Barack Obama’s speech in Osawatomie, Kansas, has certainly made waves. Well-received by the mainstream media, The Baltimore Sun wrote that the President has finally found “his voice” while the ever-dour Bill Press said that Obama was “channeling Teddy Roosevelt.” Yet if talk-show host Rush Limbaugh is correct, the President was channeling someone also long-dead but a lot more red. The radio giant asserts that Obama has “outed” himself, in that he has “announced to the world in no uncertain terms that he is a socialist, if not a Marxist.”
What did Obama say that brought cheers from the Left and jeers from the Right? Among other things, he stated that our relatively free enterprise system not only “doesn’t work” — “it has never worked.”
The first thing to note is the blindness and ingratitude evidenced by this statement. Our nation enjoys wealth unprecedented in man’s history, with its supermarkets stocked with thousands of products from the world over; and with how its “poor” people usually have cars, TVs, cellphones and other luxuries, as well as bellies that come out and greet you. So while “never worked” may describe Obama’s constituents, it can hardly be said about our system.
So our system shouldn’t be on trial here — Obama should be. But is it really fair to suggest he may be a Marxist? Or was there evidence for it all along?
Well, consider the words of John Drew, a man whom writer Paul Kengor calls “Obama’s Missing Link.” A contemporary of Obama’s at Occidental College three decades ago, Drew says that he himself was a Marxist at the time — and part of Obama’s inner circle. And what does he reveal?
Obama was an “ardent” “Marxist-Leninist” who “was in 100 percent, total agreement with [his] Marxist professors,” said Drew.
In fact, Drew states that while he was a more nuanced Marxist who tried to convince Obama that old-style communist revolution was unrealistic in the West, the future President would have none of it and considered Drew a “reactionary.”
Drew doesnÂ’t believe the President has changed, either, and I agree.
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