By DEXTER DUGGAN
What is to become of Barack Obama?
Much news coverage now is focused on the incoming Donald Trump administration, but Obama may be planning more political activism and playing less golf than when he was expected to do his job in the Oval Office.
And part of Obama’s future probably will aim at thwarting Trump’s.
Obama’s life largely has been spent as an Alinskyite organizer, rubbing resentments and upending expectations as ordinary people just tried to live their busy lives. That’s Obama’s résumé.
Why should he be expected to learn a different trade past age 50? That’s just for older guys who’ve been thrown out of work by the steely cogs of Obama’s globalist corporatist friends.
Trump, at age 70, happens to be an older guy who, too, could get thrown out of work if those unreconciled to his presidential win still have a chance to say, “You’re fired!”
An article posted November 25 said, “President Obama is over. He knows that. There are still some things that he can do before he leaves office, but everything except the most destructive can be undone by his successor. The next phase of his campaign will not be fought from the White House. It will be fought against the White House.”
Those words are from an article by Daniel Greenfield at conservative activist David Horowitz’s FrontPageMag website (frontpagemag.com).
“The other Obama is emerging in conference calls with his supporters,” Greenfield continued. “‘One of the challenges that I’ve discovered being president is I’d like to be organizer-in-chief, but it’s hard,’ he said in one call. Obama can no longer be commander-in-chief. Instead he’s plotting to become organizer-in-chief.”
With Obama’s final weeks as president expiring, he’s being deferential in the White House, not blasting out frequent assaults against Trump. But, Greenfield said, Obama’s faithful followers “are getting much clearer signals. ‘You’re going to see me early next year, and we’re going to be in a position where we can start cooking up all kinds of great stuff to do’.”
Even now, leftists’ demands for states’ presidential vote recounts that couldn’t take Trump’s electoral-college majority away from him serve as a distracting and harassing action.
Obama and his foot soldiers hardly are Trump’s only major foes. In addition to the dominant, unforgiving media, who’d like to have Trump impeached as soon as possible, many in the Republican establishment may be just lying in wait for their chance to throw sand in the gears.
Even such prominent GOP officials as House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell held their noses through much of the Manhattan billionaire’s presidential campaign.
On December 5 Breitbart News posted an article saying that GOP congressional leadership’s priorities may not be well-aligned with Trump’s. Breitbart quoted blogger Mickey Kaus, an unconventional Democrat who attacks liberal dogmatism, saying:
“The GOP Congressional leadership wants to pass all its priorities quickly — tax cuts, regulatory cuts, Obamacare repeal, a Scalia replacement, maybe throw in some kind of weak ‘border security’ bill for show. But once Trump signs their bills, what do they need him for? His leverage is cut in half.”
If Trump wants something else important, like funding for a border wall, “it seems like he has to get them while he still has leverage,” Kaus was quoted.
However, Trump may be doing some of his own maneuvering to disarm old opponents.
On December 6, national radio talkmeister Rush Limbaugh noted Trump bringing in strong foes like Mitt Romney and former Democratic vice president Al Gore to have chats, with the possibility of rewards.
Limbaugh noted that conservative pundit Steven Hayward, at the Powerline blog, had just cited the Italian Renaissance political strategist Niccolò Machiavelli expounding on a ruler placing his enemies under his wing, as it were, so they’ll feel it necessary to prove their loyalty to him now.
“And it’s uncanny,” Limbaugh said. “It’s uncanny how applicable what Machiavelli wrote hundreds of years ago is to what Trump is doing today.”
Not that Trump is forgetting his election base. He made another announcement pleasing to conservatives and pro-lifers when he named retired pediatric neurosurgeon Ben Carson as his choice for secretary of Housing and Urban Development.
Carson, raised along with a brother by a poor but determined single mother, could be an inspirational example to others looking for a future forward instead of a dead end.
Meanwhile, Trump continues to criticize the dishonest dominant media, which do him the continuing favor of providing plenty of examples to prove him correct. Although outlets like the Washington Post and New York Times would be at the head of many people’s lists, those left-wing flagships have eager media imitators in political correctness around the nation.
The San Diego Union-Tribune, which came under the control of the longtime liberal Los Angeles Times last year, is best approached with considerable skepticism.
A recent example: The Union-Tribune posted a story on December 3 emphatically headlined, “Catholic leaders: Climate change on same level as abortion and death penalty.”
The story was good at broad generalizations, but not so much at substantiation. Citing energy-saving overhauls and solar panels being installed at churches hardly demonstrates that moral theology has been rewritten.
One liberal churchman the story managed to find who may believe the headline’s assertion of issues-equivalency was the recently arrived head of San Diego’s own Catholic diocese, Robert McElroy, who came down from San Francisco in early 2015 to assume that post.
The Union-Tribune said McElroy “ranks abortion and global warming as his two most pressing issues.”
It quoted McElroy: “Climate change and the environment in general really have to do with the continuation of life on our planet, and thus we really have to come to grips with the fact that we are depleting the resources of the created order at such a rate that humanity won’t be able to survive unless we change the patterns that we’ve been engaged in.”
Alas, McElroy has a long way to go. The very last paragraph in the story said Pew Research Center polling data say that while 79 percent of Catholics who identify as liberal Democrats “believe Earth is warming because of human activity, only 15 percent of Catholic conservative Republicans do so.”
The story didn’t inform readers of how many, if any, airplane flights to bishops’ meetings or other energy-consuming travels McElroy has given up to reduce his carbon footprint.
Just a few days earlier, the Union-Tribune had another emphatic headline about the Catholic Church dancing to the liberal tune. Posted November 30, it said, “Catholic Church prepares to fight ‘grave evil’ of mass deportations.”
Bishop McElroy was right there in the first paragraph this time, “making clear that if President-elect Donald Trump makes good on campaign promises of mass deportations of unauthorized immigrants, the Church is prepared to take ‘massive action’.”
The bishop was quoted: “During the past months the specter of a massive deportation campaign aimed at ripping more than 10 million undocumented immigrants from their lives and families has realistically emerged as potential federal policy.”
Such a deportation would be “an act of injustice which would stain our national honor” the same way that Native Americans’ dispossession of their lands did, McElroy was quoted.
Well, here’s the possible beginning of a solution. McElroy can depart from the California Native Americans’ conscripted land where he lives and works and “go back to Europe,” as some Latino activists might suggest.
“McElroy said mass deportations could remove more than 10 percent of parishioners from U.S. churches,” the Union-Tribune also said.
Should the illegal immigrants actually be sent back to their homelands, the bishops might try filling the empty space in the pews by evangelizing some of the millions of former U.S. Catholics who left a Church that they came to regard as more of an errand boy for the liberal Democratic Party than a faithful religious institution.
By the way, the Los Angeles Times posted a story on December 1 saying: “Mexican authorities deported close to 200,000 people last year, and between October 2014 and May 2015, they detained more Central American migrants than the U.S. Border Patrol. Human-rights advocates expect 2016 to be the year with the highest number of detentions and deportations yet.”
U.S. citizens would say Mexico is fully justified to enforce its own borders, so why is the U.S. “racist” for wanting to do the same? Perhaps McElroy can travel to Mexico City — by foot, not by energy-guzzling machines — to explain to Mexican officials the error of their racist ways.
In a December 6 interview, Arizonan Reymundo Torres told The Wanderer that he thinks McElroy is “absolutely naive and disconnected” from his responsibilities as a U.S. citizen.
By its nature, the Catholic Church has a global mentality, but this can come into conflict with the requirements of a nation-state, Torres said.
Torres is a third-generation Mexican-American whose family came to the U.S. legally. He also is a member of the Arizona Latino Republican Association (latinogop.org), which says its mission “is to foster the conservative principles of the Republican Party in Arizona’s Latino community; enhance the understanding of Latino values in public policy; and create an empowered network of Republican Latino leaders, grassroots activists, and voters throughout the state.”
The vast majority of illegal immigrants who come to the U.S. from Mexico do so for economic reasons, not to escape drug-cartel violence, Torres said.
To harshly condemn those who oppose unlimited immigration is “almost on the same level as calling your political opponent a Nazi,” Torres said, adding that it’s “a biblical and historical mismatch” to compare illegal immigrants and refugees generally with the Holy Family fleeing Herod.
The incoming Trump administration “rightfully has seen that the government has a responsibility” to “protect its citizens before attending to the needs of the government of a failed state” that refugees are fleeing, Torres said.
Pick And Choose
Northern California conservative commentator Barbara Simpson, a Catholic, sent The Wanderer a statement strongly disagreeing with McElroy. The rest of this article, below, is Simpson’s statement.
It appears Bishop McElroy and the USCCB have thrown down the gauntlet when it comes to illegal aliens in this country, making it a primary cause for the American Church, even to the point of using churches as sanctuaries. There is no room, according to him, for any Catholic who disagrees with this blatant violation of our laws.
And yes, for those offended by those words “illegal aliens” — get real. A foreigner in this country is legally considered an “alien” — and if that person crossed the border illegally, he/she is an “illegal alien” — read that “lawbreaker.”
The hypocrisy of his statements about supporting a “mass mobilization” of the Church if Donald Trump deports immigrants is astonishing. Whose side are they on? Why aren’t these men of God supporting people who want the law observed?
Comparing it to the civil-rights movement is laughable. Civil rights involved the rights of citizens of the country who were being denied because of their skin color.
He compares it to the “energy – – of Catholic opposition to abortion.” Really? I’ll believe that when I hear abortion spoken about from local priests during their homilies — as in “never.”
As a cradle Catholic, academically trained in theology on the college level, I’m ashamed so many of our clerical leaders are supporting law violators. How do we teach our children how to obey the law? Apparently, according to Bishop McElroy, they can pick and choose. Does that apply to the Ten Commandments as well? If so, we’re in more trouble than I realized.
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