President Obama acts as though he merely sympathizes with the Wall Street occupiers' "broad-based frustration" about how America's financial system works, but he's doing a lot more than sympathizing. He's fanning their flames.
Perhaps we should take a look at what, exactly, Obama is supporting and contrast it with the tea party movement he so roundly condemns.
In May 2010, when a White House dinner guest suggested to Obama that racism was a motivating force behind the tea party opposition to him, he raised nary a finger of objection and even affirmed that there was a racially biased "subterranean agenda" afoot in the anti-Obama movement. About that same time, the administration had lumped the tea party protesters into a group to be monitored as "domestic terrorists."
Ever since this authentic, grass-roots movement spontaneously erupted throughout the nation, Obama and the leftist establishment have engaged in a systematic effort to demonize and discredit tea party protesters as extremist, racist and violent. Nancy Pelosi predicted the protests would lead to a climate of violence. In a recent interview, Obama portrayed tea party ideas as extreme positions that are rejected by "a vast majority of Americans."
Those of us who identify with the movement and have attended some of the rallies know that in their false characterizations, Obama and his supporters are either lying or projecting. The protests have been remarkably peaceful, respectful and lawful. We are talking about Americana here, folks — people who believe in American ideals and who object to the government's bankrupting us and destroying our liberties.
There has been no tea party-instigated violence at these rallies, and there has been no racism. Bearing false witness is egregious; doing so in exploitation of the race issue is worse.
Why do we believe that in defaming tea partyers, Obama is projecting? Simply because he is a community organizer at heart with an ends-justify-the-means ethic. He has been engaged in political street agitation his entire adult life, so it is natural for him to assume his political opponents would engage in the same tactics. But they don't.
We see in the Occupy Wall Street protests — and some of the Service Employees International Union protests that have preceded it — the attitudes and atmosphere that prevail among leftist activists, whose aimless angst is directed at everyone but those most responsible for causing the damage they are decrying: their fellow leftists.
For a bird's-eye view of the type of protest Obama and his fellow leftists pretended to fear in the tea party events, we need look no further than the Wall Street occupier dust-ups. Here hateful and violent rhetoric abound, just as the ugly specter of racism, particularly against Jews, is in full relief, all of which are as verifiable in the YouTube videos of these protests as their absence has been in the tea party videos.
On her blog, Michelle Malkin cites a Denver protester saying, "There's a lot of stuff that needs to change, and it if doesn't, violent revolution will come."
He continues, "If you get the thirteen families that own the world, including George Bush and his administration, get them in front of the White House and hang them and shoot them, because they deserve that." And if that doesn't impress you, how about the protesters "calling for the beheading of 'white kids,' the 'hanging' of capitalists, and the murder of parents," as reported by the blog "Pundit Press"?
This, my friends, is representative of the type of protest our community organizer in chief claims to be "monitoring" and nevertheless supports — the type that has led to more than 750 arrests throughout the country, compared with only one arrest in all the tea party protests.
Hindsight vindicates our early assurances that the tea party protests were not going to lead to violence because they were populated by people who honor the rule of law. Indeed, the tea partyers' lawful behavior is an outworking of their substantive ideals, just as the occupiers' lawlessness is reflective of their underlying anarchy. The former respect proper constitutional restraints; the latter more closely resemble a mob.
With Obama, it's all smoke and mirrors; nothing is as he would have you believe. Every negative thing he says about the tea partyers is false, including that they don't represent the sentiment of the American majority, which is bursting with outrage at Obama's reckless agenda.
And whereas he pretended to fear violence from the tea partyers, he is actually trying to foment unrest among the occupiers. Their lifeblood is class warfare, and he is stoking its flames every single day.
With no ideas left on his plate that a long suffering American public is willing to further indulge, much less embrace, Obama is reduced to what he knows best: stirring public discontentment and unrest, hoping that this will somehow serve his political interests.
David Limbaugh is a writer, author and attorney. His latest book, "Crimes Against Liberty," was No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list for nonfiction for its first two weeks. Follow him on Twitter @davidlimbaugh and his website at www.davidlimbaugh.com. To read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.
