Fleeced: How Barack Obama, Media Mockery of Terrorist Threats, Liberals Who Want to Kill Talk Radio, the Self-Serving Congress, Companies That Help Iran, and Washington Lobbyists for Foreign Governments Are Scamming Us...and What to Do About It

Fleeced
How Barack Obama, Media Mockery of Terrorist Threats, Liberals Who Want to Kill Talk Radio, the Do-Nothing Congress, Companies That Help Iran, and Washington Lobbyists for Foreign Governments Are Scamming Us...and What to Do About It

One

President Obama: What Would He Do?

This book will expose a disastrous array of fleeces that are conspiring to rob the American people of their money, their security, and their way of life. The worst among them, however, is what we'll all have to go through if Barack Obama takes office on Inauguration Day in January 2009. There's a strong chance that a Democratic winner would be accompanied by an overwhelming congressional majority, consolidating Democratic control over both houses. We believe that as many as fifty-eight Democrats will be elected to the Senate and the Democrats will extend their domination of the House. The beleaguered Senate Republicans may find it hard to summon the forty-plus votes they would need to sustain a filibuster and stop Obama from fulfilling his agenda. He would be able to do his will. But what will that be? Where would he take our country?

Obama would take the country sharply, suddenly, and dangerously to the far left. He would raise taxes immediately and substantially: increasing the top bracket to at least 40 percent, lifting the cap on Social Security taxes, and doubling capital gains taxes and taxes on dividends. He would roll back the increases in the threshold for the inheritance tax passed under Bush. But his catastrophic intervention in our society would hardly end there. Obama would open the door wide to illegal immigrants and make it easy for them tobecome citizens and voters.

• He would socialize medicine in America—through a federal insurance program that would include illegal immigrants.

• He would weaken the PATRIOT Act in important ways and would increase our vulnerability to terrorists.

• He one would weaken the standards Bush imposed for improved public education.

• He would lower penalties for some of our most dangerous drug criminals and give many a free pass to leave prison.

And, most important, Obama would pull out of Iraq unilaterally, without conditions, and leave it to its (likely bloody) fate. If it became a base for terrorists, he is likely to do little more than to wring his hands and blame President Bush. During the primary season, Obama has been relatively clear about what he would do as president. The trouble is that most voters haven't been listening to what he's been saying. Enthralled by his charisma, enraptured by the idea of electing the first black president, thrilled to have an alternative to the deadly oscillation of Clintons and Bushes in the White House, the voters have allowed the specifics of Obama's agenda to get lost along the way. They have missed the dangerously radical substance that lies behind his attractive rhetoric.

For Obama has done much more than merely promise to end the current political style in Washington and to bring the "audacity of hope to the nation's politics. During the campaign, he explicitly outlined an ultra-liberal agenda—one that runs even further to the left than what Hillary was willing to own up to.

Whereas Hillary flip-flopped on the war in Iraq, Obama was quite clear: he wants out, regardless of the price in lost credibility or Iraqi lives.Whereas Hillary hid her planned tax increases, Obama is quite explicit about them: he would nearly double the capital gains tax and the tax on dividends while raising Social Security and income taxes sky-high.

Hillary forced us to read between the lines to see what she would do as president. With Obama, it was all there in plain sight; we just needed to look—and pay attention.

After all, paying attention to the specifics of what Obama says he will do is vital. We must understand the policies and programs he would bring with him to the White House.

Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of presidents: ideologues and pragmatists. Ideologues have a clear agenda based on their political philosophy; they see their election as an opportunity to implement it. Pragmatists, on the other hand, take office with no clear idea of what course they will adopt until they get there. Clearly, Hillary Clinton is an ideologue—and the evidence we have so far suggests that Barack Obama is one as well.

But Bill Clinton was no ideologue. He was the ultimate pragmatist—and this is the crucial respect in which he differs from Hillary. Bill Clinton, for example, campaigned on generalities: he promised to enact a middle-class tax cut, to "end welfare as we know it," and to focus "like a laser beam" on the economy. Once he took power, however, it became clear that he had no set agenda in mind. Shortly after the election he convened an economic "summit" in Little Rock, Arkansas, with one central mission: for others to tell him what to do. For days he sat and listened as experts propounded their solutions; then, after arriving in Washington, he convened a nonstop parade of policy meetings to try to settle on a concrete agenda. What emerged was a hodgepodge. First he decided to increase the deficit in order to stimulate the economy. Then he decided to cut the deficit and raise taxes in order to bring down interest rates. But the fact is that the zigging and zagging produced a good and solid economic expansion—a stroke of very good fortune.

But the core of Bill Clinton's approach to governing was the quotation from Franklin D. Roosevelt that he often recited: a commitment to "bold, persistent experimentation," seeing what worked and discarding what did not.

But if presidents such as FDR, John F. Kennedy, George H. W. Bush, and Bill Clinton took office with only a vague sense of what they would do, many presidents were ideologues—like Ronald Reagan, Lyndon Johnson, and George W. Bush—who had clear agendas in their minds as they laid their hands on the Bible to take the oath of office.

Lyndon Johnson, empowered first by a national outpouring of grief and guilt after John F. Kennedy's murder and then by a massive electoral victory in 1964, moved quickly to pass JFK's civil rights bill and then implemented a program of domestic spending to combat poverty that he'd envisioned ever since his days as a New Deal congressman from a poor district in Texas.