THE ENTERPRISE—"BEWITCHED, BOTHERED AND BEWILDERED"

THE ENTERPRISE—"BEWITCHED, BOTHERED AND BEWILDERED"

"BEWITCHED, BOTHERED AND BEWILDERED"
This was the name of a decades old popular song.  It pretty well sums up how most rational thinkers feel about the probably Democratic candidate for President, Barack Obama.  This week's lengthy edition of THE ENTERPRISE will present the views of several intelligent, thoughtful people who share this viewpoint.

PLEASE PASS THIS ON... to everyone you correspond with via email...
Amidst all the media exuberance over Barack Obama "winning" the Democratic nomination for President, there are some aspects of Obama that have been overlooked and/or given far too little attention by the mainstream media.  

My content this week consists mostly of 4 articles, three of them by distinguished men of Obama's own race--part of the 10% or so that aren't entranced by him. 
If you will read these and pass this email on (like a chain letter), we can probably raise awareness of how the man and the image just don't match.

A recent WSJ article by Juan Williams, yet another person of Obama's own (minority) race stated a few important points too.  In summary they pointed out that Obama's words and behaviors don't match.  First Rev. Wright was his spiritual mentor--but then, he as like an uncle to him, a member of an angry older generation.  In 20 years of attending his church Obama never heard any of this kind of rhetoric.  WHAT?  Why go to church if you don't hear anything?  What gives here?

And Obama's bi-partisan conciliatory campaign rhetoric flies completely in the face of a voting record in his short time as a US Senator that is the MOST LIBERAL in the Senate--to the left of John Kerry, Ted Kennedy, et. al.  And surely the fact that Tony Rezko, a Chicago "businessman" paid twice market value for the lot next to the house Obama's wanted to buy, had nothing to do with Obama's ability to pay below market value for the house.  Of course not.

Kimberly Strassel writing for the WSJ's Potomac Watch says it well:  "We've learned that the Obama campaign's main message still has no clothes.  The senator has had nearly a year-and-a-half to explain how his new brand of politics and bipartisanship would work; the optimists among us are still waiting."

BUT THESE FACTS DON'T MATTER UNLESS OR UNTIL SOMEONE CAN BREAK OBAMA'S MAGIC SPELL ON THE YOUTH WHO ADMIRE THIS NEW POLITICAL "ROCK STAR" CANDIDATE & HIS ELITIST WIFE.

READ ON...
------------------------------
Not So Fast, Barack
 
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Tuesday, June 03, 2008 4:20 PM PT
 
Decision '08: Barack Obama is changing churches in hopes of changing the subject long enough to slip into the White House. But it won't change what he believes. Who'll pin him down?

A careful reading of the transcript of Obama's press conference over the weekend reveals that he neither denounced his church nor permanently quit it. He twice left open the door to rejoining Trinity United Church of Christ after the election.  He said he and his wife merely decided "it was going to be very difficult to continue our membership there so long as I was running for president."
 
Typical of the coverage of this candidate, nobody in the press followed up with tough questions. Nobody bothered to parse his words.  They just lobbed more softballs. "Do you feel like your faith and your church come under fire, more rapid fire, than other candidates in this presidential election?" asked one reporter. "How do you feel about that?"
 
We already know how Obama feels. He's frosted that this paper and others outside the mainstream liberal media exposed his militantly Afro-centric, anti-American church and preacher.  "I didn't anticipate my fairly conventional Christian faith being subjected to such challenge," he said, with a straight face. So now he hopes quitting the church will put the controversy behind him.  "We don't want to have to answer for everything that's stated in a church," Obama complained. "We also don't want a church subjected to the scrutiny that a presidential campaign legitimately undergoes."
 
In other words, don't ask any more questions. The media seem content to honor his wishes, repeating the professional malpractice they committed in 1992 with another of their favorites, Bill Clinton.  But there's nothing "conventional" about Obama's church. It adheres to a radical doctrine that marries black nationalism with Christianity and believes white America is the centrum of evil in the world. It not only deserves further scrutiny, it screams for it.
 
Voters deserve to see specifically where there is and isn't alignment between a church doctrine that preaches hatred of America and a candidate who wants to "change" America.  Black militant James Cone is the father of this doctrine, known as "black liberation theology." Obama's preacher and mentor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, has said, "I do not in any way disagree with James Cone," now a professor in New York.  Obama's church uses Cone's 1969 book, "Black Theology and Black Power," as a second Bible. Wright keeps asking his critics if they've ever read Cone's books. The real question is whether Obama has ever read them.

Nobody has asked him. 
Or whether he's taught Sunday school classes on Cone's theology. Never asked, never answered.  Cone believes Jesus Christ was black, that blacks are the true chosen people and that Africa is the Promised Land. Does Obama share these unconventional views?  Cone also believes that the white man is the "devil" and the white church in America the "anti-Christ." Does Obama hold these views, as well?  Both Wright and Cone have argued for reparations for blacks. Where does Obama stand on this issue? We don't know. He's not talking.
 
Obama, a lawyer, is very clever about crafting his denials. He claims he never heard Wright's splenetic sermons while sitting in "the pews."  What about in the church's two overflow rooms in the bowels of the building, where latecomers sit on folding chairs and watch a TV broadcast of the service? Did he ever hear his sermons via streaming Internet broadcasts or via the DVDs sold at the church gift shop? We don't know.

Nobody has asked him. 
Cone's protege is Dwight Hopkins, who teaches black theology classes at Obama's church that include harangues against "U.S. capitalism's oppressive character." Did Obama ever hear Hopkins speak? Did he ever take a class taught by him?  What about all the kooky conspiracy theories Obama's preachers and "fellow Trinitarians" believe? Does Obama, too, buy that the U.S. government cooked up AIDS and crack to destroy blacks?  These are just a few of the questions left unasked by the media and unanswered by the presumptive Democratic nominee for president.
 
The media failed to adequately vet Bill Clinton, and look what the electorate got. History is repeating itself now with Obama, and the country could end up with something far worse.

------------------------------
Beyond The Rhetoric And Resignations
 
By THOMAS SOWELL | Posted Tuesday, June 03, 2008 4:30 PM PT
 
It is amazing how seriously the media are taking Sen. Barack Obama's latest statement about the latest racist rant from the pulpit of the church he has attended for 20 years.  But neither that statement nor the apology for his rant by Father Michael Pfleger really matters, one way or the other. Nor does Sen. Obama's belated resignation from that church.
 
For any politician, what matters is not his election-year rhetoric, or an election-year resignation from a church, but the track record of that politician in the years before the election.  Yet so many people are so fascinated by Obama's rhetorical skills that they don't care about his voting record in the U.S. Senate, in the Illinois state Senate, the causes that he has chosen to promote over the years, or the candidate's personal character and values, as revealed by his actions and associations.
 
Despite clever spin from Obama's supporters about avoiding "guilt by association," much more is involved than casual association with people like Jeremiah Wright and Father Pfleger.  In addition to giving $20,000 of his own money to Jeremiah Wright, as a state senator, Obama directed $225,000 of the Illinois taxpayers' money for programs run by Father Pfleger. In the U.S. Senate, Obama earmarked $100,000 in federal tax money for Father Pfleger's work.  Giving someone more than 300 grand is not just some tenuous, coincidental association.
 
Are Barack Obama's views shown by what he says during an election year or by what he has been doing for decades before?  The complete contrast between Obama's election-year image as a healer of divisions and his whole career of promoting far-left grievance politics, in association with America-haters like Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers, are brushed aside by his supporters, who talk about getting back to "the real issues."  There is nothing more real than a man's character and values. The track record of what he has actually done is far more real than anything he says, however elegantly he says it.
 
There is no office where the character and values of the person in that office matter more than the office of president of the United States. He holds the destiny of 300 million Americans in his hands and the fate of generations yet unborn.  That was never more true than today, with Iran moving ever closer to a nuclear bomb, while the United Nations wrings its hands and Congress fritters away its time on things from steroids in sports to earmarks for pet projects back home.
 
Does anyone seriously consider what it would mean for Iran to have nuclear weapons? They already are supplying terrorists with the means of killing people in other countries, including killing American troops in Iraq.  Sen. Obama has been downplaying the Iran threat, saying that they are just "a small country," not like the Soviet Union. The people who flew planes into the World Trade Center were an even smaller group than the Iranian government.
 
Half a dozen terrorists like that with nuclear weapons would be a bigger danger than the Soviet Union ever was, because the Soviet leaders were not suicide bombers. They could be deterred by the threat of what we would do to Moscow if they attacked New York. You cannot deter suicidal fanatics. They are not going to stop unless they get stopped. Rhetoric is not going to do it.
 
Not only Sen. Obama, but too many other Americans, seem to have no concept of the seething hatred that can lead people to destroy their own lives in order to lash out at others. But terrorists have been doing this repeatedly, not only in Iraq and in Israel, but in other countries around the world — including the United States on 9/11.  Have we already forgotten how the Palestinians were cheering in the streets over the news of the attack on the World Trade Center? How videotapes of sadistic beheadings of innocent people by terrorists have found an eager audience in the Middle East?
 
Are we going to leave our children hostages to hate-filled sadists with nuclear weapons? Are we to rely on Barack Obama's rhetoric to protect them?
 Sen. Obama's foreign policy seems to be somewhere between Rodney King's "Can't we just get along?" and Alfred E. Neuman's "What, me worry?"

FROM THE CANDIDATE WHO REFUSES TO GO TO IRAQ--WHY?  MIGHT HE LEARN THE TRUTH INSTEAD OF HIS PROCLAMATIONS?

------------------------------
A Black Columnist on Obama
 
Ken Blackwell - Columnist for the New York Sun

It's an amazing time to be alive in America . We're in a year of firsts in this presidential election: the first viable woman candidate; the first viable African-American candidate; and, a candidate who is the first front-running freedom fighter over 70. The next president of America will be a first.

We won't truly be in an election of firsts, however, until we judge every candidate by where they stand. We won't arrive where we should be until we no longer talk about skin color or gender. Now that Barack Obama steps to the front of the Democratic field, we need to stop talking about his race, and start talking about his policies and his politics.

The reality is this: Though the Democrats will not have a nominee until August, unless Hillary Clinton drops out, Mr. Obama is now the front-runner, and its time America takes a closer and deeper look at him. Some pundits are calling him the next John F. Kennedy. He's not. He's the next George McGovern. And it's time people learned the facts.

Because the truth is that Mr. Obama is the single most liberal senator in the entire U.S. Senate. He is more liberal than Ted Kennedy, Bernie Sanders, or Mrs. Clinton.  Never in my life have I seen a presidential front-runner whose rhetoric is so far removed from his record. Walter Mondale promised to raise our taxes, and he lost. George McGovern promised military weakness, and he lost. Michael Dukakis promised a liberal domestic agenda, and he lost.

Yet Mr. Obama is promising all those things, and he's not behind in the polls. Why? Because the press has dealt with him as if he were in a beauty pageant.  Mr. Obama talks about getting past party, getting past red and blue, to lead the United States of America . But let's look at the more defined strokes of who he is underneath this superficial 'beauty.'

Start with national security, since the president's most important duties are as commander-in-chief. Over the summer, Mr. Obama talked about invading Pakistan, a nation armed with nuclear weapons; meeting without preconditions with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who vows to destroy Israel and create another Holocaust; and Kim Jong II, who is murdering and starving his people, but emphasized that the nuclear option was off the table against terrorists - something no president has ever taken off the table since we created nuclear weapons in the 1940s. Even Democrats who have worked in national security condemned all of those remarks. Mr. Obama is a foreign-policy novice who would put our national security at risk.

Next, consider economic policy. For all its faults, our health care system is the strongest in the world. And free trade agreements, created by Bill Clinton as well as President Bush, have made more goods more affordable so that even people of modest means can live a life that no one imagined a generation ago. Yet Mr. Obama promises to raise taxes on 'the rich.' How to fix Social Security? Raise taxes. How to fix Medicare? Raise taxes. Prescription drugs? Raise taxes. Free college? Raise taxes. Socialize medicine? Raise taxes. His solution to everything is to have government take it over. Big Brother on steroids, funded by your paycheck.

Finally, look at the social issues. Mr. Obama had the audacity to open a stadium rally by saying, 'All praise and glory to God!' but says that Christian leaders speaking for life and marriage have 'hijacked' - hijacked - Christianity. He is pro-partial birth abortion, and promises to appoint Supreme Court justices who will rule any restriction on it unconstitutional. He espouses the abortion views of Margaret Sanger, one of the early advocates of racial cleansing. His spiritual leaders endorse homosexual marriage, and he is moving in that direction. In Illinois , he refused to vote against an existing statewide ban on all handguns in the state. These are radical left, Hollywood , and San Francisco values, not Middle America values.

The real Mr. Obama is an easy target for the general election. Mrs. Clinton is a far tougher opponent. But Mr. Obama could win if people don't start looking behind his veneer and flowery speeches. His vision of 'bringing America together' means saying that those who disagree with his agenda for America are hijackers or warmongers. Uniting the country means adopting his liberal agenda and abandoning any conflicting beliefs.  

But right now everyone is talking about how eloquent of a speaker he is and - yes - they're talking about his race. Those should never be the factors on which we base our choice for president. Mr. Obama's radical agenda sets him far outside the American mainstream, to the left of Mrs. Clinton.

It's time to talk about the real Barack Obama. In an election of firsts, let's first make sure we elect the person who is qualified to be our president in a nuclear age during a global civilization war.

                            Ken Blackwell was Secretary of State of OHIO and a gubernatorial candidate in 2006.
--------------------------
Only One Choice In Face Of Nuclear Terror

By THOMAS SOWELL | Posted Thursday, June 05, 2008 4:30 PM PT

Now that the two parties have finally selected their presidential candidates, it is time for a sober — if not grim — assessment of where we are.  Not since 1972 have we been presented with two such painfully inadequate candidates. When election day came that year, I could not bring myself to vote for either George McGovern or Richard Nixon. I stayed home.

This year, none of us has that luxury. While all sorts of gushing is going on in the media, and posturing is going on in politics, the biggest national sponsor of terrorism in the world — Iran — is moving step by step toward building a nuclear bomb. The point when they get that bomb will be the point of no return. Iran's nuclear bomb will be the terrorists' nuclear bomb — and they can make 9/11 look like child's play.

All the options that are on the table right now will be swept off the table forever. Our choices will be to give in to whatever the terrorists demand — however outrageous those demands might be — or to risk seeing American cities start disappearing in radioactive mushroom clouds.  All the things we are preoccupied with today, from the price of gasoline to health care to global warming, will suddenly no longer matter.

Just as the Nazis did not find it enough to simply kill people in their concentration camps, but had to humiliate and dehumanize them first, so we can expect terrorists with nuclear weapons to both humiliate us and force us to humiliate ourselves, before they finally start killing us.  They have already telegraphed their punches with their sadistic beheadings of innocent civilians, and with the popularity of videotapes of those beheadings in the Middle East.

Danger Ahead
They have already telegraphed their intention to dictate to us with such things as Osama bin Laden's threats to target those places in America that did not vote the way he prescribed in the 2004 elections. He could not back up those threats then, but he may be able to in a very few years.  The terrorists have given us as clear a picture of what they are all about as Adolf Hitler and the Nazis did during the 1930s — and our "leaders" and intelligentsia have ignored the warning signs as resolutely as the "leaders" and intelligentsia of the 1930s downplayed the dangers of Hitler.  We are much like people drifting down the Niagara River, oblivious to the waterfalls up ahead. Once we go over those falls, we cannot come back up again.

What does this have to do with today's presidential candidates? It has everything to do with them.  One of these candidates will determine what we are going to do to stop Iran from going nuclear — or whether we are going to do anything other than talk, as Western leaders talked in the 1930s.

There is one big difference between now and the 1930s. Although the West's lack of military preparedness and its political irresolution led to three solid years of devastating losses to Nazi Germany and imperial Japan, nevertheless when all the West's industrial and military forces were finally mobilized, the democracies were able to turn the tide and win decisively.

But you cannot lose a nuclear war for three years and then come back. You cannot even sustain the will to resist for three years when you are first broken down morally by threats and then devastated by nuclear bombs.

Can't Wait
Our one window of opportunity to prevent this will occur within the term of whoever becomes president of the United States in 2009.  At a time like this, we don't have the luxury of waiting for our ideal candidate or of indulging our emotions by voting for a third party candidate to show our displeasure — at the cost of putting someone in the White House who isn't up to the job.

Sen. John McCain has been criticized in this column many times. But, when all is said and done, he has not spent decades aiding and abetting people who hate America.  On the contrary, he has paid a huge price for resisting our enemies, even when they held him prisoner and tortured him. The choice between him and Barack Obama should be a no-brainer.

------------------------
DID ANY OF THIS HIT HOME?
If you are a fan of Obama's, all of this probably was dismissed as "partisan" and somehow wrong.  But these are not all "partisan rants."  They are reasoned analysis.  Think hard about who you want as the leader of the USA--your future and that of your children and grandchildren depend on this decision.

I hope some of It opened your eyes to the truth about the man whose soaring rhetoric somehow isn't matched by his  earthly actions.  The question is, do we want a President who will tell us what we want to hear in soaring rhetoric and then do something different--either naive, misguided or with a definite approach that he learned during the past 20 years of his life in a militant black church and as part of a city's corrupt political system?   I don't. 

WANT ANOTHER SCARY THOUGHT?
According to The Book of Revelations the antichrist will be a man, in his 40s, of Muslim descent, who will deceive the nations with persuasive language, and have a massive Christlike appeal.  The prophecy says that people will flock to him and he will promise false hope and world peace, and when he is in power, will destroy everything.   (Have you read any of the fictional "LEFT BEHIND" series of novels based on the book of Revelations?)

Does this sound scarily familiar?  Form your own opinions--logical, factual or spiritual--or ignore it at your own risk

SURE, THE ELECTION IS STILL 5 MONTHS AWAY--BUT THE FACTS--& CANDIDATES--AREN'T LIKELY TO CHANGE
Whether you like John McCain or not, he is a man of proven courage, of character, and one who does what he thinks is best for America -- and takes on all comers face to face --he doesn't equivocate and dissemble.  Perhaps this turns off some people, but I'd rather have a brave man of known strengths (and weaknesses) as my President, instead of one who says one thing, but for his entire life, has done something diametrically different.   Leopards don't change their spots, whatever color they are.

Best, John

"I wake up every morning determined both to change the world and have one hell of a good time.  It makes planning the day a little difficult."  --E. B. White