As this long primary season drags on, the presumed Democratic nominee for president still won't bring his vision for "change" into focus. He continues to speak in glittering generalities, providing few details.
The reticence, combined with Obama's radical ties, begs the question: Is he hiding an un-American agenda?
We know his longtime mentor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, detests America and its capitalist system, viewing it as unjust, oppressive and enslaving to minorities. He and his fellow travelers think they have in Obama the perfect candidate to remake America into a self-loathing dispenser of apologetic largesse to victim groups at home and Marxist regimes abroad.
Key among these is reverend-turned-professor James Cone, who believes merging Marxism with the Gospel will liberate African-Americans from the supposed economic slavery of "white" capitalism. "Together," he says, "black religion and Marxist philosophy may show us the way to build a completely new society."
Cone is the mentor of Obama's mentor, Wright. Wright adopted Cone's "black liberation theology" as his church's core doctrine. According to Cone, the reverend "is really the one who took it from my books and brought it to the church."
Cone's books are required reading at Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ, where Obama has worshiped for the past 20 years. Trinity instituted the theology and its attendant "black value system" a full decade before Obama formally pledged membership in 1991.
Cone describes black liberation theology as "a faith that does justice," a concept embraced by Obama, who's even argued that "racial justice" cannot be achieved without "economic justice."
According to the theology, divine justice will come when black Jesus (Obama's church believes Christ was black) grants African-Americans the power to permanently destroy "white greed" and white institutions and replace them with their own "black value system."
Cone writes that "black theology will accept only the love of God which participates in the destruction of the white enemy" and all its institutions.
Trinity demands its members pledge allegiance instead to "black institutions" and "black leadership," and patronize black-only businesses. Obama himself has said America's institutions are "broken" and need to be "fixed."
Obama has recently tried to distance himself from his crackpot pastor, but he hasn't disavowed any part of the Marxist pseudo faith that embodies everything Wright has preached. He refuses to respond to even written questions about Cone and black liberation theology.
His campaign last year confirmed the doctrine is included in new-member packets provided by the church, and is taught in new-member classes. Both Obama and his wife have attended these classes, so it stands to reason they have been indoctrinated into the radical theology.
And Obama in his first book defended black liberation theology as sensible, and has even called his tutelage under Wright "the best education I ever had."
Nowadays, Obama has another, prettier sounding term for his Afrocentric, black-first theology: the "social gospel." "Rev. Wright's sermons spoke directly to the social gospel," he has said, "and I found that very attractive." Apparently the social gospel Obama believes in is one where the CIA created AIDS and is secretly working with the U.S. government to exterminate black people so drug companies can test new drugs on them.
Wright says his sermons are inspired by Cone's books, the contents of which should repulse every patriotic American, white or black. "To be black is to be committed to destroying everything this country loves and adores," Cone writes.
That Marxist commitment to revolution doesn't stop at the water's edge. Obama's church in the 1980s rallied to the cause of communist regimes in America's backyard — from Cuba to Grenada to Nicaragua — while downplaying the threat posed by the Soviet Union.
From his pulpit, Wright whitewashed the brutality of the Sandinista junta and condemned the U.S. for backing the contra freedom fighters.
"Our congregation stood in solidarity with the peasants in El Salvador and Nicaragua while our government was supporting the contras, who were killing peasants in those two countries," Wright recently thundered.
The black liberation theology adopted by his church is "very similar," Wright says, to the "liberation theology" espoused by the Marxist revolutionaries whom the contras fought in Nicaragua.
Wright also condemned as "terrorism" the U.S. invasion of Grenada to oust a budding militant Marxist regime. "We bombed Grenada and killed innocent civilians, babies," Wright claimed.
Does Obama intend to carry on that tradition of appeasing socialist despots in our hemisphere, starting with Raul Castro and Hugo Chavez? Nicaraguan leader Daniel Ortega will no doubt also find support. The Marxist thug has already endorsed Obama's campaign as "revolutionary."
While Obama has refused to wear a flag pin or stand with respect during the national anthem, he certainly doesn't look or speak the part of an angry anti-American race revolutionist. But appearances may be deceiving. His positions often align with black liberation theology.
"I don't see anything in (Obama's) books or in the (Philadelphia race) speech that contradicts black liberation theology," Cone recently remarked. Obama has just sanded over the "radical edge to it," he said.
Does Obama speak in a code recognizable to fellow travelers but not to most voters, who would be frightened off by a radical agenda? "If you're black, it's hard to say what you truly think and not upset white people," Cone said.
Obama has learned a trick, however, to put the evil white America at ease: "smile" and act "well mannered." And don't "seem angry" or make any "sudden moves," as he shared in his first book, "Dreams From My Father."
Also, talk about "hope" without saying what exactly it is you're hoping for. That way, everybody will bring their own miasma of sugarplum delusions and just assume that is what you're talking about. Tellingly, Cone writes a good deal about "hope theology" — which "places the Marxist emphasis on action and change in the Christian context (and) is compatible with black theology's concerns."
Likewise, Obama has suggested he'd use his faith as "an active, palpable agent in the world," and a source of "hope" in overcoming "economic injustice."
"I still believe in the power of the African-American religious tradition to spur social change," Obama said in a 2006 speech to the Washington-based socialist group, Call to
Renewal.
Speaking of black revolution, Cone in his memoir said, "Hope is the expectation of that which is not. It is the belief that the impossible is possible, the 'not yet' is coming in history."
Here's Obama in his 2004 DNC convention speech: "Hope in the face of difficulty, hope in the face of uncertainty, the audacity of hope! In the end, a belief in things not seen, a belief that
there are better days ahead."
In his 1969 book, "Black Theology and Black Power," which Trinity uses as a second bible, Cone said: "When we look at what whiteness has done to the minds of men in this country, we can see clearly what the New Testament meant when it spoke of the principalities and powers."
Here's Obama, in his 2006 "Call to Renewal" speech: "The black church understands in an intimate way the biblical call to feed the hungry and clothe the naked, and challenge powers and principalities."
Louis Farrakhan, head of the Nation of Islam, says Obama has been "very careful" to avoid the path of failed presidential hopefuls Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, who openly militated for black causes. "He has been groomed, wisely so, to be seen as a unifier, rather than one who speaks only for the hurt of black people," Farrakhan said.
When Obama marched on Washington with Farrakhan last decade, he said blacks turn to "black nationalism whenever we have a sense, as we do now, that white Americans couldn't care less about the profound problems African-Americans are facing."
He added they have to be smart about how they protest and go about reforming the system. "Cursing out white folks is not going to get the job done," he said. "We've got some hard nuts-and-bolts organizing and planning to do."
His mild-mannered style has thrown off even some angry black radicals, who want him to speak out more forcefully about the legacy of U.S. racism and economic inequality.
One is Princeton professor Cornel West, a militant black and self-described socialist. Reportedly, West was reluctant to join the refined Obama's presidential campaign until Obama took him aside and explained to him that he had to walk a rhetorical tightrope to reassure whites. West is now solidly on board his campaign as an adviser.
West, along with Wright and Cone, has argued for reparations for blacks. Obama seemed to sow the grounds for such a case in his Philadelphia speech.
"So many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow," he said. "We still haven't fixed them."
He added, "That history helps explain the wealth and income gap between black and white."
Trinity's mission statement calls for "economic parity." Such anti-capitalist views are reflected in Obama's rhetoric and proposals.
Rated by The University of Maryland as the most liberal member in the Senate, Obama wants to soak the most productive members of society and subsidize those who are not. He wants to hit small businesses and big corporations alike with major tax hikes — singling out for special rebuke oil producers and "Wall Street predators" who have "tricked" blacks out of their homes. At the same time, he plans to expand the welfare state with massive increases in domestic spending.
"We have more work to do," he told black graduates at Howard University last September. "It's time to seek a new dawn of justice in America. . . . We can right wrongs we see in America."
Cone says he wants to see a "new system" in America "in which people have the distribution of wealth." He adds, "I don't know how quite to do that institutionally."
Enter a Harvard-educated lawyer and Southside Chicago-trained community organizer who has a real shot at institutional power. As Obama promised black graduates at Hampton University last June, "We're going to usher in a new America."
Sounds like an attempt to backdoor traditional, pinko socialism.
