Thursday at CPAC, Cliff Kincaid, head of the conservative group Accuracy in Media, suggested that President Obama is a Communist, and that we’re not sure he was born in the United States.
A few months ago, the “controversy” over Obama’s citizenship seemed confined to a small community of right-wing weirdos, the kind of people who might question whether NASA really landed anyone on the Moon. But the applause in the room at CPAC suggests a large number of conservatives attending CPAC believe Obama is a not a natural born citizen. I’m curious as to what the larger conservative community really believes on this point.
Click here to read the Factcheck.org article on Obama’s birth certificate.
Is Obama a communist? As far as I know, he is not advocating total government control of all social and economic activity, or single-party rule. But a few weeks ago Dick Morris wrote the following at Real Clear Politics:
2009-2010 will rank with 1913-14, 1933-36, 1964-65 and 1981-82 as years that will permanently change our government, politics and lives. Just as the stars were aligned for Wilson, Roosevelt, Johnson and Reagan, they are aligned for Obama. Simply put, we enter his administration as free-enterprise, market-dominated, laissez-faire America. We will shortly become like Germany, France, the United Kingdom, or Sweden — a socialist democracy in which the government dominates the economy, determines private-sector priorities and offers a vastly expanded range of services to many more people at much higher taxes.
Morris may be correct, but a socialist democracy is not nearly the same thing as the totalitarian government that ran the Soviet Union. Obama appears to be initiating sweeping changes that could fundamentally alter our nation’s economic engine for decades to come, perhaps not for the better. Thus, Obama needs to be criticized and challenged—that’s part of how a constitutional republic is designed to work. So Kincaid and other conservatives would do better to use more precise language when criticizing Obama’s policies, and not enter the Bermuda Triangle to question his citizenship. A more level-headed approach to political dialog will improve their credibility with the voters and strengthen their position enough to force Democrats to work out compromises on points of disagreement. Looking back at our nation’s history, it has often turned out that compromises between opposing political factions have proved extemely beneficial to the country.
HT: Think Progress
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