Obama like Big Brother attempts to separate us from our roots, our traditions, our beliefs. That’s the gist of Robert Costa’s post on the NRO interview with Newt Gingrich who is touting his newly hosted documentary, Rediscovering God in America II: Our Heritage. As we know Newt is an historian of the first order and also an intelligent observer of contemporary America. Our Ryan Costella recently traveled with Gingrich on his trip to China and I’m sure he will support both observations.
In any case the interview is well worth the read in full but here is a taste:
Though it may be about the past, Gingrich says the documentary’s themes are tied directly to the present. He says he worries that the “core definition of America” — that citizens are “endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights” — is “under assault, both in the academic and news-media communities, as well as in the courts.”
Gingrich says he has major concerns about American culture, and “the degree to which it is becoming an anti-religious culture.”
“Ironically, in some ways, it is becoming a culture in which it is more acceptable for schools to teach about Islam than to teach about Christianity,” says Gingrich. “If you think about that, it verges on the bizarre.”
“We are the only society I know of that asserts that power comes directly from God to you, that you are sovereign, and that you loan power to the government,” says Gingrich. “A point that Reagan always used to make was that the Constitution begins with ‘we the people,’ and not ‘we the bureaucrats,’ or ‘we the lawyers,’ or ‘we the judges,’ or ‘we the politicians,’ but ‘we the people.’ If you eliminate that, and you make generalizations about where power comes from, then of course we can trust the judges, and of course we can trust the politicians.”
If power in America continues to move away from the people, Gingrich says that the country risks “actually eliminating the uniqueness that has made America an exceptional nation. You begin drift into a world where nothing is stable.”
“The modern Left is essentially proto-totalitarian,” says Gingrich. President Obama, he says, is “an authentic representative of the intelligentsia. I think he likes Reveille for Radicals for a reason; he likes William Ayers for a reason. He didn’t notice 20 years of sermons for a reason.”
But is Obama that different from liberals like George McGovern? “Oh, yeah,” says Gingrich. “My sense is with McGovern, unequivocally, that he was a man from a different world. McGovern was a man who had grown up in pre–World War II America. And he grew up in South Dakota. Obama really grew up in the world of the modern American intelligentsia — he is a person of the Left. The minute you accept that, you understand almost everything.”
Obama, Gingrich adds, “is a radical in the sense that the victory of those values would mean the end of American civilization as we know it.” President Reagan, in contrast, “was a radical within the American tradition. He was almost like the Jacksonian uprising against the establishment. Reagan represented a fundamental break with the dominant system of government for the last 60 years. He didn’t quite pull it off. He managed to defeat the Soviet Empire and managed to renew the energy of entrepreneurial America, but he did not in fact change the underlying crisis.”
And Americans didn’t vote for Obama’s brand of radicalism. In 2008, Americans, says Gingrich, “were voting for the end of Bush. They were voting to have no taxes raised on anybody making under $250,000, and they were voting for a tax cut for 95 percent of the American people. Go back and read what Obama campaigned on. This is a con job on the scale of Madoff.”
The Obama ego, self confidence, and solipsism fit neatly into Newt’s observations as does the pitiful state of our liberal, leftist ruling class. Man is the measure of all! What a shame for this once great nation.
Tom Motherway