“Trust matters,” President Barack Obama said this week, campaigning in Iowa.
And here’s the thing, Iowa, you know me. You know–you know that I say what I mean and I mean what I say. There’s some folks in this crowd who have probably been following me since I was running for the United States Senate. You could take a videotape of things I said 10 years ago, 12 years ago and you’d say, ‘Man this is the same guy.’
To which we at Breitbart News say: exactly.
Obama is the same politician who called for “redistributive change” in a 2001 interview, and lamented that the Warren Court had not been radical enough since it “never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth.”
Obama is the same politician who gave a Martin Luther King, Jr. Day sermon in 2002 in which he played up class warfare, claiming that “rich people are all for nonviolence.”
Obama is the same politician who told a forum at Loyola College in 1998 that he wanted the government to redistribute wealth.
Obama is the same politician who claimed in 2007 that the federal government was less responsive to the victims of Hurricane Katrina than to the victims of 9/11 because of racism–even though he voted against waiving the Stafford Act to allow federal aid to flow to Katrina victims without matching local funds.
“Man, this is the same guy.”
Today Obama is running for re-election on a platform of raising taxes on “millionaires and billionaires,” though he knows that would neither grow the economy nor solve the federal deficit.
Instead of running on his record, he has portrayed his opponent as an evil, and criminal, plutocrat. He and his running mate have even suggested that their opponents are racist and sexist–a charge without basis.
That is the real Obama–the Obama that the mainstream media attempted to hide from the American people in 2008, the Obama that Andrew Breitbart sought to expose when he launched “The Vetting” series earlier this year.
In over three dozen articles, published over several months, the “Vetting” uncovered many previously unknown facts about Obama and his associates, great and small. Among the highlights were the following:
- Obama developed a relationship with radical Critical Race Theory professor Derrick Bell, who described white supremacy as a permanent feature of our constitutional system that could only be overcome by enacting sweeping socieconomic rights. Obama praised Bell in a speech at a protest at Harvard in 1990 and later used Bell’s writings to teach his own students–and, perhaps, to guide his Supreme Court appointments today.
- Obama’s literary agent published a promotional booklet in 1991 that advertised Obama as having been “born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii,” despite available evidence to the contrary. The agent described the mistake as a “fact checking error,” but it remained in Obama’s bio on the agency’s website for sixteen years. Obama may have been the source of the mistake–and the inadvertent source of the Birther conspiracy theory.
- Obama’s relationship with radicals in Chicago was deeper and more enduring than had previously been suspected. As a state senator, he participated in public discussion of Saul Alinsky; as a U.S. Senator, he continued to socialize with unrepentant domestic terrorist Bill Ayers. He associated with radical members of the clergy–not just Jeremiah Wright, but Catholic priest Michael Pfleger and the radical Reform rabbi Arnold J. Wolf.
- Obama did, in fact, graduate from Columbia University in 1983–though he had been admitted in an unusually weak transfer class, whose average SAT score was lower than that of much-derided former president George W. Bush. Obama, who still refuses to release his college and law school transcripts, was likely in the bottom 20% of his entering class at Harvard Law, though he obviously exceeded his early potential.
- Obama has a long-standing ideological commitment to gun control, as does his Attorney General, Eric Holder. As a U.S. Attorney in the District of Columbia, Holder said that the government needed to “brainwash” people against guns. Obama likewise demagogued the issue for years as a state senator, and has continued to do so as president, possibly using the fatal Operation Fast & Furious as a vehicle to introduce new gun restrictions.
- Obama, despite his radical beliefs, is perfectly capable of adopting more mainstream postures when necessary. As a student at Columbia, he praised anti-military groups that opposed the Selective Service–but now fashions himself as a wartime president. He began his Chicago career as a radical community organizer, but as a state senator he courted the support of business groups and extolled the virtues of private equity.
There is more–much more–unknown about Obama’s murky past. There are unreleased videos–including the infamous Khalidi tape, which no source came forward to provide, despite a $100,000 reward offer.
Yet the mainstream media have shown little interest in uncovering the relevant details of Obama’s record, either before or during his term, leaving ample work for future biographers but little information for American voters.
In that vacuum, conspiracy theories flourish–as do the media’s messianic fantasies. But enough of the truth has emerged, through the efforts of Breitbart and others, to enable Americans to see Obama as much “the same guy” he was before achieving prominence.
The same Obama who promises voters “trust” also promises America’s enemies more “flexibility” in his second term.
Today, no thanks to the mainstream media, Americans have some idea what that could mean.