Give Us Liberty

Crimes Against Liberty & Politics 101

Monday, August 23rd at 6:00AM EDT

#alttext# You want to know why Barack Obama coming out for the Ground Zero mosque was such a bad idea? It has nothing whatsoever to do with whether Obama’s position was or was not correct.

For the past two years polls have shown that people liked Barack Obama personally, but they hated his policies. There was a great disconnect. But over the past seven or eight months, the tide has been turning. More and more people are deciding they don’t like Barack Obama personally.

This is, if you will recall, the opposite of what happened with Bill Clinton. In Clinton’s case, people thought he was a scumbag, but they loved his Presidency and policies. They just didn’t want their wives or daughters around him.

Now with Barack Obama we’re seeing the great disconnect become reconnected in a bad sort of way for Obama — people don’t like him or his policies. His detachment from the pulse of the American middle class became more evident with his preachiness on the mosque. His world view is different from what people thought and people want a President who shares their world view. They want to like and trust the guy. Instead, the people are starting to see Obama as nothing more than a school yard bully.

There are a lot of books out and coming out that will examine Barack Obama and his Presidency, but none so far have actually examined Obama’s character and conduct as President. In essence, no one has examined how well Obama is handling the Politics 101 of his job — being liked by those who elected him.

Only David Limbaugh has done this. His new book, Crimes Against Liberty, is just out and I’ve read through it. (Full disclosure: our sister company, Regnery Publishing, which is also publishing my book, published David’s) David Limbaugh really gets into the play of personality and conduct of Obama — the bully behind the bully pulpit.

“We were told we were getting a cool, calm, steady leader who could rise above emotional impulses to deliver classic statesmanship and prudent governance. But all too often we witness in him a petulant and vindictive bully who doesn’t seem to understand why anyone would challenge his omniscience,” Limbaugh writes.

One of the questions a lot of pundits are speculating on is whether Barack Obama will make the great pivot after 2010, the way Bill Clinton did after 1994. Remember, Clinton made a big pivot to the right. Privately, a number of Democratic pollsters and others tell me they fundamentally believe Barack Obama is ideologically incapable of such a pivot. Limbaugh’s book provides the first real evidence that this is true. After 2010, there will be no moderation or pivot right. Obama is wedded to the failed liberal policies of the past hundred years that again and again the American public has repudiated.

But Obama holds that repudiation in contempt. As Limbaugh writes, “Obama’s disingenuousness is not just a matter of stretching the truth once in a while or engaging in a little old-fashioned hyperbole. His outright, habitual lies are a fundamental aspect of his governance…Inside a few months, he showed himself to be deeply racial, aggressively partisan, grossly incompetent, often verbally awkward apart from his teleprompter, an inflexible liberal ideologue, secretive, dishonest, undemocratic, dogmatic and dictatorial, and intolerant and dismissive of his opposition.”

David Limbaugh is the first guy on the right to really dig down into Obama’s politics and personality at the depth where we see not just what we already know, but what we’ve suspected — the Obama Presidency, if not put in check, will threaten our liberties all in the name of Obama’s ivory tower utopian world view.

“Based on his behavior as president, it is clear he truly believes his own hype, for we have discovered that instead of messianic, Obama is acutely, perhaps clinically, narcissistic…. Unless stopped, and reversed, the casualties of Obama’s systematic assault on this nation will be our prosperity, our security, and ultimately, our liberty.”