The itch that's destroying America

Joan Swirsky, RenewAmerica analyst

It's a funny thing about itches...the more you scratch, the more you itch. This is because scratching floods your system with histamine, which causes — itching! Oh, you can get rid of the itching with an over-the-counter medication, or go to the doctor for something stronger. But people with chronic itching conditions inevitably start to believe in Hell, and view itching as among the worst punishments on earth.

My title alluded to an itch — one itch — but this is really about the chronic, relentless, agitating, but also motivating itches that affect the entire left and also Obama's putative boss, George Soros.

Barack Obama's itch started — if any part of his biography is to be believed — with the Marxists who raised and mentored him, inculcating in him bedrock leftist doctrines that include a deep loathing of America and its natural and glorious outgrowth, individual freedom.

Obama's anti-Western itch continued during his schooling among Muslims in Indonesia, and was further inflamed by the far-left classmates he befriended in the American colleges he attended, with the religious leader whose anti-American and anti-Semitic "theology" he imbibed for over 20 years, and in the street-agitating career he chose as a community organizer.

In all cases, these influences provided Mr. Obama with ideas and philosophies that irritated his psyche, and to this day provoke and agitate him. They also spur him on to scratch those infuriating itches!

The usual suspects

Those irritants, those itches, include:

Most Americans — by any measure, the overwhelming majority — who Obama has labeled "bitter" folks who cling to their guns and religion. Scratch, scratch, scratch.

America's Founding Fathers — men like Washington, Adams, Hamilton, Jefferson, Franklin, et al. — whose monumental accomplishments are diminished, in the Marxist mind, to the size of a pea, but whose few (albeit serious) flaws are magnified to the size of a mountain. Scratch, scratch, scratch.

The U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights, which laid the foundation for the freest, most successful, most generous nation in all of recorded history, but to the Progressive's mentality, stop short of being perfectly "fair" to every entity from the delta smelt to the illegal alien. Scratch, scratch, scratch.

Capitalism — that surging engine of free markets and bountiful philanthropy, redeemer of poverty and misery, and route to worldwide comfort and security — if only the world were capable and smart enough to embrace it — considered by leftists the root of all evil. Not that they, themselves, don't lust for as much money as possible, the better to engage in conspicuous consumption and all manner of nouveau-riche indulgences. But hey, this is the condescending noblesse-oblige that always redounds to tasteless, classless, finger-wagging liberals. NOTE: Go to any search engine and type in Obama's vacations — frequency and expenses...and you'll see what I mean.

God — at least the God of Christians and Jews. It's bizarre — and inaccurate — that in his 2009 speech in Turkey, Obama declared that America is no longer a Christian country. According to a Pew study, nearly 80 percent of Americans are Christian, 1.6 percent Jews, and 0.6 percent Muslim. When he spoke at Georgetown University, Obama demanded that the symbol of Jesus be covered in black plywood. And have you noticed that when Obama refers to the Islamic prayer book, it is always "the Holy Koran," but he never refers to the Jewish or Christian bibles as holy? As businessman and possible presidential contender Herman Cain has said: When the president, "on purpose," leaves out of the Declaration of Independence the words "endowed by their Creator" — not once but three times! — "something is wrong." Scratch, scratch, scratch.

Jews. Obama's pronouncement that "Israel is suspicious of me" because his middle name is Hussein is so phony and calculated that it makes even uninformed people wince. In fact, JihadWatch.org points out the huge number of antagonists to Israel who staff Obama's offices. Again, the short list: Samantha Power, the National Security Council's Senior Director for Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights; Robert Malley, key foreign policy adviser; Zbigniew Brzezinski, foreign policy adviser; Rosa Brooks, advisor to the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy; Chuck Hagel, co-chair of the Intelligence Advisory Board...the list really does go on and on. Oops...didn't mean to omit U.S. Representative to the sinkhole on First Avenue (aka the United Nations) Susan Rice, who recently, as is her wont, threw Israel under the bus, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who recently stated that all of Israel's settlements (meaning homes built by Israelis on Israeli land) were "illegal" — not to mention her own deep ties to Saudi money and ole Bill's deep ties to Saudi money. Astonishingly, Israel-hater Michael Scheuer calls Obama both arrogant and racist. You can get the entire sordid list in Pamela Geller's and Robert Spencer's blockbuster book, The Post-American Presidency. One more thing: last week Kamal al-Halbawi became the first Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood leader to visit Tehran, where he promptly pronounced: "Every night when I go to bed, I pray to wake up the next day to see Israel is wiped off the map." Reaction from Obama and sidekicks: a deafening silence, which is not at all surprising given that Obama has appointed members of the Muslim Brotherhood to key posts in his "administration." Claw, claw, claw.

Racism, which Obama sees wherever he looks, even when it's not there! But this subject is clearly the driving force of his life, and the issue he is determined not to solve but to exact revenge for what he perceives — thanks to over five decades of Marxist indoctrination — as a simple formula: whitey = bad; people of color = good. Claw, claw, claw.

Yes, every time these issues flicker across Obama's consciousness, his rage quotient increases. It doesn't matter how many years elapse in which progress takes place, the rage still grows, which is how leftists react whenever their unrealistic, utopian dreams are not actualized. That rage acts like an unreachable itch, the kind that makes you tear at your skin until it bleeds, but without success. The itch remains.

The projection problem

To understand the intractability of the left's chronic itching condition, it's helpful to appreciate what drives them. Leftists are utopia-driven fantasists, basically fixated children who derive their dewy-eyed inspiration from the Communist-Manifesto-embracing lyrics of John Lennon's "Imagine" ("imagine there's no countries...no religion too...no possessions...imagine all the people living for today").

When the grown-ups among us disagree with them, leftists more often than not refuse to debate the issues based on objective reality or empirical fact, but instead hurl gratuitous insults, call names, and resort to that old psychological stand-by, projection — in other words, blaming other people for the very words and actions they, themselves, say and do.

For instance, when Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords got shot in the head, the left blamed the tragedy on the "incivility" of conservatives, while studiously ignoring the non-stop rudeness and crudeness emanating from their own ranks, including this gem, where a union intellectual (just kidding) threatens to break a tea-partier's neck.

If anyone throws a paper napkin out the window or dares to suggest we drill for oil, leftists castigate them for polluting the environment, while they consistently defile every event they attend by leaving mountains of trash that cost millions to clean up — for instance the 2009 "presidential" inauguration, the left's rally at the Lincoln Memorial in 2010, and now the temper-tantrum demonstrations at the State House in Wisconsin. Makes you wonder what kinds of homes these disrespectful slobs are raised in!

Syndicated columnist David Limbaugh has documented numerous examples of how Obama — the so-called post-racial "president" — uses projection (among other mechanisms) to address issues of race. We can skip Obama calling his grandmother "a typical white person" and accusing the Cambridge, MA, police department of "acting stupidly" when they arrested his pal, Harvard professor Henry Gates...that is old news. But here is the short list:

• Appointing Eric Holder as Attorney General, a man who has accused Americans of being "a nation of cowards" when it comes to race. Holder also dismissed a case against New Black Panther Party members for voter intimidation even though it had already been won, prompting former Justice lawyer, J. Christian Adams, to say that the case was dismissed based on the Justice Department's policy of not prosecuting such cases against blacks when they involve white victims. Holder explained his racist decisions before a House Appropriations subcommittee last week by admitting they were biased toward "my people." And all this time I thought that the Attorney General's "people" were all Americans, and not his own hand-picked subset.
  
  
• Holder's Justice Department — in both a racist and patronizing decision — also overruled a judgment to do away with party affiliation of candidates in local elections by the city of Kinston, N.C., insisting that black voters could not achieve civil rights without the Democrat Party.
  
  
• Just a year ago this month, the Obama regime filed a brief that supported racial preferences in university admissions. Now just how racist and patronizing and insulting can you get? How does Obama think the recipients of this largesse feel when they know their admissions have nothing to do with merit?
  
  
• Unrelated but equally if not more egregious is Holder's Justice Department — no doubt at the behest of his boss — ignoring the rulings of two federal judges, one on the issue of offshore drilling (for which the Obama "administration" has been held in contempt), and the other on Obamacare — in essence spitting on both the U.S. Congress and the U.S. Constitution — two institutions revered by the American public, but clearly reviled by the current occupant of the White House.
  
  

The rage of it all

Hard leftists like Obama comprise a negligible percentage of our electorate, but because they've all studied the Marxist Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals — or what writer James Lewis calls Rules for Psychopaths — they have memorized Rule #1: Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.

Lewis writes that Alinsky "called ordinary Americans 'the enemy,'" and quotes Alinski as saying "radicals have contemptuously rejected the values and way of life of the middle class. They have stigmatized it as materialistic, decadent, bourgeois, degenerate, imperialistic, war-mongering, brutalized and corrupt...They are right...."

Hello, all you middle-class people out there who voted for Obama, the Alinsky acolyte! Now you know why gas is getting more unaffordable every day, why inflation has reduced your purchases at the supermarket to beans and pasta, why your medical care is ten times worse than it was only two years ago, why you fear that your aging parents will be death-paneled by the nightmare of Obamacare, why your quality of life has devolved steadily since 2008. (By the way, for 50 straight weeks, the majority of Americans have supported repeal of this socialized-medicine scheme).

Is it not obvious by now that it's the middle class this cabal of Marxists is targeting for extinction?!

But what fuels the kind of rage that targets the backbone of our country, the middle-class men and women who work hard every day, sacrifice for their families, pay their bills and their sky-high taxes, believe in God, and love America?

What kind of rage motivates anyone to try to cripple and ultimately destroy the middle class, with the ultimate goal of making the entire country — except for the few oligarchs at the very top — dependent on government handouts?

It's the rage of failure — utter, abject, measurable, decades-long failure.

What liberal rage has wrought

Think about it. The left invented the welfare system, which, until it was overturned in 1994 by Republicans, destroyed black families, condemning generations of young people to grow up without fathers in their homes, which in turn resulted in millions of young men who might otherwise have enjoyed the bounty of the American Dream ending up uneducated, unemployed, in prison, or dead.

But liberals didn't give up. In their unending quest to create dependency and suffocate independence — the better to maintain power and control over their straggling flock — they insisted that tax-paying citizens throw more and more and more and more money at the problems they created, as we know to no avail.

The left also touted public education, again suggesting that the consistent, across-the-board failures it produced were products not of bad teaching or left-wing curricula but of — tada! — not enough money! So again they asked taxpayers to fund their failures with more and more and more and more money, but again to no avail.

In light of the crashing and tragic failures of these and other social experiments, the left thought up Affirmative Action to make the admission process for both schools and jobs "fair." Then they thought up Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to make access to home-ownership "fair."

Black conservatives have known for decades that these community-annihilating schemes were fraudulent and immoral, but just as today, they were given little air time or print space for their views and were consistently eclipsed by a largely leftist media. Erik Rush, the author of Negrophilia: From Slave Blocks to Pedestal ~ America's Racial Obsession, explains that "Black conservatism threatens the pre-eminence and perceptual validity of [the media's] ideology. If the Democratic Party loses a substantial portion of the black vote, they're done for — and they know it. When conservatives of color — black and otherwise — are unleashed, they will quickly become as ubiquitous as in other areas of endeavor. The result, however, will be a death blow to Progressivism in America."

In short, everything the left has tried to make things fairer for minority communities, to up their success quotient, has met with thundering failure, just as every leftist hero they glorify — in their Communist/Socialist/Maoist/Marxist/Leninist firmament — has failed.

That's where their rage comes from. It's the rage of failure. And then the unquenchable thirst — the unscratchable itch — for revenge. And that's what we're witnessing today, a veritable rampage of revenge on the successful middle class, on successful capitalism, on successful America.

It is these successes that the angry, vengeful left — Obama and his fulminating minions — resent and are working overtime to destroy. Instead of using the brains and energy God gave them to rethink their misguided direction, they have dug in deep, which I guess is understandable, given that a change of mind and heart would mean to them that everything they've believed their entire lives is dead wrong.

The problem with megalomaniacal, narcissistic, autocratic personalities is that just beneath the bluster is an eggshell-like fragility. Which is why if you tap them on the shoulder, they explode. If you challenge one of their policies, they lash out. If you take legal, constitutional steps to overturn the essentially Communistic legislation they've rammed through Congress, they devolve into street-fighting thugs.

The next time you see or hear a leftist holding forth, imagine the intractable, insanity-producing itching that's going on inside of him or her. Picture the internal inflammation, the redness, the cascade of histamine that's making the itching worse. It is this torturing condition that makes leftists so chronically dissatisfied, such doomsday addicts and incurable scratchaholics. If you itched like they do, you too would also be constantly on the borderline of insanity.

The We-the-People antidote

When Sarah Palin burst on the national scene in 2008, the left went into paroxysms of uncontrollable itching...even an armory of prednisone would not have touched their out-of-control symptoms! They recognized Palin as a mortal threat and attacked her — and, to their shame, her children — relentlessly. The net result was that Palin's popularity exploded and her influence grew exponentially as she directly influenced many of the races that resulted in the trouncing and bouncing of Democrats from Congress in the 2010 midterms.

When the Tea Party movement emerged in April 2009, the left again went into panic mode, summoning their equally-itching allies in the craven media to rail against and lie about those nervy advocates of small government and low taxes. The net result was drastic Democrat losses in the midterm elections.

When Arizona Governor Jan Brewer signed the Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act (SB 1070) in April 2010, which required — according to federal law — that all illegal aliens carry registration documents, and also cracked down on those hiring or sheltering illegal aliens, the left broke their fingernails because the scratching got so bad. The net result is that Brewer won 55 percent of votes for her second term, dozens of states are seeking to emulate her actions, and she is now being mentioned for a cabinet position in a future Republican administration.

When Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker interpreted the mandate he received from the state's voters to actually fulfill his campaign promises to rein in government spending and reduce the state's massive deficit, the left lost it completely. So inflamed did they become that they abandoned all semblance of modesty and started scratching themselves with abandon in front of national and international cameras. The net result was that Governor Walker prevailed, thereby saving his state multimillions and starting it on the road back to fiscal sanity.

When New York Congressman Peter King, Chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, instituted hearings on March 10th to explore the Islamic radicalization of American Muslims, the left bought thousands of forks so they could use them to scratch themselves silly while their fingernails were growing back from the Gov. Walker itching attack. Dozens of individuals and groups citing bogus "discrimination" of Muslims came out in numbers, practically scratching their own eyes out in frustration. The net result is that King has remained undaunted and un-intimidated, in spite of the death threats he has received. You can see his hearings on CSPAN3, or streamed live at http://www.c-span.org/Li.

These are only five out of dozens if not hundreds of examples of the immensely successful push-back that Republicans, centrist Democrats, and Independents have achieved in spite of the frighteningly fascistic nature of the leftists in power.

There is no force quite as powerful as We the People of the United States of America, as our Armed Forces have proven in the wars we've fought and as the grassroots have proven since January 2009.

We can't quit now! Our very country is at stake!

© Joan Swirsky