Saul, Barack, and Me

by Robert Ringer

Most readers have probably not noticed it, but in all the articles I’ve written about BHO, I have never referred to him as “President Obama” except when quoting someone else. As you might have assumed, this has not been by accident.

I’ll never forget the time I was standing in line at a bookstore, chatting with someone about BHO. A stranger standing a couple of people away from me overheard my comments and abruptly admonished me, “Whether you like it or not, he’s our president.”

To which I responded, “He may be your president, but he’s not mine. That was the end of any thought I may have had about conceding and accepting the fact that BHO had been elected to the highest office in the land. The reason I have never seen BHO as the president of the United States is because he swore to uphold the Constitution, but from the day he took an oath to that effect, he immediately began violating it.

I concede that all of our presidents have violated the Constitution, but even the worst of them have at least made a gratuitous attempt to honor it to some degree. BHO’s actions make it clear that he does not even acknowledge its existence.

But enough of my intransigence. My humble objective is to get a handle on what makes this self-defensive, arrogant young socialist so angry and so anxious to take away the rights of American citizens. Call it my personal contribution to the noble cause of preventing him from making good on his promise to fundamentally transform America.

BHO’s actions have been deceitful to such an extreme that some have gone so far as to suggest that he is the Antichrist. Others stop short of that label, but see him as the epitome of evil.

Well, this may surprise you, but I don’t see Chairman Obama as evil. I really don’t. After a good deal of study and observation, my take on him is that he is a man without a soul. And, as a soulless individual, his actions are not hampered by trivial moral considerations.

If you read his autobiographies (two in print before he even made it to the White House!), along with some of the other books written about him, you see a very troubled young man. I, for one, have a great deal of compassion for anyone who has experienced a difficult childhood.

And, clearly, Obama had a dysfunctional life growing up — a white Marxist mother, a black African Muslim father who was a drunk and a philanderer, then, of all things, an Indonesian Muslim stepfather. And, of course, there were the years he spent in a Wahabbi Muslim school in Indonesia (Wahabbi schools being most famous for teaching students hatred for Western countries).

Given all this, it’s not hard to understand why a youngster would become vulnerable to a “down–with-the-rich” proselytizer. And in BHO’s life, it seems clear that that proselytizer came in the form of American communist Frank Marshall Davis, whom he refers to in his memoirs simply as “Frank.”

Ironically, BHO attended Punahou High School in Honolulu, which is the most upper-crust school in Hawaii. Like so many other things about BHO’s life, where he got the money to attend such an expensive school, not to mention Columbia and Harvard, has never been revealed.

In this series of articles, I’m going to try to get inside BHO’s head by dissecting the man and the book that perhaps had more influence on his anti-capitalist, anti-American attitude than anyone or anything else in his life. I’m talking, of course, about the infamous Saul Alinsky, founder of modern community organizing, and his equally infamous book, Rules for Radicals.

Alinksy, who died in 1972, was the son of Russian immigrants. He grew up in Chicago and was a street-smart kid whose early community organizing efforts were focused on the downtrodden Back of the Yards neighborhood in Chicago (made famous years earlier by Upton Sinclair in his classic novel The Jungle).

Because I always keep in mind that it is critically important to know your enemies, I recently reread Rules for Radicals, and was surprised by how certain parts of it struck me. For example, would you believe that there was much about Saul Alinsky that I actually liked? He was a fascinating character with a great sense of humor.

In fact, Alinksy was a witty, congenial, intellectual man with whom I probably would have enjoyed having lunch once a month. As I reread Rules for Radicals, I pictured what it would have been like to have engaged in friendly philosophical debates with my fantasy friend at the other end of the political spectrum.

I think my attitude toward him would have been, “Saul, I love ya, pal, but I feel obliged to tell you that you’re full of crap.” And with that, we’d have another friendly debate over human nature, philosophy, politics, and life. Alinksy was no Jeremiah Wright or Bill Ayers. He was a serious thinker.

In Part II of this article, I’ll tell you some of the things in the early part of Rules for Radicals that make me believe that I would have liked Saul Alinsky. Before concluding that I’ve lost my mind, be sure to read what I have to say.

Read Part II here.

Read Part III here.

Read Part IV here.

Read Part V here.

Read Part VI here.

Read Part VII here.

Read Part VIII here.