Saul Alinsky wrote the ‘bible’ for community organizers titled, “Rules for Radicals.” Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama learned his methods, took them to heart and executed them. Of course, we know now who was the better student.
Today I’m bringing you Rule #4 of Alinsky’s tactics for beating the enemy partly because I was eager to show a chink in the Obama ‘we are all one’ rhetoric.
Here is Rule # 4:
Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules. You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity.
Obama claims to be a pragmatist and says he abhors ideologues who he linked with bigots in his speech in Baltimore the other day. But, as Jonah Goldberg pointed out here, Obama is just what he claims to abhor—an ideologue (and I will add a bigot!).
In his Philadelphia speech kicking off his inauguration weekend train ride to Washington, Barack Obama proclaimed “What is required is a new declaration of independence, not just in our nation, but in our own lives – from ideology and small thinking, prejudice and bigotry – an appeal not to our easy instincts but to our better angels.”
Few sentences give us a better sense of Barack Obama’s – dare I say – ideology.
Look at the things then-President-elect Obama lumps with the i-word: small-thinking, prejudice, bigotry. It certainly sounds like Obama thinks ideology is not only bad, but really bad. This is hardly the first time he’s made it clear that he thinks ideology is backward and undesirable. Remember his famous comment that small town folks who bitterly cling to their guns and religion because of the lack of jobs and other progressive economic policies? The press downplayed the rest of the quote. He went on to say that the same people might also cling to “antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
Goldberg goes on to ask, isn’t it ideology when one insists, as Obama has, that only government can solve the economic crisis?
If Obama’s rule book proclaims ‘ideologues’ are bad then show how he too is an ‘ideologue’ and in fact a “bigot.” Obama’s comments about the ‘bitter clingers’ shows an elitist and BIGOTED attitude toward people who live in the country.
Here is a definition of a bigot:
A person obstinately or intolerantly devoted to his or her own opinions and prejudices, especially : one who regards or treats the members of a group with hatred and intolerance.
Isn’t that the perfect description of how Obama and friends in the media treated Sarah Palin and the millions of Americans who live like her (with guns and Bibles) in rural America?
Seems to me that Obama should be held to account if he doesn’t follow his own rules. As Alinsky says in Rule # 4, make him live up to his own book of rules!
P.S. When the ‘church’ group started bringing refugees to Hagerstown, MD near where we live, and long time local residents (who had grown up in this rural county) questioned why third worlders were being brought here, they were treated with much hatred and intolerance by the ‘church’ group and the local paper. The hypocrisy of that just infuriates me—while claiming the locals were bigoted they didn’t see their own bigotry!
