In the 1942 Jack Benny/Carole Lombard movie “To Be Or Not To Be” – about a troupe of Polish actors trying to flee the Nazis – one villain, a Col. Ehrhardt, is referred to as “Concentration Camp Ehrhardt,” to which Benny quips, “He does the concentrating. The Poles do the camping.”
Since he came to office 4 ½ long years ago, Obama has been concentrating on destroying the conservative movement – eliminating any opposition to the socialist republic he’s creating. In a few years, many of us could be “camping” in a very real sense.
If that sounds alarmist, read on. And try to see the big picture – not snooping, secret e-mail accounts, official harassment and intimidation, sundry assaults on the First Amendment and using the IRS as a presidential goon squad in isolation– but as a deliberate, coordinated, far-reaching plan to use the machinery of government to crush dissent.
Last week, six Tea Party and conservative groups testified before the House Ways and Means Committee on how the IRS tied them in knots when they sought tax-exempt status, which was awarded to leftist groups at the blink of an eye.
The San Fernando Valley Patriots was asked for detailed answers to 36 questions, with 80 sub-questions. Other targets got an even more extensive body-cavity search by the IRS – which asked for membership lists, donor lists, material and the copies of speeches of speeches – not to mention what they had for breakfast that morning.
To re-cap, here’s the IRS scandal by the numbers: 1. 300-500 – tnumber of groups targeted by the IRS for political reasons 2. 27 – the average number of months it took for Tea Party/conservative groups which persevered to get their 501-c-3 status (compared to an average of 9 months for everyone else), 3. 118 – the number of times Obama’s first IRS Commissioner visited the White House over three years, and 4. $49 million -- the amount the IRS spent on conferences in roughly the same period. Tormenting Obama’s opponents is so fatiguing.
Commentator and former Clinton confidant Dick Morris says the “incredible frequency” of White House visits by the former IRS head would “indicate that Obama must have been deeply involved with the inner workings of the audits and harassment of conservative groups.” Which would indicate the president really, really wanted to get the Tea Parties, which he viewed as his chief adversaries.
You can’t keep track of Obama scandals without a program.
Last week, we learned his political appointees, including Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, used private e-mail accounts for government business, hoping to avoid disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act. You only do this if you have something serious to hide. While Obama officials were concealing their communications, the Department of Justice got two months-worth of phone logs from the Associated Press.
According to the Washington Post of June 7, under the guise of fighting terrorism, “The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents and connection logs.”
The Guardian, a left-wing British publication, observed that this “shows for the first time that under the Obama administration the communications records of millions of U.S. citizens are being collected indiscriminately and in bulk – regardless of whether they are suspected of any wrongdoing.”
It gets more sinister with the revelation that the FBI is now probing right-to-life groups, another focal point of opposition to the administration.
Chris Slattery of the New York-based Expectant Mother Care (which runs a number of pregnancy resource centers) was contacted recently by an agent of the Joint Domestic Terrorism Task Force about meeting with him on a monthly basis “for a mutually beneficial relationship.” Says Slattery, “In other words, if I don’t meet with them, it will not be beneficial for me.”
The IRS asked one pro-life group to sign a pledge that it would never picket a Planned Parenthood clinic. FBI and DHS agents have attended training sessions on “pro-life terrorism” run by Planned Parenthood and the National Abortion Federation.
This is the same FBI whose Boston office consistently ignored signals from the Tsarnaev boys prior to the Marathon bombings. Meanwhile, Holder’s Justice Department has increased the number of cases it’s prosecuting under the anti-speech Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act. Forget al-Qaeda and its clones, homicidal imams and the Muslim Brotherhood. Catholic grandmothers and evangelical high school kids -- now that’s where the real anti-terrorist action is.
The administration is moving to curtail speech on a broad range of issues. On June 4, a rather remarkable meeting was held at the Manchester-Coffee County (Tennessee) Conference Center, conducted jointly by U.S. Attorney Bill Killian and the American Muslim Advisory Council.
Regardless of the rationale offered, the meeting was to warn the public – 2,000 of whom showed up, most to protest – against criticism of Islam. There were suggestions that Internet postings offensive to Muslims could be prosecuted as violations of U.S. civil rights law.
Are Muslims uniquely threatened? According to the FBI, Jews are eight times more likely to be the victims of religious hate-crimes than Muslims. So, why no public forums where prosecutors vow to spare to effort to curtail anti-Semitic incidents – or attacks on Christians?
Obama (who said in his 2009 Cairo speech that it was part of his “responsibility as President of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam”) is moving against anti-Sharia activism and efforts to block mosque-expansion in Tennessee, both perfectly legal. Once again, the president hopes to win by intimidation.
Obama is rapidly remaking the military in his own image. There is an ongoing campaign to purge outspoken Christians from its ranks.
After the 2010 election, the president pushed repeal of Don’t-Ask-Don’t-Tell through a lame duck Congress. Following the Ft. Hood massacre – by a Muslim major shouting “Allah is Great” – Army Chief of Staff General George C. Casey, Jr. said that although he was seriously annoyed about 13 dead soldiers under his command, “If our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that’s worse” – easilythe stupidest statement made by a general since Custer’s “I don’t think there are many Indians over that ridge.”
On April 23, Pentagon officials sought input from Mikey Weinstein, head of something called the Military Religious Freedom Foundation. (Think they had trouble with their C-3 status?)
Weinstein wants to root out Christian “proselytizing” (which he describes as “spiritual rape”) from the military. The secular Jacobin would like to see hundreds of court-martials for this heinous offense.
But what exactly is Christian proselytizing? Saying “God bless you” when someone sneezes? Having a “My Boss is a Jewish Carpenter” bumper sticker on your car, or impromptu prayers by soldiers in combat? It’s ironic that a homosexual can now share his “lifestyle” with his comrades-in-arms, but a Christian can not.
Ret. Lt. General Jerry Boykin, vice president of the Family Research Council, says, “This has the potential to destroy military recruiting across the services as Americans realize that their faith will be suppressed by joining the military.” Patriots and Christians, always the backbone of our armed forces, have no place in Obama’s Army.
On another front in the war against right-wing Christian fanatics, in May, Lt. Col. Frank Rich, stationed at Fort Campbell, sent a 14-page e-mail to officers in his command warning them to be on the lookout for soldiers influenced by hate groups. Along with the Ku Klux Klan and skinheads, Rich listed among these poisonous influences “anti-gay, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim” groups. He named the American Family Association, FRC and the Federation for American Immigration Reform.
The list appears to have been taken verbatim from the no-smear-is-too-outrageous Southern Poverty Law Center, whose literature was found on a gunman who tried to storm the FRC headquarters in Washington, D.C. last year, shooting a guard. When Rich’s memo came to light, there were loud disavowals among the brass, but one wonders how pervasive such attitudes are in Obama’s Diversity-Is-Our-Greatest-Strength military.
Because, you see, there is an eerie similarity between Rich’s e-mail and a 2009 report from the Department of Homeland Security – withdrawn when it became public. Within weeks of the regime’s inception, DHS produced a memorandum for local law enforcement titled “Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalism and Recruitment,” which lumped gun owners, veterans and small-government advocates with neo-Nazis and other violent nut-cases.
In his war on conservatives, Obama has been tutored by the Marx Brothers – not Chico, Harpo and Groucho, but Saul, Herbert and Antonio. Saul Alinsky instructed him to maintain “constant pressure on the opposition” and “look for ways to increase insecurity, anxiety and uncertainty” among target groups.
Mentor of the ‘60s New Left, Herbert Marcuse advocated the “withdrawal of toleration of speech and assembly from groups which promote aggressive policies, armament (and) chauvinism,” as well as those which oppose extension of the welfare state. The impact of his thinking is the main reason it’s nearly impossible for prominent conservatives to speak on college campuses today.
Antonio Gramsci, a Marxist theorist of the early 20th century, urged the left to seek “cultural hegemony,” which it’s largely achieved in the early 21st century. He also said the “revolution” would never triumph as long the proletariat had a “false class consciousness,” inculcated by family, church and nation state.
Recall Obama’s bitter-clinger remarks from the 2008 campaign -- identifying resistance to his message primarily among those who cling to religion, guns and “anti-immigrant” sentiment. Think of his anti-nationalism (including the rejection of American exceptionalism) and attacks on the family, via same-sex “marriage” and taking medical decisions out of the family’s hands.
The president is harassing his opponents, monitoring their activities, intimidating them, limiting their funding and generally creating a hostile environment for un-Obama speech.
Defending the super-snoops in his NSA, on Friday, the president warned, that if people can’t trust their rulers – himself first and foremost – “We’re going to have some problems here.”
How can you not trust a man who lied to you about what happened in Benghazi, lied when he told you that if you liked your health insurance plan, you could keep it under ObamaCare, lied about not raising taxes on the middle class, lied about the impact of sequestration, lied about the use of chemical weapons in Syria being a “red line,” and, just yesterday, promised to keep North Korea from getting the nuclear weapons it already had.
Never mind. You just trust Obama, and you go right on trusting him – until they shove you in a cattle car.
Originally published at GrassTopsUSA
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