RUTHFULLY YOURS

On his recent Asian tour, President Obama characterized his fellow Americans (the most productive workers in the world) as “lazy.”

In fact, he went on to deride Americans for a list of supposed transgressions ranging from the Vietnam War to environmental desecration to the 19th century treatment of Native Americans.

“If you’re in the United States,” the president said, “sometimes you can feel lazy and think we’re so big we don’t have to really know anything about other people.”

The attack on supposedly insular Americans was somewhat bizarre, given that Obama himself knows no foreign languages. He often seems confused about even basic world geography. (His birthplace of Hawaii is not “Asia,” Austrians do not speak “Austrian,” and the Falkland Islands are not the Maldives).

Obama’s sense of history is equally weak. Contrary to his past remarks, the Islamic world did not spark either the Western Renaissance or the Enlightenment. Cordoba was not, as he once suggested, an Islamic center of “tolerance” during the Spanish Inquisition; in fact, its Muslim population had been expelled during the early Reconquista over two centuries earlier.

In another eerie ditto of his infamous 2008 attack on the supposedly intolerant Pennsylvania “clingers,” Obama returned to his theme that ignorant Americans “typically” become xenophobic and racist: “Typically, when people feel stressed, they turn on others who don’t look like them.” (“Typically” is not a good Obama word to use in the context of racial relations, since he once dubbed his own grandmother a “typical white person.”)

Too often Obama has gratuitously aroused racial animosities with inflammatory rhetoric such as “punish our enemies,” or injected himself into the middle of hot-button controversies like the Trayvon Martin case, the Henry Louis Gates melodrama, and the “hands up, don’t shoot” Ferguson mayhem.

Most recently, Obama seemed to praise backup 49ers quarterback and multimillionaire Colin Kaepernick for his refusal to stand during the National Anthem, empathizing with Kaepernick’s claims of endemic American racism.

What is going on in Obama’s home stretch?

Apparently Obama is veering even further to the left, in hopes of establishing a rhetorical progressive legacy in lieu of any lasting legislative or foreign-policy achievement. Turning the presidency into an edgy soapbox is seemingly all that is left of Obama’s promise to “fundamentally transform” the country.

But divisive sermonizing and the issuing of executive orders are not the same as successfully reforming our health-care system. The Affordable Care Act, born of exaggeration and untruth, is now in peril as insurers pull out and the costs of premiums and deductibles soar.

For devotees of Marxist-Leninist dialectical materialism the world is in motion and “progress” occurs through struggles. It follows the Hegelian principle that an evolving thesis morphs into anti-thesis resulting in synthesis. Thus history is not the unfolding of spirit or individual intervention, but of class struggle through violent revolution which is inexorable. Since all things contain within themselves internal contradictions, which are the primary cause of motion, they ipso facto possess the seeds of their own destruction. Hence the strategy for historical evolution is using the existing methods of free will to undermine freedom. For example, applying the freedom of expression guaranteed by the First Amendment allows for the expression of a theory on which free speech is not permitted.

It is noteworthy that Black Lives Matter has been united with the Muslim Brotherhood in attacking the state of Israel since both of these organizations, intolerant of oppositional positions, employ the Constitution to brow-beat the American public, an almost classic use of the dialectic.

Recently George Soros’ Open Society Justice Initiative called for international regulation of private decisions on what information should be taken off the internet and what should remain. It is ironic – in an Orwellian sense – that an “open society” is calling for a closed society. Presumably there are those in Washington or perhaps in George Soros’ circle who are best prepared to tell us what should be on the internet.

At many American universities including Princeton, student groups have organized a campaign against free speech because it can be “insensitive”. These children of privilege might be offended by words even tasteless words that are used in texts and classroom discussions. What these students are really saying is we want to control the words and curriculum we study. The net result would be a narrowly defined curriculum by a minority of students imposed on an unwary majority.

Then there is the Colin Kaepernick imbroglio in which the San Francisco 49 quarterback insists on sitting for the national anthem as a protest; here too irony abounds. He claimed to be protesting oppression of blacks and people of color. What he ignores is that the economic strides made by blacks in the U.S. since the 1970’s are unprecedented. He ignores as well that most victims of crimes involve people of color harming people of color. Of course the First Amendment gives him the right to take a stand, but context is useful. Free speech allows the stupid to express an opinion, but in Kaepernick’s case the hypocrisy is palpable. This man of color was adopted by white parents and raised in a middle class home. Moreover, this “oppressed” black man earns 19 million dollars a year in a country where another black man is president. Here, too, this is not merely hypocrisy, but the unknowing application of the dialectic to unsettle the status quo.

Chief Judge Beryl A. Howell, appointed by President Obama to the District Court for the District of Columbia, left out “so help me God” while administering the Oath of Allegiance at a naturalization ceremony Wednesday.

Howell asked the new U.S. citizens to raise their right hand and “repeat the ‘Oath of Allegiance’ after me.”

According to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the oath goes: “I hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty, of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen; that I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I will bear arms on behalf of the United States when required by the law; that I will perform noncombatant service in the Armed Forces of the United States when required by the law; that I will perform work of national importance under civilian direction when required by the law; and that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; so help me God.”

When presiding over the ceremony at the National Archives in Washington, Howell omitted “so help me God” at the end of the oath. She then congratulated the new U.S. citizens and said they may be seated.

Title 8 of the Code of Federal Regulations provides for a religious exemption, stating in part, “When a petitioner or applicant for naturalization, by reason of religious training and belief (or individual interpretation thereof), or for other reasons of good conscience, cannot take the oath prescribed in paragraph (a) of this section with the words ‘on oath’ and ‘so help me God’ included, the words ‘and solemnly affirm’ shall be substituted for the words ‘on oath,’ the words ‘so help me God’ shall be deleted, and the oath shall be taken in such modified form.”

Judge Howell did not mention the phrase “and solemnly affirmed” while administering the oath Wednesday. U.S. Code does not outline the specific rules for the official or judge presiding over a mass public naturalization ceremony when one or more new citizens requests a religious exemption. CONTINUE AT SITE