OBAMA IS A MARXIST IDEOLOGUE
Posted on 09/30/2009 10:30:23 AM PDT by Kaslin
As someone who teaches and writes about international politics, I can confidently say that last week was one of the strangest in memory, from the G-20 circus in my backyard (Pittsburgh) to the political zoo at the United Nations. President Obama, of course, was front and center, including with a major speech at the United Nations.
What struck me wasn't so much what Obama said as what others said about him. I cannot recall any time, in the entire history of the United Nations, where nearly every single one of the world's worst rogue dictators came out of the woodwork to shower heaping praise on the president of the United States-Clinton or Bush, JFK or Reagan, Truman or Eisenhower, Democrat or Republican.
Iran's theocratic madman, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who once despised our president-when the president was George W. Bush-had a different tone this time around. Sure, as usual, he customarily paused to deny the Holocaust, and to deplore "the ugly behavior of the U.S. governments."
Well, not all U.S. governments: he exempted the current one. Actually, more than that, Iran's leader commended President Obama for agreeing with him on this "ugly" American behavior. As Iranian television reported , "Ahmadinejad noted that even the U.S. President Barack Obama in his remarks has accepted [this] fact and has called for a change in the way Washington treats other nations."
It wasn't only Ahmadinejad. Another Middle East madman, longtime terrorism sponsor, and enemy of America, Moammar Kaddafi, not only hailed his "Brother Obama" but wished that Obama could be president for life . "We are content and happy if Obama can stay forever as the president of the United States," said the architect of the Achille Lauro and Pan Am 103 murders.
And the greatest menace in the Western Hemisphere for 50 years, Fidel Castro, who once favored launching nuclear missiles at the United States, has finally found a president he not only likes but agrees with on policy. The aging apparatchik, who an earlier Democratic president, JFK, tried to remove with military force, rose from his sickbed to thank Obama for his lead on "climate change."
You can't make this up. The Republican National Committee, in its worst burst of cheap propaganda, wouldn't dare conjure up something like this. Besides, no one would believe it.
Yet, perhaps most troubling was what Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, an admirer of Obama, said in an extraordinary statement at the United Nations.
"It doesn't smell of sulfur here anymore," sniffed Chavez, in a swipe at former President Bush, whom he denounced as "the devil" in U.N. remarks in 2006. There was freshness in the air. Waxing almost spiritual, Chavez mused: "It smells of something else. It smells of hope."
Here, of course, the Venezuelan communist was referring to President Obama, invoking Obama's popular slogan. And it was this particular compliment that really hit a nerve with me; it was Chavez's words about "hope."
Hugo Chavez is far from alone in seeing Barack Obama as synonymous with hope. Each time I travel to Washington, I see a pro-Obama bumper sticker carrying simply two words, "Got Hope?"
Some will dismiss this as benign, a clever play on the phrase "Got milk?" The slogan, however, is way too glib. Whether the maker or bearer of the bumper sticker realizes it or not, there's something disturbing about this incessant identification with Obama as "hope."
The fact is that hope is a theological virtue; it is one of the three theological virtues, along with faith and charity. In my faith, we define hope as explicitly connected to God alone. Hope is the virtue by which we desire the kingdom of heaven and eternal life as our ultimate happiness-i.e., not in anything temporal or man-centered here on Earth. It is the virtue by which we place our trust in Christ's promises through the help and grace of the Holy Spirit. The virtue of hope is a response to "the aspiration to happiness" which God alone has placed in the heart of every human being.
For quite a while now, there has been an excessive embrace of Obama, sometimes bordering on reverence, from Europeans literally hailing him as their Messiah to schoolchildren singing songs of praise to their dear leader. Have you seen the Obama "prayer candles?" How about the crucified Obama?
I've written extensively on the faith of presidents and political figures, from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush to Hillary Clinton to Nancy Pelosi to Joe Biden, from the American founders to dozens of presidents; none were elevated the way the secular left is lifting up Obama.
It isn't healthy. To observe Americans putting their "hope" in Obama, and even making Obama hope, is troubling.
Sadly, though, this is a logical, inevitable conclusion of an increasingly secular left that seeks salvation in politics rather than conventional forms of religion. As Rousseau said, all people need some sort of religion. Even the irreligious seek some semblance of belief. We are "hard-wired" that way.
Yet, as Augustine warned: this is a God-shaped vacuum that only God can fill.
We have hope, yes. It is a hope that springs eternal. It is there for all of us. And it should never be placed in any man, politician, or president.
As a Christian, I understand hope from a Biblical perspective.
I wonder if things like “hope” or “faith” or “love” has any meaning in Obama’s original Islamic religion?
“It smells of hope”
Chavez really ought to be in advertising.
“It smells of something else.”.....
You beat it does, tinpot!
This guy has got to be a total embarassment to the black community. He is setting them back 50 years in relation to them running for President. People will loose all trust in the near future if this is what they have to look forward to.
675 Before Christ's second coming, the Church must pass through a final trial that will shake the faith of many believers. The persecution that accompanies her pilgrimage on earth will unveil the "mystery of iniquity" in the form of a religious deception offering men an apparent solution to their problems at the price of apostasy from the truth. The supreme religious deception is that of the Antichrist, a pseudo-messianism by which man glorifies himself in place of God and of his Messiah's come in the flesh.
676 The Antichrist's deception already begins to take shape in the world every time the claim is made to realize within history that messianic hope which can only be realized beyond history through the eschatalogical judgment. The Church has rejected even modified forms of this falsification of the kingdom to come under the name of millenarianism, especially of "intrinsically perverse" political form of secular messianism.
Nope.
funny, yes, but an absolute blasphemy of an outstanding Rockwell piece.
should read “Messiah come in the flesh.”
His black support has ebbed to the vicinity of 75%. (Rats normally get 90%. Bummer got 95% of the black vote.)
I “hope” this adds up more to a distrust of Democrats than it does a distrust of black people. Bummer is such a clown that white America could not mistake the average black person for him.
Evangelical teaching on the matter is essentially identical to this.
Apart from some vernacular flourishes. Like setting dates and naming names, for example.
Anyway, since it originates with the Church, like all sound doctrine, we shouldn't be surprised if it does.
Since the Roman patriots insist on blending together all congregations that mention Jesus in any context, they can come up with nonsense accusations like this.
I think it is the Lord's intention that the Church be his mystical body -- how can one separate them?
Last word is yours.
What you call curious is spot on. It’s what you get when you equate, say, Jehovah’s Witnesses to Southern Baptists.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.