Sounding Obama Alarm Bells NOW

Catastrophe Awaits - Let's Pray to Avoid It

On the eve of the Obama inauguration, Brushfires wants to be on record with our deep concerns about Barack Obama as President of the United States. Before any specific decisions, before the all-out media spin to support everything he does or doesn’t do, before criticism of Obama is defined as racism, per se, we want to spell out the reasons Americans should be praying as never before in support of their country and the office of the Presidency. We hope Obama will grow into that office and be worthy of its capacity for goodness and greatness; and we hope our concerns will prove unfounded. But the time to sound warnings and to call for prayer is now.

Let’s start by dispensing with the obvious: the media will pull out all the stops to foster a monumental lifting of the nation’s spirit—even the world’s—with their breathless accounts of the significance of the inauguration of Barack Obama as President. They may succeed, briefly, because on the surface of humanity’s long struggle with skin color as a barrier to individual progress and societal harmony, his election is an uplifting story. But it will be a short-lived high, because the real significance of Obama’s election has nothing to do with overcoming racial prejudice.

We agree with Sean Hannity’s belief that the vast majority of Americans are not racist and have not been for many, many years. Of course there are pockets of ignorance and bigotry—which will exist as long as the human condition exists—but racism has not been a dominant or even significant influence in US leadership circles of government or business for quite some time. Instead, the disaster of the 2008 election is that the liberal, mainstream, ‘drive-by’ media fomented in the electorate an unnecessary preoccupation with proving itself free of racism by electing Obama. In the process, they led the nation to elect a man whose inexperience and utter lack of demonstrated character and qualifications for the presidency—regardless of the color of his skin—were deliberately hidden from view, and barred from inquiry and investigation. Never has the country elected a President who is in so far over his head. A white-skinned candidate with this level of inexperience and lack of demonstrated character and qualifications would not have garnered even 25% of the vote. The nation and everyone in it is in great danger as a result.

ECHOES of Brushfires: "Barack Obama is a Novice - and it shows" from Toby Harnden in the Daily Telegraph, February 8, 2009.

ECHOES, Part 2 of Brushfires: "Murphy's Law, the Peter Principle, and Barack Obama" from Kyle-Anne Shiver in American Thinker, February 11, 2009.

ECHOES, Part 3 of Brushfires: "The Obamateur Hour" from Mark Steyn in National Review Online, February 14, 2009.

ECHOES, Part 4 of Brushfires: "A Rookie President" from Thomas Sowell.in townhall.com on March 31, 2009.

[Though it's only April 3 as we write this, we'll stop updating with ECHOES. There are far too many to keep track of; we just thought Thomas Sowell's piece was too good to omit.]

Faith is Critical to Presidential Leadership

We’ve not seen any evidence to suggest Obama has any real faith in anything besides himself and the ‘correctness’ of the liberal worldview. This worldview is the essence of arrogant, godless intellectualism, and it will lead directly to disaster because at its core, it is a denial of the existence of truth. It’s the hubris that says if you’ll just give we smart people enough power over you average Joe’s and Jane’s, we’ll engineer everything so you can have a fantasy pain-free life with no problem that government won’t reach in and fix for you. In the process, we’ll redefine truth any way we want to—what makes you happy; what is good; what government is for—and you’ll learn to accept it and love it.

We can try to comfort ourselves about Obama’s faith by the ritual invocation that no one really knows what’s in another’s heart—and so maybe there’s more there than we’ve been able to discern. But our take is that this is a man who believes he has a superior intellect that permits him to condescend to people of faith, and to faith itself. For him, religion is a political prop—an affiliation that is useful in some settings and not so useful in others—but certainly of no transcendent or day-to-day importance. And whatever he may have heard or not heard in Jeremiah Wright’s church, one doesn’t have to listen to Wright’s rants very long to know that Wright’s preaching has little or nothing to do with Christianity. So when Obama spoke in an unguarded moment of religious people as ‘bitter’ and clinging to religion to cover for their biases and shortcomings, we had a sense he was speaking honestly as to his actual view of religion. Which says a great deal also about his view of God.

In this intellectual, disdainful view of God and religion and faith, we think, sadly, that Obama is alone among US Presidents. For all the wishful media invocations of parallels between Obama and Lincoln, on matters of humility and faith, we think there could not be a larger gulf between the two. In fact, of America’s greatest Presidents—such as Washington, Lincoln and Reagan—their honest, humble and genuine faith was probably the single most important quality they had in common. We believe it was the single most important factor in giving them the vision and courage and conviction that led to such transformative progress in their eras.

There is nothing that can take the place of honest, humble and genuine faith and trust in God, and heartfelt prayer for His guidance in times of crisis. Godless arrogance leads to a catastrophic fall, guaranteed. When that arrogance is in the White House and essentially all around the Cabinet, major trouble lies ahead. Ben Shapiro agrees.

Facing Evil Requires Courage and Discernment that Obama Has Not Shown

In our view, Obama’s rise in the political world did not evidence much in the way of courage or toughness under real fire. By engaging in Chicago-style political hardball and dirty tricks, he ran essentially unopposed in winning the Illinois state position and the U.S. Senate office. In the 2008 Presidential election, he had the 100% lockstep support of the mainstream media, fawning over his personality, and steadfastly refusing to investigate or even consider his shortcomings. But none of this matters a hill of beans in the real world of exercising presidential authority and responsibility. In particular, the leaders of America’s enemies are not remotely swayed by US media fantasies; they can see right through the Obama façade to a man who is not ready for the weight of real responsibility, and will run from it or believe he can talk and rationalize it away without consequence. It won’t take any courage to propose legislation in step with the left-wing bias of the media and the Democrat majorities in Congress, but will take courage to stand up to evil. Obama has never demonstrated real courage. (The idea that it took great courage in 2008 to run for President in ‘racist America’ is a fiction created by a media determined to make us believe that America in 2008 was the same as America in the 1950’s. This is nonsense; he could never have come close to winning if America were truly a racist country.)

Even more important, Obama’s understanding of evil seems narrowly confined to his notion, stated in one of his two autobiographies, of ‘white folks’ greed [running] a world in need’. This is not brilliant discernment; it is babe-in-the-woods foolishness and naiveté. The foremost evil facing the world today is Islamofacism’s war against Judeo-Christian civilization, and it has nothing to do with skin color. It is plainly a war about religion. Intellectuals believe all religion is silly, and therefore ultimately they, the smart people, can find a way to make the silly little religious people in the world calm down and live together harmoniously. But the reality is that it is religion, and humanity’s quest to understand God—not politics, not economics, and not global warming—that over generations really shape human progress or human backtracking. When Obama shows signs of really believing there is moral equivalence and therefore a livable compromise between Hamas and Israel, he is truly in the intellectual’s realm of foolishness. Hamas’ guiding ideology and theology are evil, period, and evil must be confronted and defeated, not legitimized and accommodated.

Islamofascism and other forms of evil will confront America as evil always has, and it will not be about skin color. It will be because those who embrace evil hate the idea of individual freedom and responsibility under one God. Obama doesn’t know what evil is, but will seek along with the media to redefine evil as good, or appease it and accommodate it and announce peace in our time. But this won’t work because it isn’t true and can’t be done. The danger from America’s enemies will escalate in the face of this naiveté, and if that danger materializes, 9/11 will be small in comparison.

The Man has NO Experience as an Executive

There are mid-level managers at mid-size companies who have made more executive decisions than Barack Obama. A state representative and a US Senator are not executive decision-makers; they are political ‘positioners’ who jockey for soundbites and occasionally vote, while retaining ability to explain with hindsight why the vote was right, or if it was wrong, why it was based on bad information or improper influences. There is no real accountability; and the mild political heat stirred by a particular vote is not even remotely comparable to the pressure that follows an actual decision that affects millions. We think Obama the intellectual may have convinced himself that anyone can do this job and it’s no big deal; if so, it only confirms just how clueless and arrogant he is about the magnitude of this difference. His pattern of voting ‘present’ in the Illinois legislature may have been a shrewd way to avoid a voting record that could be criticized, but it doesn’t indicate the strength of character that is actually required of a chief executive.

Obama’s supporters are casting their imaginations on him when they argue that winning a political campaign is akin to presidential leadership and decision-making. The office of the Presidency is not a game where cleverness at posturing and evading responsibility has any value or even relevance. The buck stops there.

There is also NO indication that Obama knows the first thing about managing and delegating. This leads to the treatment of the Cabinet as political tree decorations, with the appointments themselves representing all that needs to be done in terms of effective governing. The tree looks pretty, so isn’t that enough? Most of his appointees show zero evidence of managerial experience and success. Most are the simplest of political hacks or personal acolytes. This is a recipe for guaranteed mismanagement and out-of-control agency activity; chaos, in other words.

In step with Brushfires, Karl Rove later expanded on the details of Obama's mismanagement in process.

We can unfortunately but readily envision Obama being physically and mentally exhausted very early in his term, from the sheer weight of executive level responsibility that he has never before had to carry, and from the absence of any real faith to lean on.

It’s Time for Prayer

America and its place in the world and in human history are so important to humanity’s well-being—we can only want the best for whoever holds the office of the Presidency. But we have entered an Orwellian era where the media and the state are essentially one, and the media’s investment in Obama’s success will mean that no doublespeak will be too brazen to use in attributing all good in the world to Obama, and all that is not good to Bush—or to simply take something that is not good, and redefine it as good. The fact that his agenda and proposals and worldview are antithetical to the American foundational principle of individual freedom under God—and can only fail, and fail spectacularly—will never be mentioned or even considered. He will be said to be so brilliant and messianic that if things don’t work, it’s because we’re all too racist to understand how brilliant and messianic he is.

The good news is that despite our Pravda-like media’s determination to tell us we love Obama and want a godless, liberal USA, the fact is that we don’t. People inherently love and desire freedom under God; they know when they are being driven away from it; and they don’t like or trust leaders who push in this direction. They already sense Obama is doing this, which is why we are seeing such a persistent lack of confidence in economic recovery, and such a sense of fear and trepidation in our communities.

So there is going to be a short honeymoon for Obama, and if he starts off with a radical leftist anti-Christian agenda of government/Obama-as-the-new-god, he is going to find out just how far out of sync he is with the heart and soul of America. The nervous discontent that is already being felt at a grassroots level around the country could soon swell into a muffled and then open uproar of ‘who the hell is this guy?’ and ‘what have we done?’ that may rock the country and the world. The silver lining in all this is that the media will be incapable of stopping it because the media will have no idea why it is happening, and will keep telling itself it isn’t happening.

But enough of this… Brushfires is not in the business of forecasting doom; it desires to stir the brushfires of freedom in the minds of men that will lead them to avoid doom—in this case by actively and pointedly and tirelessly resisting the entire manipulated godless liberal groupthink that propelled Obama.

[As an aside, George Soros is the leader of this groupthink; he is the man who bought the Democrat Party, and is driving his virulently anti-Christian "open society" agenda. We think Soros truly believes Obama is his puppet, and will implement Soros’ radical agenda. Perhaps this will be the subject of a future Brushfires essay.]

Brushfires wants America and the world and everyone in it, including the new President, to avoid doom. We have a democracy and freedom of speech—so use them. (We actually have the power to put the left-wing media out of business, if we’ll just stop buying their newspapers and watching their TV programming.)

We also have prayer. All of Soros’ money—and all of the liberal money in the world—can’t outlaw or stop the effectiveness of prayer. Through prayer, we can work to see the necessary change—either in Obama’s faith and worldview, or in the blocking or failure of anti-God, anti-Christian, anti-freedom proposals. But we had better be alert to the magnitude of consecrated prayer that is urgently needed.

Paul Gable

Posted January 19, 2009