November 22, 2009
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July 14, 2008

Yet Another Obama

By Michael J. O'Shea
Behold Barack doing yet another Obama, this one vintage 2006:

But what I know is, Joe Lieberman's a man with a good heart, with a keen intellect, who cares about the working families of America. I am absolutely certain that Connecticut's going to have the good sense to send Joe Lieberman back to the United States Senate.

Ooops.

Or in the words of The Washington Post - a scant six months later:

Democratic Sen. Barack Obama, a vocal defender of Sen. Joe Lieberman earlier this year, is urging Connecticut voters to rally behind his rival, Ned Lamont.

Not that that would have surprised William F. Buckley who, just prior to the Obama swithceroo, noted that "in politics, vows of fidelity are renewable every 24 hours."

The Buckley-Lieberman bond is as uplifting as the Obama-Lieberman link is a downer.

Buckley on Lieberman:

Joe Lieberman is a singular human being. He has personal support from people who know him, and who sense in him a true love for God and country.

Lieberman on Buckley:

I have lost a dear and cherished friend who I have known for more than 40 years.

One could disagree with him -- as I did quite frequently -- and never lose respect or affection, dare I say love, for a wonderful human being.

Contrast that with the crassness of Barack Obama:

  • latching on to Lieberman -- who, when Obama was just a two-year-old, had registered Black voters in Mississippi -- as his senate mentor,
  • whooshing to Connecticut to rally support for his colleague's re-election,
  • then forking over $5,000 to defeat the man who had embraced him from the start.

Barack Obama speaks frequently of the Golden Rule, but lives one of his own: If he helps my career, flaunt him; if he doesn't, dump him. That rule is universal, applying to principle as well as people, the sacred as well as the profane -  anything, and anyone, that gets in the way, anything, and anyone, to get ahead.

Barack Obama boasts that world leaders would look to him. But what would they see if they did? Would they glimpse in him what Margaret Thatcher saw in Mikhail Gorbachev?

I like Mr. Gorbachev. We can do business together. We both believe in our own political systems. He firmly believes in his; I firmly believe in mine. We are never going to change one another. So that is not in doubt, but we have two great interests in common.

What leader would know what Barack Obama "firmly believes" -- or that he firmly believes anything at all? 

It's not just hard to have faith in Barack Obama, it's hard to have faith in his faith itself. Just last week he said,

it's been a journey that began decades ago on the South Side of Chicago, when, working as a community organizer, helping to build struggling neighborhoods, I let Jesus Christ  into my life.

But just last year his spiritual saga had a different paternity:

And I heard Reverend Jeremiah A. Wright deliver a sermon called "The Audacity of Hope." And during the course of that sermon, he introduced me to someone named Jesus Christ.

But then Jeremiah got in the way, as had Joe, so Jeremiah and Joe both had to go. Both learned what America and the world may learn too late - that the one thing you can count on about Barack Obama is that you can't count on Barack Obama.

No matter how scholarly about Scripture this "devout Christian" purports to be, he can't fathom Christ's simple command: "Simply let your ‘Yes' be ‘Yes' and your ‘No' be ‘No.'" Be a man of your word.

No matter how often he cites Old Testament and New, he misses the Bible's single, simple message: keep your word. God keeps His to you, keep yours to Him and to your fellow man.

No matter how often he cites his Hawaiian or Kansas or Selma or other American roots, he still doesn't grasp, much less live, what the Founders declared:

And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.

That pledge had weight because all 56 signers were men of their word.

So, too, Bill Buckley, so, too, Joe Lieberman -- Christian and Jew, conservative and liberal -- yet steadfast: men of honor, men of their word.

And then there's Barack Obama: a man of words whose word is worthless.
on "Yet Another Obama"
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