Barack Obama Is A Socialist

Don't believe me? It's ironclad.

From Gateway Pundit:

Barack Obama was an active participant in the 1990s, and a direct political beneficiary, of the Chicago New Party and, importantly, the Chicago DSA, a group of socialists affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America.

The connections are extensively documented by Matthew Weaver.

And:

His first mentor in high school was noted Communist Frank Marshall Davis.

He admitted he attended socialist conferences during his college years in his first book, "Dreams From My Father", page 122:

"Political discussions, the kind that at Occidental had once seemed so intense and purposeful, came to take on the flavor of the socialist conferences that I sometimes attended at Cooper Union or the African cultural fairs that took place in Harlem or Brooklyn during the summers-a few of the many diversions that New York had to offer, like going to a foreign film or ice-skating at the Rockefeller Center."

Obama also wrote that he selected his friends carefully, the more Marxist and radical the better, page 100:

"To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist Professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets."

And, don't forget Obama's pastor, mentor and father figure of 20 years, G-D AmeriKKKa Jeremiah Wright, who brought the black liberation socialist theology to the alter.

Politically Drunk on Power has more on Obama's socialist recent past.

Here's a screenshot:

Here's another screenshot that nails Obama:


Some additional details:

Obama actively sought the New Party’s endorsement and urged the Marxist members to join his campaigns. The New Party went so far as to claim Obama as an official member of their organisation.

For a comprehensive retracing of his connections to the Socialist New Party, go here. And, here we have it in his own words:

Spread the wealth around?? That's classic socialism and re-distribution! Wow, he must be quite confident that Americans are too dumb to figure out what he's planning!

The bottom line is that his history is quite clear: he's officially been a Socialist, he actively sought the support of other Socialists for his campaigns, he freely associated with other known Socialists, and he currently advocates Socialist policies. So, what's the big deal?

First is the bias in the reporting on this history of Obama. Powerline points out the obvious:

Just over a month ago, it was falsely claimed that Sarah Palin had been a member of the Independence Party during the 1990s. Media outlets jumped on that false claim and reported it as fact. The New York Times, to take just one example, printed the report and subsequently had to run a correction.

There is now strong evidence that during the 1990s, Barack Obama was a member of the socialist New Party, an arm of the Democratic Socialist Party of America. So far, to my knowledge not a single "mainstream" news outlet has followed up on this report, let alone immediately report it as fact, as they did with Sarah Palin.

Why do you suppose that is?

Uh, it's because they are desperate to get Obama elected, and have thrown objective reporting down the toilet.

Also, socialist policies destroy economies. The American Spectator predicts an absolute meltdown if Obama wins in November and gets his way with American economic policy.

Even more than that, though, is exactly how dangerous socialism is from a freedom standpoint. From the American Thinker:

It helps to begin by understanding what socialism is not. It isn't Liberalism and it isn't mere Leftism.

If it were up to me to attach labels to modern political ideologies, I would choose the terms "Individualism" and "Statism." "Individualism" would reflect the Founder's ideology, which sought to repose as much power as possible in individual citizens, with as little power as possible in the State, especially the federal state. The Founder's had emerged from a long traditional of monarchal and parliamentary statism, and they concluded that, whenever power is concentrated in the government, the individual suffers.

And what of Statism? Well, there's already a name for that ideology, and it's a name that should now be firmly attached to Sen. Obama: Socialism.

Here's a brief history of socialism:

Although one can trace socialist ideas back to the French Revolution (and even before), socialism's true naissance is the 19th Century, when various utopian dreamers envisioned a class-free society in which everyone shared equally in what the socialist utopians firmly believed was a finite economic pie. That is, they did not conceive of the possibility of economic growth. Instead, they believed that, forever and ever, there would only be so many riches and resources to go around.

The original utopians did not yet look to the state for help establishing a world of perfect equality. Instead, they relied on each enlightened individual's moral sense, and they set up myriad high-minded communes to achieve this end. All of them failed.

It took Marx and Engels to carry socialism to the next level, in which they envisioned the complete overthrow of all governments, with the workers of the world uniting so that all contributed to a single socialist government, which in turn would give back to them on an as needed basis. It does not take into account the fact that the state has no conscience.

Once you vest all power in the state, history demonstrates that the state, although technically composed of individuals, in fact takes on a life of its own, with the operating bureaucracy driving it to ever greater extremes of control. Additionally, history demonstrates that, if the wrong person becomes all-powerful in the state, the absence of individualism means that the state becomes a juggernaut, completely in thrall to a psychopath's ideas.

My favorite example is always Nazi Germany because so many people forget that it was a socialist dictatorship. In other words, while most people consider the Nazi party to be a totalitarian ideology arising from the right, it was, in fact, a totalitarian party arising from the left.

Practically within minutes of the Nazi takeover of the German government, individuals were subordinated to the state. Even industries that remained privately owned ... were allowed to do so only if their owners bent their efforts to the benefit of the state.

Citizens immediately lost the right to bear arms; thought crimes were punished with imprisonment and death; children were indoctrinated into giving their allegiance to the state, not the family; the government dictated the way in which people could live their day-to-day lives; and people who appeared to be outliers to the harmony of the conscienceless government entity (gays, mentally ill-people, physically handicapped people, Jews, gypsies) were dehumanized and eventually slaughtered.

And here's something important for you to realize as you think about what happened in that socialist state. While a core group of people, Hitler included, undoubtedly envisioned these extremes as their initial goals, most didn't. They just thought that, after the utter chaos of the 1920s (especially the economic chaos), the socialists would calm the economy (which they did), and simply remove from people the painful obligation of having to make their way in the world. It was only incrementally that the average German bought into the ever-more-extreme demands of the state - and those who didn't buy in were coerced because of the state's unfettered willingness to use its vast, brute power to subordinate individuals to its demand.

If that description of Nazi Germany doesn't ring some bells with current events, you need to pay better attention. Here are some other examples of destructive socialism:

... the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

From its inception, the Soviet state brutalized people, whether it was the upper echelon party purges or the mass slaughter of the kulaks -- all in the name of collectivism and the protection of the state envisioned by Lenin and Stalin. Most estimates are that, in the years leading up to WWII, the Soviet socialist state killed between 30 and 60 million of its own citizens.

I've got another example for you: the People's Republic of China, another socialist state. One sees the same pattern as in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia: individuals were instantly subordinated to the needs of the state and, as the state's needs became ever more grandiose, more and more people had to die. Current estimates are that Mao's "visionary" Great Leap Forward resulted in the deaths of up to 100 million people. The people died from starvation, or were tortured to death, or just outright murdered because of thought crimes. The same pattern, of course, daily plays out on a smaller scale in socialist North Korea.

Those are examples of hard socialism, but the soft socialism of modern-day Europe is almost as bad:

Britain's socialist medicine is a disaster, with practically daily stories about people being denied treatment or receiving minimal treatment. Invariably, the denials arise because the State's needs trump the individual's: Either the treatment is generally deemed too costly (and there are no market forces at work) or the patients are deemed unworthy of care, especially if they're old.

British socialism has other problems, aside from the dead left behind in her hospital wards. As did Germany, Russia, and China (and as would Obama), socialist Britain took guns away (at least in London), with the evitable result that violent crime against innocent people skyrocketed.

The British socialist bureaucracy also controls people's lives at a level currently incomprehensible to Americans, who can't appreciate a state that is constantly looking out for its own good. In Britain, government protects thieves right's against property owner's, has it's public utilities urge children to report their parents for "green" crimes; tries to criminalize people taking pictures of their own children in public places; destroys perfectly good food that does not meet obsessive compulsive bureaucratic standards; and increasingly stifles free speech. (Impressively, all of the preceding examples are from just the last six months in England.)

Here's the point: socialism destroys nations. It is a corrupt, bankrupt philosophy that always -- ALWAYS -- hurts people. When the state has too much control, the citizens always pay the price. That is precisely what we see happening in America today. With each new bailout, the government is taking on more control of industries that should be private. When that happens, more and more people become dependent upon the government to provide for them rather than on themselves. That opportunity for an individual to succeed or fail -- the very thing that made America the greatest nation on the planet -- goes away. That's the cancer of socialism - ultimately, it's anti-freedom. If people are dependent on the state to provide for them, they will not be able (or willing) to provide for themselves.

Now, let me remind you: Barack Obama is a Socialist who advocates Socialist policies for America. His history proves it, his proposals prove it, and own words prove it.

Do we really want to have America follow in the footsteps of Nazi Germany, the U.S.S.R., and China in terms of radical socialism? If so, vote for Obama.

I think I'll pass on that one.

There's my two cents.