Note: I was born in Brooklyn, New York. I grew up in a melting pot and I was raised not to see any color or creed or religion or race in other people, and that is how I lived my whole life. I am a lifelong member of the Democratic Party, though I have not supported the Party in quite some time, probably not since Bill Clinton’s administration. I would say I am an independent. I want to make it clear that Nazis, White Supremacists, KKK, racists and others of such ilk have no place in our society. When I see Nazi symbols I feel sick. When I hear the N word I am horrified and repulsed, (even when it is used by a black person). I grew up in dire fear of the KKK, as I was as much a target of their hatred as anyone else. I supported Martin Luther King, loved him, followed him, was too young to travel to Mississippi, and knew some men who died there fighting for civil rights and freedom.
Trying to sum up the 8 year legacy of former President Barack Obama, I was drawn to some former Presidents who had an impact on American history. Abraham Lincoln is known mostly as “The Great Emancipator”, and Ronald Reagan is known mostly as “The Great Communicator”.
I thought about this, since many of his followers have likened Obama to Lincoln, and many of his detractors have distinguished him from Reagan.
I began to think of these comparisons, and what former President Obama left us as his legacy. More and more, every day, it becomes clear that Barack Obama was “The Great Divider”. No better evidence of this is what happened in Charlottsville in the past few days. Many in the media have placed the blame for the violence in Charlottsville at the feet of President Trump. However, the enormous gap between the “far right” and the “far left” began long before Donald Trump even showed up on the political scene, it began back in the early days of Obama’s presidential campaign before he was elected.
While former President Obama talked often of uniting America, he did nothing of the sort. In fact, Barack Obama led liberals, progressives, socialists and communists, those who disliked the right, disliked conservatives, disliked religion, disliked Christians, disliked white people, disliked America, disliked Israel, disliked Jews who supported Israel, disliked drug control, disliked law enforcement, and many of the like out into the wilderness, for eight years. And when he returned from the wildnerness, with his tens of millions of followers, they had become rabid haters of all they had disliked, having been emboldened by how far to the left the President had driven the Democratic Party, my party, so far left, so extreme in their views, so intolerant, so politically correct, so sensitive, so violent, so vocal, and so hell bent on forcing their views on everyone, everywhere, that when the American conscience sat around the table that has been America’s melting pot of ideas, Obama’s followers and fascists, nazis, white supremacists and KKK members, who were many of the people who showed up in Charlottsville, were actually sitting right next to each other, because in fact the far, extreme, disgusting right, and the far, extreme disgusting left could no longer be distinguished, both imbued with hatred, both hopelessly irreconciliable, both so far to the left and right that their hatred was mutually bright and blinding, their methods equally offensive and loud, their hearts filled with murder and destruction and intolerance and both absolutely convinced they and only they are right about everything and that no one can disagree.
President Obama united nothing. He flung the world into chaos by refusing to act, whether out of a belief the US has no business in international affairs, emasculating the United States so as to convince the world the US was not a shining light, not the answer to any question or to any problem, or promising one thing and doing another (such as abandoning the Syrian rebels mid-stream), inventing the foreign policy doctrine of “Oppeasement”, and bowing to the likes of Hu Jintao, Xi Jinping, and Putin, not to mention Iran, North Korea and the Palestinians, managing to put Russia back at the top of the list and emboldening every evil in the world with his weakness, hesitation, indecisiveness and passivism.
Obama, the first black President, did not do one single thing to raise up black people in the United States, but merely encouraged them to rise up without leading them in any particular direction to give them the voice and wherewithal to achieve the equality they deserve and are absolutely entitled to in American life. He did not lead them to schools, but fashioned excuses for low performance, he did not pound on the importance of families in getting a good education, he did not exhort blacks to obey the law, but rather justified their fear of the law, setting minority against authority by injecting himself into legal matters the President had no business commenting on during investigation. He turned out to be wrong in every single case. He made the advice “when you see the man, run” the standing order of the day for minorities in America and tacitly approved of it, instead of encouraging faith in the legal system, and explaining that no one single significant shooting of a person of color in the years of his presidency would have occurred if the victim had only been encouraged by the President of the United States, the first black president, to obey a lawful order of the police, and not “run, when you see the man”, or resist arrest or carry a weapon, or take it out. I don’t recall a single time in eight years that President Obama supported law enforcement in the United States regarding the black community. In fact, the Great Divider drove a wedge between blacks and police, between blacks and whites, between rich and poor, between educated and uneducated, between lawful legal aliens and immigrants and illegal aliens (Obama using the euphemism “undocumented” to avoid “illegal alien”, the perfectly correct concept under the law (under the law of every country on Earth) applying to immigrants without the legal right to stay in the country).
Even in his own party, the Democratic Party, Obama was the great divider. If you did not support his extreme “progressive” and “liberal” ideas, you were not with the program. I often thought, wait, this is the Democratic Party, not the Liberal Party or Progressive Party, or Socialist Party or Communist Party. In his push to impose his extreme leftist views on his followers, he ended up making it necessary for white people to hate themselves in order to get into his Party. He even drove wedges between white people, and successfully made “old white men” a derogatory term, like the “N” word, which if I spoke, my parents would have washed my mouth out with soap (and I never did or could say it or any other derogatory term because I didn’t believe in that kind of racism against people I had always embraced and respected every diverse person in my life, which in New York was many).
Former President Obama divided American allies from America, almost all of them, his foreign policy based on “resetting” relationships, which all failed (every single one), and no more embarrassing than Russia, which Obama had proudly and arrogantly instructed his challenger Romney on when Romney said Russia was our primary enemy, saying the Cold War had ended decades before. Obama’s passivity elevated Russia to new heights, allowing Putin to assume the mantle of Russian dictator, and allowed Russia to once again stick its ugly head into foreign affairs in order to thwart every single American initiative. Putin also buddied up with Xi Jinping when convenient to form a block of totalitarian opposition to American support for freedom and democracy, those things being anathema to both Russia and Communist China. Former President Obama divided Jews and Palestinians (and Jews who swore by “never again” and Jews in Israel and the United States who followed his extremism so much so they hated themselves and pursued policies which could only lead to the eventual destruction of Israel). President Obama divided Christians and Muslims, by exhorting Islam and characterizing Christianity as the problem, creating deep conflicts in the US, and giving rise to a huge swath of discontented Americans who could no longer support his party, and went looking for something, anything else than his dogmatic American self-hatred, and many of whom ended up in Donald Trump’s lap (as much the fault of the weak, divided and hopelessly unfocused Republican Party, which could not even agree on debating rules, let alone policies for the American people or fielding a small group of leaders who could stand for election and actually get elected – debates turned into boxing matches which turned off most of the electorate).
Former President Obama made it a crime to be successful, to be comfortable, to have worked hard and earned a good living, he actually made it a crime to earn more than someone else – and the name for this is “socialism”. He made “taxing the rich” a mantra, and Obamacare was not as much about bringing 40 million Americans into the health care system as it was about decimating the health care apparatus for the other 300 million Americans. Obama’s own medical care for his family and him was not affected. The quality of health care dropped like a stone, waiting times tripled or were even ten times as long, insurance companies raised premiums because the system was untenable as proposed by the Great Divider. The end result was basically to sabotage the health care system, scrap it, and start from scratch, leaving hundreds of millions of Americans affected and fuming. The Great Divider achieved his aim of making sure success did not mean success – in his system, utterly opposite of the American system of working hard to get ahead, everyone was entitled to the same, even if the government had to pay to achieve that – socialism. To achieve this, Obama decimated the military to save billions for his socialist programs, trying to turn the US into Europe’s Mini-me.
The hatred demonstrated at the march in Charlottsville has been around for centuries. Nazis have been parading for more than 70 years. Is it disgusting? Yes. Is it allowed under the Constitution? Absolutely. And here is the problem. Former President Obama actually divided the nation in what it could and could not say, by imposing Political Correctness on every single utterance, except those things said by his followers.
Nazis can march. They have always had the right to march. Our Constitution protects all speech. But the last five years have seen a tendency to characterize any ideas that infringe on the ideas of the left as illegal speech. This is not true. Nazis can march. We can stand on the other side of the street with signs and shout slogans against their disgusting racist un-American principles. We cannot assault them, we cannot throw stones at them, we cannot shoot them. We can say they have no place here, but they are entitled to their disgusting thoughts under our Consitution. And the minute that stops. the minute that segments of speech become prohibited, that is the moment we descend into autocracy, and that is the bus that President Obama was driving for 8 years.
The Great Divider – he left office with the world and our beautiful country in chaos. He was a great speaker, a great motivator, but his policies and principles were a million miles further to the left than Trump’s are to the right. President Obama elected President Trump just as surely as if he voted for him. Obama created an enormous silent majority of people who believe like I set forth here, not like a dyed-in-the-wool leftist, like a socialist, or communist, all of whom believe, based on Obama’s teachings, that their droppings smell like roses. Unfortunately, President Trump and his White House Circus have not figured out yet how to run the country, and so long as the President has a twitter account it will be so. He does not realize that every single word he utters has a consequence, and that he needs advisers to advise him before he speaks, not after. The concept of “damage control” has become the primary function of day to day White House life.
It will take some time, maybe another 8-20 years to fix the mess that The Great Divider left for us, both here in America and abroad. There are many fires to put out, and many concepts to re-purpose. But I think the fires that The Great Divider started cannot be extinguished so easily, and they are not the fires of progress but the fires of destruction. Of course Barry would rather burn down the house than let it survive. That is the definition of extremism. And we are on fire now, and it is not a good fire, it is a totalitarian fire burning on the left…look at Venezuela, if you dare.
Strait Talk by Lee Longhwa 