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Greenfield: Obama's "Iraqization" of America
Sultan Knish blog ^ | Tuesday, September 09, 2014 | Daniel Greenfield

Posted on 09/09/2014 12:04:27 PM PDT by Louis Foxwell

Tuesday, September 09, 2014

Obama's "Iraqization" of America

Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog

When it comes to Iraq, Obama lectures the Sunnis and the Shiites on getting along and forming a government that won't exist for the sole benefit of a single group at the expense of the other.

But in America he runs exactly that sort of government.

Only 27% of whites see Obama as a "Uniter" compared to 78% of blacks. Those are Sunni-Shiite numbers. And numbers like that have consequences. 

Iraqis are not stupid. They look at the news and they see Ferguson and Al Sharpton screaming at
angry mobs and know that Obama is not practicing what he preaches to them. Obama may have forced out Maliki, but his own tribal politics are hard to distinguish from those of Maliki or ISIS.

Obama rules not by inspiring people, but, like Maliki and ISIS, he divides and conquers, setting people against each other. Obama's America is as spitefully tribal as Maliki's Iraq. Its bosses, like Eric Holder, hold a divisive worldview that excludes much of the country.

Al Sharpton, Obama's close political ally, and the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, his mentor, are familiar types in Iraq. You can find a thousand Jeremiah Wrights on any given Friday screaming about killing the Shiites or the Sunnis. You can find a million Al Sharptons community organizing local hatreds until they explode. One of the most prominent Sharptons of Iraq is a Shiite named Muqtada al-Sadr.

The Sharptons and Wrights of Iraq have guns because the machinery of law and order there has collapsed even more comprehensively than it has in Detroit. In a country divided by ethnic and sectarian politics, a multicultural military and police are incapable of enforcing the law and uninterested in standing up to violence from their own people.

Those are the ugly tribal politics that Obama has brought to America. Instead of repairing the economy, he focused on wealth redistribution. Instead of bringing Americans together as one nation, he calculatedly tore them apart around manufactured crises of race, gender, class and religion. He pitted blacks against whites, liberal Protestants against Catholics, the poor against the middle class and the cities against the suburbs.

Not only did Obama pit his own voting bases against the country, but he even sought to make his own voters fight each other.

Instead of reaching out to white Americans after they thoroughly rejected him in the 2012 election, he instead decided that divisive and racist politics were the key to staying in power.

In 2012, Obama decisively lost white voters 59% to 39%. He lost white voters of every sex and age. He lost white voters in almost every state. In the three states where he won them, it was only by the narrowest of margins.

And he only tied Romney among white voters in New York with a 49% to 49% split.

Obama lost white men. He lost white women. He lost young white voters. He lost middle aged and old white voters. He lost white Protestants and he lost white Catholics.

That did not happen because the white voters of 2008 who came out for him in New York 52% to 46% or the young white voters who came out for him 54% to 44%  (only to turn him down 44% to 51% in 2012) developed a sudden belated case of racism.

It was Obama's governing style that developed a sudden belated case of racism.

Obama promised us a united America and gave us a divided America. He has shown that he is a slicker and more polished version of Al Sharpton.

After coming to prominence with a vision of "There is not a Black America and a White America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of America" he shrugged off helping Americans as a whole and instead championed narrow tribal interests.

Maliki wasn't the Prime Minister of Iraq. He was the Prime Minister of a Shiite Iraq. Obama isn't the President of the United States. He's trying to be the President of Black America, Gay America, Latino America, Asian America, Transgender America and a thousand other micro Americas.

At no point in time has he been the President of the United States of America.

His antics in Ferguson, as in Florida, are yet another reminder that his governing style is tribal. It's Iraqi, not American. He doesn't bring people together, he tears them apart. He plays on racial crises to make minorities feel vulnerable and insecure while his emissaries denounce the majority.

To the left, this politics of acrimony is passed off as being more legitimate than the Sunni and Shiite tail-chewing in Iraq because one race is guiltier than the other. It's not. It's equally vile and equally cynical. And while there is no ISIS rampaging around America (though Muslim violence continues to flare up regularly with brutal killings) the miasma of hatred has consequences.

The victims of the Knockout games and the stores looted and burned in Ferguson are a consequence of Obama's tribal style of leadership. On the other side of the rusty coin are the people stocking up on weapons and preparing for a national collapse.

All that doesn't add up to Iraq, but it's not as far away from it as we would like to think.

America has been weakened by being divided. Divided nations are too busy fighting among themselves to put up a strong defense. The world is going to hell because everyone from Putin to ISIS is confident that Americans are too busy fighting over Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, over gay marriage and illegal alien amnesty, to pay much attention to them.

And they're right.

Obama's governing style isn't just inept, it makes America seem weak. Strong leaders don't need to divide and conquer their populations to keep them in line. Only weak leaders afraid that the people will wake up to their corruption and incompetence play those games.

America's strength was rooted in a republicanism that transcended tribal politics. Now America is sunk in a swamp of tribal politics. Its government is obsessed with negotiating every possible tribal demand on terms favorable to the tribes. There can be no better formula for tearing apart a nation.

Obama's America is as intimidating to ISIS as Maliki's Iraq was. A country at war with itself frightens no one. And Obama's America leaves the world with the impression that it's taking every possible effort by the authorities just to keep it from devolving into another Iraq.

There's nothing to spare for Putin or Al Qaeda except more token gestures. And we're almost out of those.

Democrats accused Bush of wrecking Iraq. Now they have turned America into another Iraq; a tribal society that is growing poorer every day while the tribes bicker over preferential treatment from the government. Americans are losing hope in the future as the left promises them that these conflicts will continue indefinitely because its social justice tribal grievances matter more than national unity.

Iraq fell before ISIS because despite its heavy armor, its air power and large military, it lacked national unity. As we move through a century of Islamic wars, we must take a lesson from the Iraqis.

If we live as a divided nation, we will forever be at the mercy of demagogues like Obama and tribal armies like ISIS. If we cannot unite as Americans, then we will find ourselves scattered as separate tribes, arguing to the last about precedence and privileges, like the Iraqi parliament, while the enemy destroys everything in its path.

Freedom was America's promise. Our equality was not based on tribal privileges, as the left insists it was and as it demands that it should be, but on the open equality of freedom.

Obama's tribal politics are dedicated to squelching the open equality of freedom and turning every aspect of life into a subsidized commodity to be dispensed by a central authority on a tribal basis.

That is not America. That is Egypt. That is Saudi Arabia. That is Iraq.

Iraq couldn't afford Saddam or Maliki. America can't afford Obama. A leader that divides a nation, bribing one half to support him and punishing the other half on account of their religion, their skin color or any other tribal variable is not out to make a nation strong or just.

He is out to weaken it by strengthening his own power over them.

The "Iraqization" of America, the "Sharptonization" of America, will mean the end of America. It will transform us from a country of hope and ambition into a warren of quarreling slums protected by rival gangs whose citizenry feel they have as little in common as the Sunnis and Shiites of Iraq.

That will strengthen Washington and destroy America.

While Obama lectures Iraq on unity and its politicians on working together, he is leading America down the same ugly path of tribe against tribe, religion against religion and citizen against citizen. It's too late for the Iraqis to change, but it's not too late for us to learn from their example.


TOPICS: Government; History; Politics; Religion
KEYWORDS: greenfield; identitypolitics; sultanknish

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Lou

1 posted on 09/09/2014 12:04:28 PM PDT by Louis Foxwell
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To: Louis Foxwell

Herein lies the problem. When government and PC drones started the whole hyphenated name crap (Irish-America, African-America, Native-American) we lost our identity as a country and create cliques within cliques that were existent before but only in a historical aspect. Previous immigrants wanted to be called American, not anymore.


2 posted on 09/09/2014 12:07:35 PM PDT by Resolute Conservative
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To: Louis Foxwell

Proof that Obama is not a failure. He is succeeding in his plan to turn us into Iraq.


3 posted on 09/09/2014 12:11:47 PM PDT by Sans-Culotte (Psalm 14:1 ~ The fool says in his heart, “There is no God.”)
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To: Resolute Conservative
'Previous immigrants wanted to be called American, not anymore'

At times. It was more of a regional phenomenon. Once[some still do] it was I'm a Virginian, a Tennessean. Texas perhaps carries that tradition today.

4 posted on 09/09/2014 12:14:22 PM PDT by Theoria (I should never have surrendered. I should have fought until I was the last man alive)
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To: Resolute Conservative

Yeah, Greenfield isn’t touching on anything new. It’s identity politics and it’s been around a long time.

Obama is just the agent, the catalyst, for pushing the US past the tipping point when it comes to Balkanization ...


5 posted on 09/09/2014 12:18:52 PM PDT by tanknetter
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To: Theoria

yes, but that moniker was not used to glean welfare status or a financial advantage, it was merely a cultural sense of pride and friendly competition.


6 posted on 09/09/2014 12:19:13 PM PDT by Resolute Conservative
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To: daisy mae for the usa; AdvisorB; wizardoz; free-in-nyc; Vendome; Georgia Girl 2; blaveda; ...

Where is the heart of this once great nation? Is it lost in a moral wasteland?

How do we still the voices that scream for personal privilege? How do we bring dopers, fornicators, thieves, gangsters and pornographers under a tent of decency, hope and moral courage?

Are there voices that can speak to the lost and show them the way back?

Is this the end or is there a glimmer of hope left in us?

7 posted on 09/09/2014 12:25:58 PM PDT by Louis Foxwell (This is a wake up call. Join the Sultan Knish ping list.)
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To: Resolute Conservative
When government and PC drones started the whole hyphenated name crap (Irish-America, African-America, Native-American) we lost our identity as a country

When my grandmother, who was born in 1903, and her family called themselves Irish-American, they meant that they were Americans whose ancestors came from Ireland, and when my grandfather's family called themselves Italian-Americans, they meant that they were Americans whose ancestors came from Italy. "American" was the family name, because we were all part of the American family. Cf. The House I Live In We still could be, except that it wouldn't benefit the leftists.

8 posted on 09/09/2014 12:31:29 PM PDT by chajin ("There is no other name under heaven given among people by which we must be saved." Acts 4:12)
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To: Louis Foxwell
In 2012, Obama would have lost in a landslide if the country still had the demographics of 1980.

The Immigration Act of 1965 took awhile, but it did eventually kill the USA.

9 posted on 09/09/2014 12:33:27 PM PDT by Dagnabitt (Amnesty is Treason. Its agents are Traitors.)
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To: Theoria

Within the country, maybe. For the rest of the world, you’re an American.

I’m a New Yorker, but I certainly don’t introduce myself to foreigners that way, even though they obviously know where New York is - and they have their own regional divisions, in fact.


10 posted on 09/09/2014 12:44:45 PM PDT by livius
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To: Louis Foxwell
Greenfield’s angle of observation that he regularly brings to current events is always original, which makes for thought provoking reading. This article is a great example.
11 posted on 09/09/2014 1:01:15 PM PDT by iontheball
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To: Louis Foxwell
0bama, "tribal"? Who knew!


12 posted on 09/09/2014 1:14:03 PM PDT by Uncle Miltie (Clinton / Bush 2016?)
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To: Louis Foxwell

When it comes to Iraq, Obama lectures the Sunnis and the Shiites on getting along and forming a government that won’t exist for the sole benefit of a single group at the expense of the other.But in America he runs exactly that sort of government.>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Thats exactly right. Obama is a liberal fascist who lectures Iraq and Turkey on how to get along with their minorities , while Obama makes a point of NOT getting along at home , dividing and polarizing the USA, where he is nothing more that a Chicago political thug, with delusions of grandure.


13 posted on 09/09/2014 2:02:00 PM PDT by Candor7 (Obama fascism article:(http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/05/barack_obama_the_quintessentia_1.html))
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To: Candor7

We. collectively, broke the cardinal rule of American presidential politics. Never elect a Chicago politician.


14 posted on 09/09/2014 2:14:34 PM PDT by Louis Foxwell (This is a wake up call. Join the Sultan Knish ping list.)
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To: Louis Foxwell
Obama promised us a united America and gave us a divided America. He has shown that he is a slicker and more polished version of Al Sharpton.

LOL

15 posted on 09/09/2014 8:40:30 PM PDT by GOPJ ("If America was a house, the Left would root for the termites." - Greg Gutfeld)
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