Giving America the finger

There is some ridiculous buzz about B. Hussein Obama giving Hillary the finger in response to Wednesday's very revealing debate which highlighted his tendency to embrace radical leftists who hate America, such as Weather Underground terrorist William Ayres, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and Michelle Obama.

To me it looks like an innocent face scratch. But who knows? Maybe it was intentional. And why not? What right-minded person would not relish the chance to flip Hillary the bird on national television for all the harm she wants to do to America.

What we ought to be concerned about is the way that Obama looked America square in the eyes and flipped us off, saying that our bitterness causes us to cling to guns and religion and to anti-illegal immigrant sentiment.

People are bothered by what he said because it reveals that his carefully crafted public image is a sham. Obama presents himself as a man who can bring the country together, overcoming differences of party or race, as well as solving our international problems by talking with Iran and other countries with which we are at odds, and performing other miscellaneous miracles as needed.

There is not a speck of evidence that Obama has ever transcended party differences in the U.S. Senate. Voting records show him to be the farthest left of anyone in the Senate. Nor has he sponsored any significant bipartisan legislation — nor any other significant legislation, for that matter.

But speaking privately to far-left supporters in San Francisco, he let his hair down and revealed what he really thinks of the voters he is trying to woo. His statements are standard far Left rhetoric, where guns and religion are regarded as signs of psychological dysfunction and opinions different from those of the Left are ascribed to emotions, rather than to legitimate issues that need to be answered. Obama rejects “stereotypes” when they are stereotypes he doesn’t like but blithely throws around his own stereotypes about “a typical white person” or “bitter” gun-toting, religious, and racist working-class people sitting on their hands for 25 years waiting for government to rescue them.

In politics, the clearer a statement is, the more certain it is to be followed by a “clarification,” when people react adversely to what was plainly said. Obama and his supporters were still busy “clarifying” Jeremiah Wright’s very plain statements when it suddenly became necessary to “clarify” Senator Obama’s own statements in San Francisco.

However inconsistent Obama’s words, his behavior has been remarkably consistent over the years. He has sought out and embraced the radical, anti-Western Left — whether Jeremiah Wright, William Ayers of the terrorist Weatherman underground, pro-Palestinian and anti-Israeli Rashid Khalidi, and of course America-hating Michelle Obama.

Obama is part of a long tradition on the Left of being for the working class in the abstract, or as people potentially useful for the purposes of the Left, but having disdain or contempt for them as human beings. Karl Marx said, “The working class is revolutionary or it is nothing.” In other words, they mattered only in so far as they were willing to carry out the Marxist agenda. Fabian socialist George Bernard Shaw included the working class among the “detestable” people who “have no right to live,” saying “I should despair if I did not know that they will all die presently, and that there is no need on earth why they should be replaced by people like themselves.”

Most famously, Karl Marx called religion "an opiate for the masses." Obama has been caught stealing a play straight from the original leftist. His "uniter, not divider" shtick is not going to fly any more.