact your wealth redistribution programs, accelerating our decline from economic superpower to financial dependent. And yet, you continue to profess fiscal responsibility, even going so far as to call your presidency the most fiscally responsible ever.
Sir, you have had phenomenal political success, given the fact that you have virtually no experience or leadership skill, but you must learn that the repetition of a lie does not morph it into a truth. Adolf Hitler’s government attempted this. To the German people, he promised a thousand-year reign of prosperity and dominance. He wrote that in Mein Kampf in 1924. His power came to an end in 1945, when, by the end of his rule, Germany was desolate and beaten.
You have promised many things to the American people thus far. During your campaign, you promised that you would fight the use of earmarks in spending bills. You went so far as to say that you would sign no bill that contained earmarks. Thus far, every major appropriations bill that has left your desk with your signature has contained add-ons and amends that have cost–and will cost– the American taxpayers dearly.
You promised that lobbyists and special interests would have no place in your administration. Almost immediately upon taking the oath of office, you began appointing former lobbyists to various positions.
You promised that meetings in which laws were written would be “open and transparent” to the People. Again, no such thing has taken place. Not only are the People kept in the dark as much as possible by your government, but Republican lawmakers have also been shut out of the most important policymaking.
You promised that the People would have five days to look over every bill before it was signed into law. Sir, the Congress that has passed these ridiculous pieces of legislation has, in some cases, had only hours to read the thousands of pages of political double-speak and pork additions. Amendments to the cap-and-tax bill were written in the wee hours of the morning before the vote! This does not speak to a policy of openness. Or, would you prefer glasnost?
At one point, you feigned concern for the gargantuan spending that Congress has enacted since you took office, saying that you lose sleep over the deficit. Sir, I have a suggestion to help you get some rest: stop spending the money of hardworking Americans like someone who has lucked into a winning lottery ticket. The money made by the American people is not yours. Under our Constitution, you may use a small portion of our money to pay for our common defense and to promote the general welfare, but that is where it ends.
I believe politicians, particularly Leftists like yourself, read the Constitution only that far. “Welfare,” you read. That’s probably the first and only word of the contract with which you agree. This is why you wanted a Supreme Court nominee who believed in the “traditions” of the Constitution, not necessarily the document itself. If you read on, you will find that the intent of the Constitution was to “secure the blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our posterity.” Liberty. This is probably a concept with which you are much less familiar. I don’t fault you for this–you did not grow up here, so your understanding of what Liberty truly is has been tainted by your experience in madrassas and elsewhere.
As I am a teacher by trade, allow me to educate you on the meaning of Liberty. If you would use your Blackberry to search for a typical dictionary definition of “liberty,” you will find many different attempts at describing it. Some can get quite complicated. Liberty, however, is not a complex idea. It is, in short, the personal freedom to act without interference or oppression. Our political and economic systems in the country have been based on this concept. Throughout our relatively short history in the world, we as a People have faced numerous threats to our Liberty. Our movement for independence from England was an undertaking to create in the United States a haven of Liberty. Regardless of your views on the War Between the States, both sides fought for Liberty in some form before the conflict had concluded. Men like Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie died in the Alamo in an effort to preserve Liberty. In World War II, Americans plunged into waist-deep water and waded onto a beach, and fought against Hitler’s Germany in an effort to protect Liberty here in the United States and to give it as a gift to those countries of Europe plunged under Nazi control. Even today, our best young men and women fight and die for the preservation of Liberty. I apologize if these are facts that you have heard before, but I cannot assume you have been well educated–you did go to Harvard, after all, and I don’t believe they teach American history there anymore.
Liberty, then, is a precious commodity. Anything that people would spend their lives on must be incredibly valuable. Millions of Americans have died for ours, and, so, it is priceless. You, however, are treating our Liberty as something that exists at the whim of your government, to be given and taken away as the Creator gives and removes life. I understand that many of your followers treat you as a deity–your press has even gone so far as to call you a “god.” But you have no power when it comes to the Liberty of the People. You may suppress it for a time, and you may attempt to devolve the masses so that they do not understand what it is you’re truly doing to the country, but the People do know. The People do understand. Enough of them are standing against you now. More will join them.
You have expressed an admiration for the Marxist “community organizer” Saul Alinsky and his rules for radicals. Many of your kind profess the same belief in this twisted socialist bible. I, however, and millions like me follow different philosophers, ones that pre-date Alinsky and whose ethos is far superior. John Locke wrote, “The end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom.” Charles de Montesquieu explained that “There is no crueler tyranny than that which is perpetuated under the shield of law and in the name of justice.” Jean Jacques Rousseau wrote, “Free people, remember this maxim: we may acquire liberty, but it is never recovered if it is once lost.” And Thomas Jefferson believed that “Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.” All of these men believed that when government overstepped its bounds and became tyrannical, a vigilant People would replace it.
Liberal ideology has pervaded the government education system, and your movement has been somewhat successful in indoctrinating young people with your twisted philosophies, but when many of those young people are forced to live life, are struck by the magnitude of our government’s excess, they replace their ungrounded views with ones formed by hard experience. This is what you contend with now. These are the people who, as you put it, are waving tea bags around. These millions of informed, working Americans understand what it is you are attempting to do to our country. We will not allow it to continue. You and your Congressional leadership obviously understand this, else you would not be so hard-pressed to pass oppression after oppression as quickly as possible.
We know of your associations. We know of your philosophy, regardless of how you dress it in meaningless rhetoric. We know that your image has been carefully constructed and, once the curtain has been torn away, all that you truly are is a shifty, paranoid man who clings to his dogma when he should be leading. As a case-in-point, let us examine your attitude toward the violence in Iran. You waited for days to make any sort of real statement about the killings in that country. Those people who were being gunned down in the street, Sir, were young people who wanted to express their displeasure in their government’s policies. And your response? The response of the so-called Leader of the Free World? The United States shouldn’t “meddle.” After the leaders of France and Germany, two nations not known for their strength of character, made it known that they stood alongside the protesters, you finally took it upon yourself to make a slightly stronger statement regarding the killings and beatings. So it was after weeks of death, after the point where your words may actually have meant something, that you finally decided to take a stand. Perhaps it took a few days for your internal polling data to be processed.
More likely, you, as a Leftist, feel more comfortable dealing with a Supreme Leader or an Ahmadinejad than a free Iran–dictators stand with their own. Hitler, previously mentioned, sided with Benito Mussolini and Hideki Tojo. You have had friendly relations with Hugo Chavez and Daniel Ortega and, reportedly, had a poster of Che Guevara on the wall of your campaign headquarters. In the world system, power attracts power. This has been true for generations. It’s just that we in the United States aren’t used to seeing our president fraternizing with Communist totalitarian leaders.
By authoring this letter, I hope to show you the state of your presidency thus far. I wish only for the continued success of the United States. Your personal success or failure is of no consequence. If, by your failure, the nation is better off, then I hope you fail miserably. If you come to a realization that our country is the last, best hope of the world and your policies are weakening us to the point of collapse, if you decide then to change your ways and promote the well-being of America, then I wish you all success. Liberty, however, is the God-given right of every American. It is the natural order of Man to wish to preserve his Liberty and to fight for such preservation, if necessary. We, as a People, will not continue to sit idly by while you and your comrades in the Congress legislate our Liberty away. To once again quote Paine, in the defense of Liberty “I pray God the Americans may never be defeated, and I trust while they have good officers, and are well commanded, and willing to be commanded, that they NEVER WILL BE.”
