The Absurd Report

Audacity
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When the Obama campaign spent a ton of money “re-furbishing” the huge Boeing 757 that the candidate and his entourage fly in, most of the media attention was focused on the interior of the plane. And why not? Seeing how Obama now sits in a big high-backed, leather chair in his spacious front compartment with the words, “Barack Obama, President” stitched on the back is a pretty jarring glimpse into the man who has to be one of the most arrogant people ever to run for president in the history of the country.
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But what I can’t let go is what Obama and his people did with the exterior of the plane.
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Before you accuse me of picking nits, consider this: there is simply no way that this savvy political machine called the Obama campaign would be oblivious to the reaction they would receive to the changes they’ve made to their candidate’s plane. Don’t you think they knew that reporters would notice the word “president” stitched onto the back of his seat? Wouldn’t you think they’re aware of the fact that the whole world is watching the big Boeing 757 with the idiotic “O” logo on the plane where the flags used to be?

They know, alright. More importantly, Sen. Obama knows.

He doesn’t care.

It doesn’t matter to him if his staff calls his ostentatious, expensive plane, “O-Force One.” He doesn’t give a rat’s rear end if people object to his refusal to embrace the flag, the very symbol of this great country.

This former community organizer thinks he’s got everyone eating out of the palm of his hand right now. And he sure doesn’t need some schmaltzy American flag to distract him.

Read more from WorldNetDaily

Barack Obama’s Lost Years

The senator’s tenure as a state legislator reveals him to be an old-fashioned, big government, race-conscious liberal.
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The pages of the Hyde Park Herald and the Chicago Defender thus offer entrée into Obama’s heretofore hidden world.
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As details of Obama’s early political career emerge into the light, his associations with such radical figures as Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Father Michael Pfleger, Reverend James Meeks, Bill Ayers, and Bernardine Dohrn look less like peculiar instances of personal misjudgment and more like intentional political partnerships. At his core, in other words, the politician chronicled here is profoundly race-conscious, exceedingly liberal, free-spending even in the face of looming state budget deficits, and partisan. Elected president, this man would presumably shift the country sharply to the left on all the key issues of the day-culture-war issues included. It’s no wonder Obama has passed over his Springfield years in relative silence.
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Any rounded treatment of Obama’s early political career has got to give prominence to the issue of race. Obama has recently made efforts to preemptively blunt discussion of the race issue, warning that his critics will highlight the fact that he is African American. Yet the question of race plays so large a role in Obama’s own thought and action that it is all but impossible to discuss his political trajectory without acknowledging the extent to which it engrosses him. Obama settled in Chicago with the declared intention of “organizing black folks.” His first book is subtitled “A Story of Race and Inheritance,” and his second book contains an important chapter on race. On his return to Chicago in 1991, Obama practiced civil rights law and for many years taught a seminar on racism and law at the University of Chicago. When he entered the Illinois senate, it was to represent the heavily (although not exclusively) minority 13th district on the South Side of Chicago. Indeed, race functions for Obama as a kind of master-category, pervading and organizing a wide array of issues that many Americans may not think of as racial at all. Understanding Obama’s thinking on race, for example, is a prerequisite to grasping his views on spending and taxation. Thus, we have no alternative but to puzzle out the place of race in Obama’s broader political outlook as well as in his legislative career.
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The most interesting characterization came from Obama himself, who laid out his U.S. Senate campaign strategy for the Defender in 2003: “[A]s you combine a strong African-American base with progressive white and Latino voters, I think it is a recipe for success in the primary and in the general election.” Putting the point slightly differently, Obama added, “When you combine an energized African-American voter base and effective coalition-building with other progressive sectors of the population, we think we have a recipe for victory.” Obama consciously constructed his election strategy on a foundation of leftist ideology and racial bloc voting.
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It’s also striking that so many of the policy considerations Obama counts as decisive are classic sixties-derived issues-precisely the sort of polarizing culture-war conflicts Obama nowadays claims to have transcended.
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Also in 1998, according to the Hill, a Washington newspaper, Obama was one of only three Illinois state senators to vote against a proposal making it a criminal offense for convicts on probation or on bail to have contact with a street gang. A year later, on a vote mandating adult prosecution for aggravated discharge of a firearm in or near a school, Obama voted “present,” and reiterated his opposition to adult trials for even serious juvenile offenders. In short, when it comes to the issue of crime, Obama is on the far left of the political spectrum and very much in synch with his active political allies Ayers and Dohrn.
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Illinois’s fate may foreshadow the nation’s. Obama’s small and carefully targeted spending bills were expressly designed to win passage by a Republican-controlled state senate. But if Obama takes the presidency with a Democratic Congress at his back, we’ll likely see a grand-scale version of the fiscal mayhem Obama and his colleagues brought to Illinois.
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The real Obama? You see him in those charts. Fundamentally, he is a big-government redistributionist who wants above all to aid the poor, particularly the African-American poor. Obama is eager to do so both through race-specific programs and through broad-based social-welfare legislation. “Living wage” legislation may be economically counterproductive, and Obama-backed housing experiments may have ended disastrously, yet Obama is committed to large-scale government solutions to the problem of poverty. Obama’s early campaigns are filled with declarations of his sense of mission-a mission rooted in his community organizing days and manifest in his early legislative battles. Recent political back flips notwithstanding, Barack Obama does have an ideological core, and it’s no mystery at all to any faithful reader of the Chicago Defender or the Hyde Park Herald.