Daniel Pipes:
Barack Obama has come out swinging against his Republican rival, sponsoring television advertisements that ask, “What is Mitt Romney hiding?” The allusion is to such relatively minor matters as Romney’s prior tax returns, the date he stopped working for Bain Capital, and the non-public records from his service heading the Salt Lake City Olympics and as governor of Massachusetts. Obama defended his demands that Romney release more information about himself, declaring in Aug. 2012 that “The American people have assumed that if you want to be president of the United States that your life’s an open book when it comes to things like your finances.” Liberals like Paul Krugman of the New York Times enthusiastically endorse this focus on Mitt Romney’s personal history.
If Obama and his supporters wish to focus on biography, of course, this is a game two can play. Already, the temperate, mild-mannered Romney criticized Obama’s reelection campaign as “based on falsehood and dishonesty” and a television ad went further, asserting that Obama “doesn’t tell the truth.”
A focus on openness and honesty are likely to hurt Obama far more than Romney. Obama remains the mystery candidate with an autobiography full of gaps and even fabrications. For example, to sell his autobiography in 1991, Obama falsely claimed that he “was born in Kenya.” He lied about never having been a member and candidate of the 1990s Chicago socialist New Party; and when Stanley Kurtz produced evidence to establish that he was a member, Obama’s flacks smeared and dismissed Kurtz. Obama’s 1995 autobiography, Dreams from My Father, contains a torrent of inaccuracies and falsehoods about such his maternal grandfather, his father, his mother, his parents’ wedding, his stepfather’s father, his high school friend, his girlfriend, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. As Victor Davis Hanson puts it, “If a writer will fabricate the details about his own mother’s terminal illness and quest for insurance, then he will probably fudge on anything.”
What amazes me is that Americans actually elected this non-entity Obama. A man with no history of anything except as a parasite.
But even assuming that a majority of Americans are uneducated about most things, surely even an uneducated mass of people, surely from just gut instinct, would not vote for a person with a dubious past, so soon after 9./11.
What I mean is, would the British have voted for Adolf Smith as the PM of Britain, even as WWII was ongoing?
Now it will be pointed out to me that this is prejudice and all that. But I say that prejudice and gut instinct are part of our nature as living beings, as a self-defence mechanism.
Correction
What I mean is, would the British have voted for Adolf Schimdt as the PM of Britain, even as WWII was ongoing?
Now it will be pointed out to me that this is prejudice and all that. But I say that prejudice and gut instinct are part of our nature as living beings, as a self-defence mechanism.
Prejudice and stereo-typing are indeed part of human survival. they are a natural and understandable psychological characteristic.
Another psychological characteristic that is all too common is ‘projection’. We know that Muslims use it in spades, but this is also what Obama is doing when he asks if Romney has something to hide. He, Obama knows that he himself, has plenty to hide. Because he is a fraudster, he believes that everyone else is.
I’ve been following developments in the ongoing story of conjectures and revelations about Hussein’s curriculum, and what is absolutely terrifying is that there’s so much obfuscation and contradiction and lies without this, what is no doubt the biggest scam in political history, being blown wide open and exposed for everyone to see. If it proves one thing, it is the fact that we have come to live in a world where facts, for SELECTED individuals, no longer matter, while the rest of us are still bound by and tied to them in our endeavours and aspirations. Scary. For those of you who are interested, Peter Boyles, from KHOW in Denver, has frequent interviews with people investigating various aspects in the obscure sewage of Hussein’s life: the fake birth certificate, the social security number, the draft registration card, photoshopped pictures, his connections to Frank Marshall Davies and so on.
DP one third of the people who voted for him thought he was unqualified and couldn’t get elected, they voted for him so they could brag that they voted for the first black that was nominated by a party to be President. Now the entire world has to pay the price for their stupidity.