Alinsky Does Amnesty

National Review ^ | November 22, 2014 | Andrew C. McCarthy

[Steelfish]

NOVEMBER 22, 2014 Alinsky Does Amnesty The only limit on the president’s power that he recognizes is political expediency. By Andrew C. McCarthy

That assertion is not an epithet — well, not primarily. True, I would not describe someone I admired as an “Alinskyite.” Saul Alinsky was a loathsome figure — a radical statist who whose toxic brew of thoroughgoing deceit and brass-knuckles extortion (“direct action”) has become a part of mainstream politics. But in tying the president to the seminal community organizer whose theories and tactics so influenced him, my purpose is more to decode than to insult him.

Of course, calling Obama an “Alinskyite” draws cataracts of condemnation from the Democrat-media complex — for the same reason that Muslim Brotherhood shrieks of “Islamophobe!” inevitably follow any reasoned, scripturally based discussion of Islamic supremacism. People who advance their agendas in dishonesty and stealth can’t afford to have critics shine a light on them. The best diversion is to smear the critic as racist and phobic — or as Alinsky, a master of the game, put it, “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.”

Well, this week Alinsky did amnesty, so let’s not be diverted.

It was remarkable. We’ve endured six years of “If you like your health-care plan, you can keep your health-care plan,” “How dare you call Obamacare a tax,” “The video did it in Benghazi,” “Of course we’d never let guns walk to Mexican gangs,” “Workplace violence,” “Kinetic military action,” “The IRS harassment is outrageous and intolerable,” and “not a smidgeon of corruption” from “the most transparent administration in history.” Yet what so astonished the commentariat about Obama’s decree of amnesty for illegal aliens was the sheer audacity of hoax.

[Paine in the Neck]

Saul Alinsky was a loathsome figure — a radical statist who whose toxic brew of thoroughgoing deceit and brass-knuckles extortion (“direct action”) has become a part of mainstream politics.

More on the way...

[blackdog]

"Who is this Alinsky fellow? Never heard of him? Is he related to that Gruber fellow I've heard of on CNN?"

-BHO comments on the matter.

[Travis McGee]

[IMR 4350]

The Alinsky tactics we are seeing now weren’t learned from books, they are coming from someone that knew and was trained by him personally, and that someone is Hillary.

[gusopol3]

It is that the law has never mattered to him

Choom-gangin' his way through high school was an early indicator there.

[marktwain]

This is raw theory of power. It could as easily be found in Machiavelli.

It is a powerful way of understanding those in power.