A Wolf in Wolf’s Clothing: The Real Barack H. Obama

The great myth about Barack Obama is that he is above politics and that he is a unifier. He is the bringer of “change” and when talking about his socialist policies and if he can ensure they are implemented, he answers, “Si, se puede!” Unfortunately for him, he is just another typical politician – the most liberal in the Senate (meaning the biggest supporter of leftist/statist policies) – and he’s apparently using his race as a tool for his campaign…which he claimed would not happen. As I have stated previously, we don’t know everything about Obama. What we do know about him is quite disturbing considering the office for which he is currently running.

We know about his plans and policies for if or when he becomes president: He wants to raise taxes, he wants to increase spending, and he wants to increase the size, power, and influence of our federal government. He wants to redistribute wealth and he wants more government control of our markets. He’s a socialist. We’ve seen plenty of debates and speeches where his socialist visions were discussed, so let’s explore what else we know about him.

Barack Obama was born in Honolulu, Hawaii in 1961. Both of his parents were college students attending the University of Hawaii. His father earned degrees from both Hawaii and Harvard. His mother earned a doctorate in anthropology from the University of Hawaii. When Barack was ten years old, he began attending Punahou School – one of the top elite college prep schools in the country – until he graduated in 1979. During this time, he was living with his grandmother who was vice-president at the Bank of Hawaii. In 1983, Barack Obama earned his Bachelor’s Degree from Columbia University, where he majored in political science. He went on to Harvard Law School in 1988 and graduated in 1991 with a Juris Doctorate. While at Harvard, he was elected the first black president of the Harvard Law Review.

In 1989, Barack Obama met his future wife, Michelle Robinson, while working at the Chicago law firm, Sidley Austin.

Michelle Robinson was born in Chicago in 1964. She grew up in the South Shore community, which was still a predominantly white and middle class neighborhood in the 1960’s and early 70’s. Her father was a long-time city employee and her mother was a secretary at what was considered one of the top, if not the top catalog stores in the country – Spiegel’s. Michelle attended Whitney Young High School, a top-ranked magnet school in the nation, and graduated in 1981. She earned a Bachelor’s Degree from Princeton University in 1985 where she majored in sociology and minored in African-American studies. In 1988, she graduated from Harvard Law School with a Juris Doctorate.

Barack and Michelle married in 1992. He held several jobs doing legal work and civic activism and was a member in the Illinois State Senate until 2004, when he was elected to the United States Senate. She held several jobs including Executive Director of a non-profit organization, an Associate Dean at the University of Chicago, and an administrative position within the University of Chicago Hospitals – where she earned over $270,000 in 2006. Combined with his $157,000 salary from the U.S. Senate and other income including book royalties, the couple earned nearly $1 million for the year. In fact, according to their publicly released tax returns, the couple has not earned less than $200,000 a year in at least the last seven years. In 2005 alone, they made over $1.6 million.

According to the Obama’s, this is your typical “less fortunate” upbringing and current middle-class lifestyle.

In the mid-1980’s, Barack Obama met Reverend (and I use that term loosely) Jeremiah Wright.

Jeremiah Wright was born in 1941 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He was born and raised in an area called Germantown. His father was a Baptist preacher and one of the first black people to earn a degree from the Lutheran Theological Seminary. His mother was a school teacher and was the first black person to teach at Germantown High School, the first to teach at Philadelphia High School, and the first to teach an academic subject at Roosevelt Junior High. She later went on to become the first black vice principal for girls at Philadelphia. Jeremiah graduated from Central High School – an elite school with a rich tradition of academic superiority. Mr. Wright played football and was a member of several music groups/bands. He attended Virginia Union University for three years before leaving to join the Marine Corps in 1961. In 1963, he joined the Navy and became a cardiopulmonary technician at the Bethesda Medical Center. Wright earned a Bachelor’s Degree from Howard University in 1968 and a Master’s in English in 1969. He also holds a Master’s from the University of Chicago Divinity School and a Doctor of Ministry from the United Theological Seminary.

In 2004, Mr. Wright bought two empty lots in Tinley Park – a Chicago suburb and mostly all-white community (93% according to the 2000 census) – at a cost of $345,000. He sold the lots in 2006 to his church, Trinity United Church of Christ, for $308,000. However, the church received a $1.6 million mortgage for the property and is currently building a 10,000-plus square foot home for Mr. Wright.

Now that we have some background squared away, it will be easier to discuss the positions and philosophies of these people and how their views ought to be interpreted. It’s not enough to simply accuse them of being hypocrites, elitists, or race-baiters. It must be demonstrated through their own words and actions. Since Barry so eloquently informed us that words do have meaning, we really ought to discover the meanings of his, his wife’s, and his spiritual mentor’s words.

Just words? You’ll have to judge for yourself.

We have seen or heard the sermons of Reverend Wright where he blames the United States for the terrorist attacks on 9-11-2001, where he accuses our government of creating the AIDS virus to wipe out black people, where he calls our country the U.S. of KKK-A., and where he says, “No, no, no. Not God bless America - God damn America!” We know that, according to Barack Obama, his now infamous sermon, “Audacity to Hope” contained the lines, “white folk’s greed runs a world in need, apartheid in one hemisphere, apathy in another hemisphere…That’s the world! On which hope sits!” (This sermon was the foundation for Barack Obama’s book of a similar title, The Audacity of Hope.) We have also seen or heard the recent interviews and speeches by Reverend Wright in which he reconfirms these feelings and continues to denigrate this nation. Basically, his general point is that America is bad and white people are racist.

Given his background, one would think he would be a little more grateful to the system that has allowed him so many opportunities for a successful life and career. In fact, Wright and the Obama’s have made pretty good lives for themselves and their families in this racist and evil system in America. The fact that they now speak quite low of this country and it’s unfair or corrupt ways – while they are currently living lifestyles only shared by the top few percent of Americans – is actually pretty disgusting rhetoric. So let’s get back to that.

Mr. Wright’s church is founded on the principles of black liberation theology, or Afrocentric theology. Trinity United also adopted the “Black Value System” and demands that “these Black Ethics must be taught and exemplified in homes, churches, nurseries and schools, wherever Blacks are gathered.” What are these concepts? Here’s the list (emphasis added in bold throughout):

1. Commitment to God.
2. Commitment to the Black Community.
3. Commitment to the Black Family.
4. Dedication to the Pursuit of Education.
5. Dedication to the Pursuit of Excellence.
6. Adherence to the Black Work Ethic.
7. Commitment to Self-Discipline and Self-Respect.
8. Disavowal of the Pursuit of “Middleclassness.”
9. Pledge to Make the Fruits of All Developing and Acquired Skills Available to the Black Community.
10. Pledge to Allocate Regularly, a Portion of Personal Resources for Strengthening and Supporting Black Institutions.
11. Pledge Allegiance to All Black Leadership Who Espouse and Embrace the Black Value System.
12. Personal Commitment to Embracement of the Black Value System.

Knowing that Trinity United had a reputation for being radical, Barack Obama decided to join the church nevertheless. Not only did he join the church, he also became close with Reverend Wright and has referred to Wright as his friend, mentor, one of his spiritual advisers, and a close confidant. In his “A More Perfect Union” speech, Obama says that Mr. Wright was “like family.” So, what does that say about Barack’s acceptance of the reverend’s views or the influence they may have had on him?

This spiritual adviser of his also happened to marry Barack and Michelle. Barack’s wife shares some disturbing views about America as well.

Michelle Obama’s senior year thesis at Princeton University in 1985 gives us a good look at her early adult mentality. Although there wasn’t really any inflammatory language in the paper, it’s the general theme of it that ought to be offensive to black and white people alike. The main premise assumed that black students at Princeton were and should remain grounded within the black community and share the common interests of black people. She first assumes that all black people operate with the same group mentality and that by going to a predominantly white school they are somehow influenced into abandoning their natural born culture. She also assumes that the former black Princeton students should have been more involved in their respective black communities after graduation, and should have wanted to be more involved rather than do what each individual felt was necessary for their own future and give in to the “white” culture. This is the quintessential philosophy of what appears to be her collectivist political views and is almost comparable to the ideology of black separatism.

To make a long story (and 96-page thesis paper) short, she appeared to be obsessed with race and was seemingly disappointed when the respondents to her survey were not.

More recently, Mrs. Obama has given us another glimpse of her adult perspectives on race, culture, and the United States. It seems that not much has changed in over 20 years.

In Columbia, South Carolina on January 23, 2008, Michelle Obama made the following comments:

“We don’t like being pushed outside of our comfort zones. You know it right here on this campus. You know people sitting at different tables, y’all living in different dorms. I was there. Y’all not talking to each another, taking advantage of the fact that you’re in this diverse community because sometimes it’s easier to hold onto your own stereotypes and misconceptions. It makes you feel justified in your ignorance. That’s America.”

The next month, Mrs. Obama made another questionable remark. In a speech in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on February 18th, she delivered these words:

“For the first time in my adult life, I am proud of my country because it feels like hope is finally making a comeback.”

(“Hope” is the rhetoric that was being used by the Obama campaign – as in, the audacity of. Being proud of one’s country is apparently directly related to personal success in politics.)

Less than a month later, she was again quoted as making ill-fated comments about our country. This is an excerpt from the March 10, 2008 edition of The New Yorker magazine that discussed some of Michelle Obama’s recent stump speeches:

“Obama begins with a broad assessment of life in America in 2008, and life is not good: we’re a divided country, we’re a country that is ‘just downright mean,’ we are ‘guided by fear,’ we’re a nation of cynics, sloths, and complacents.”

“‘You’re looking at a young couple that’s just a few years out of debt,’ Obama said. ‘See, because, we went to those good schools, and we didn’t have trust funds. I’m still waiting for Barack’s trust fund. Especially after I heard that Dick Cheney was s’posed to be a relative or something. Give us something here!’”

So Michelle Obama’s America is racist, ignorant, cynical, lazy, complacent, and downright mean. On top of that, nobody is “giving” her anything. It’s no wonder why she hasn’t been proud of her country – she doesn’t seem to have a clue about it or how it operates. Is this the woman we want in our White House serving as First Lady? Do we really want a First Lady who used the system to become successful, then condemns it when it’s convenient for her own personal agenda? Do we really want a First Lady who wasn’t proud of her country until her husband started winning presidential primaries? Is her message one that we ought to reward and use to represent the people of this nation?

Is all of her rhetoric just words? What about the views of her husband? Let’s see what his feelings are about America.

Barack Obama has tried to distance himself from Mr. Wright in the last few months. Obama claims that he had not heard the inflammatory sermons from Mr. Wright and that those sermons did not accurately represent his own beliefs. However, the very first sermon Barack claims to have heard was the “Audacity to Hope” speech and we have already discussed that he knew prior to joining the church that it was a controversial one. Barack has also claimed that he had not previously parted ways with Trinity United because he knew Mr. Wright was on the verge of retiring. So, has Barack Obama been waiting for the last 20-plus years for Mr. Wright to retire?

Only when it became a political necessity to denounce his former pastor, friend, and spiritual adviser did Barack Obama publicly denounce him. Only when the inflammatory sermons became known to the wider, general public did Barack Obama distance himself from the long-held beliefs of Mr. Wright. The man – who brought Obama into the church, moved him with his sermons, married him and Michelle, baptized their children, was a friend, was “like family,” and was a member of the spiritual advisers to his campaign – was removed from the public view by Obama at the beginning of his presidential run. This was undoubtedly a calculated action by the Senator and ought to make one wonder why he felt the need to hide his former pastor. After seeing and hearing his sermons, the answer is quite obvious.

We shouldn’t expect any concern from Barack about Michelle’s comments either. I wouldn’t expect him to condemn his wife’s comments for obvious reasons. But I do wonder why his wife would make these comments while campaigning for her husband and hold these types of beliefs if neither one of them actually believe what was said. So, this brings me to the words of the man himself.

Barack’s book, Dreams of My Father is littered with descriptions of racial tension within his own mind, with the bigoted views of his close friends, and his ability to pick up certain aspects of the philosophies from people like Malcolm X. At one point in the book, Barack tells us what he took from the writings of Malcolm X:

“And yet, even as I imagined myself following Malcolm’s call, one line in the book stayed with me. He spoke of a wish he’d once had, the wish that the white blood that ran through him, there by an act of violence, might somehow be expunged. I knew that for Malcolm, that wish would never be incidental. I knew as well that traveling down the road to self-respect, my own white blood would never recede into a mere abstraction.”

Another quote from the book deals directly with Trinity United and one of the reasons Obama chose to become part of the congregation. This was what he writes about after his initial visit and meeting with Mr. Wright:

“Afterward, in the parking lot, I sat in my car and thumbed through a silver brochure that I’d picked up in the reception area. It contained a set of guiding principles – a ‘Black Value System’ – that the congregation had adopted in 1979. At the top of the list was a commitment to God, ‘who will give us the strength to give up prayerful passivism and become Black Christian activists, soldiers for Black freedom…’”

During a radio interview in Philadelphia on March 20, 2008, Barack Obama said this about a reference to his grandmother in his “A More Perfect Union Speech” two days earlier:

“The point I was making was not that my grandmother harbors any racial animosity – she doesn’t. But she is a typical white person who, you know, if she sees somebody on the street that she doesn’t know, there is a reaction. That has been bred into our experiences that don’t go away and that sometimes come out in the wrong way.”

His most recent gaffe came at a speech in San Francisco on April 6, 2008, where he attempted to deride small-town citizens in the Midwest:

“You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, a lot like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy towards people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

Now some people will say that the words of Mr. Wright do not reflect the feelings of Barack Obama. They will say that Michelle Obama simply misspoke during her speeches or that her college thesis doesn’t mean anything today. They will say that Barack also misspoke or that he had a very difficult life that he was trying to relay to the average American in Dreams of My Father. Basically, they were just words…words that weren’t meant to be interpreted in the way they were spoken or written.

If one of these remarks was a singular, isolated incident, I think most people could and ought to tolerate it after an initial condemnation and think little of it in the future. Even if it happened a second time, I think most people could do the same and forgive and forget. But multiple slips from multiple sources is what we call a pattern of personal political or philosophical thought that should be publicly scrutinized, especially when the three main players are very closely tied – in this case a man running for President of the United States, his wife, and his long-time friend/church pastor.

The problem with Barack Obama does not end with his racial views and philosophies and those of the closest people to him. That is just the beginning. He has other equally as questionable associations in the business and political world.

Antoin “Tony” Rezko, an influential Chicago businessman, has been involved with Obama since the early 1990’s. In October 2006, he was indicted on 24 charges that included wire fraud, money laundering, mail fraud, solicitation of funds, and attempted extortion. Mr. Rezko has connections with a law firm that Obama joined in 1993 – Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland. He began donating money to Obama’s various political campaigns starting in 1995, producing a total of over $250,000 in contributions. Mr. Rezko received a $1 million grant from the Woods Fund in 2000, while Barack was on the board, for a project that was developed in partnership with Allison Davis from the previously mentioned law firm for which Obama had worked. There was even a questionable adjoining property purchase made between the Obama’s and the Rezko’s in 2005.

Another figure that appears in Barack Obama’s recent past is the homegrown terrorist William Ayers. The Weathermen group, of which Ayers was a member, even teamed up with the Black Liberation Army in 1981 to steal $1 million from an armored car, killing two police officers during the robbery. (It’s quite a coincidence that the leftist philosophies of Ayers and the Black liberation ideologies are now a part of Barack’s current adult life.) In 1995, the Ayers’ (William and his wife, fellow terrorist Bernardine Dohrn) hosted an event at their home – which was in the same neighborhood as the Obama’s – that served as the launch of Barack’s political career. From 1999 to 2002, Barack and Mr. Ayers served on the Woods Fund Board of Directors and they attended at least two conferences together in which they shared the stage as speakers. One of these panels in which they were both scheduled was organized by Michelle Obama.

(For the record: William Ayers still wishes he had done more bombing and will not completely rule out participating in more bombing in the future.)

Rashid Khalidi, another questionable figure connected with Barack Obama, has received support from and given support to him. While Obama and Ayers were on the board at the Woods Fund in 2001 and 2002, the organization gave two grants to Khalidi’s Arab American Action Network (AAAN). The grants were for $40,000 and $35,000 in consecutive years. Mr. Khalidi also hosted an event for Barack Obama’s 2000 Congressional race for the U.S. House of Representatives, in which the Obama’s were in attendance. They were also at Khalidi’s farewell dinner when he left Chicago for a job at Columbia University. The problem with this connection is that Khalidi has been an outspoken critic of Israel’s “occupation” of Palestine and he is an apologist for Palestinian terrorism against Israel. He was also an alleged PLO agent from 1976 to 1982. Some of Barack’s remarks concerning sympathy towards Palestine and claiming to meet with Iran’s leaders have led Khalidi and other anti-Israeli groups to believe that Barack is supportive of the Palestinian cause.

Barack Obama, William Ayers, Tony Rezko, Rashid Khalidi, and another man, Nadhmi Auchi (an Iraqi billionaire who was convicted in France for corrupt Iraqi oil contracts and may be caught up in the Rezko affairs – and apparently met with Obama in 2004), are all part of a circle of friends that cross paths in various business deals and organizations in and around Chicago. All of these connections are only what we know so far and since the media refuses to do their job, new information is slow to reach the news outlets.

So, what do we know about Barack Obama?

His pastor, friend, and former spiritual adviser, Jeremiah Wright thinks America is bad.

His wife, Michelle, thinks America is bad.

His “friendly” associate, terrorist William Ayers, thinks America is bad (and felt it was bad enough to bomb and wishes he had done more).

Barack himself is obsessed with his racial past and holds the most liberal (socialist/statist) voting record in the U.S. Senate.

Barack has multiple questionable associations with bigots, terrorists, corrupt businessmen, and political activists.

In short, what we have seen from Barack, the people closest to him, and his political allies is a pattern of thought and behavior that is far from the mainstream and even farther from unity or forming “a more perfect union.” In fact, Barack Obama is just a typical left-wing politician whose real identity has been well hidden by an unquestioning media. There is nothing new or refreshing about his candidacy.

Some people have called Obama a “wolf in sheep’s clothing.” This would assume that we don’t know the real Obama. However, we do know the real Obama…we just refuse to believe it or we are afraid to be labeled as bigots or racists. Disparaging his opponents and calling them racists is the tactic used by Obama’s supporters. It’s the same liberal strategy that has been used for decades – and it seems to be working yet again.

Barack Obama has not been hiding who he is. We are simply hiding the fact that we already know him.

*For more articles by this author, click here.