Andrew C. McCarthy on Barack Obama

This is quoted from The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America. Anything I have emphasized is in bold.

It is vital to bear in mind that the president is an Alinskyite, so steeped in the ideology of the seminal community organizer that he became a top instructor in Alinskyite tactics for other up-and-coming radicals. Alinskyites are fifth-columnists. They have, in substance, the same goals as open revolutionaries: overthrowing the existing free-market republic and replacing it with a radical's utopia. That is why Obama could befriend such unrepentant former terrorists as Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn and take inspiration from Jeremiah Wright, a black-liberation theologist.

Alinskyites, though, are more sophisticated, patient, and practical. They bore in, hollowing out the system from within, taking on the appearance and argot of the heartland. Their single, animating goal is to overthrow the capitalist social order, which they claim to see as racist, corrupt, exploitative, imperialist, etc. Everything else--including the cultivation of like-minded Islamists--is negotiable. They reserve the right to take any position on any matter, to say anything at any time, based on the ebb and flow of popular opinion. That keeps them politically viable while they radically transform society. Transform it into what, they haven't worked out in great detail...except that it will be perfect, communal, equal, and just.

This shallow nihilism makes alliances easy to strike...and, when necessary, to shove allies under the bus. If Islam needed pushing aside for a time to secure power, Islam would be pushed aside. Yet the president's Islamic heritage is deeply rooted. As we shall see, to the extent Obama had a religious faith in his formative years, it was Islam. That doesn't make him a Muslim, much less the Muslim "Manchurian Candidate" of anti-Obama paranoia. There is no record of his ever having professed Islam as an adult (profession of the faith being the first pillar of Islam). While much about Obama remains a mystery--despite the 850 pages' worth of autobiography and policy prescriptions he had published by the age of forty-five--the religion he publicly professes is Christianity, and there is no reason to doubt him on that score.

No reason because his formal religion is nearly irrelevant. The faith to which Obama actually clings is neocommunism. It is a leftism of the most insidious kind: secular and uncompromising in its rejection of bourgeois values, but feverishly spiritual in its zeal to tear down the existing order, under the banner of its all-purpose rally-cry: "social justice."

Neocommunists need not adhere to a formal religion. Instead, they tend to infuse causes like environmentalism, privacy, and secularism with religious fervor. For most leftists, though, religion is a useful tool. It is never a straitjacket because neocommunists consider themselves no more bound by the strictures of creed than by the constraints of tradition.

Thus is Obama the Christian the most uncompromisingly pro-abortion president ever to hold the office, just as he was the senate's most vigorous supporter of abortion rights--and, before that, while serving in the Illinois legislature, an apologist for infanticide as the remedy for botched abortions in which the baby inconveniently survived. In America, where it has become declasse to question, much less examine, a person's fidelity to his avowed religious creed, formal religion is endlessly malleable. This is a tremendous asset for the necocommunist. Formal religion lends a patina of transcendence to his attack on the existing order. And any religion will do if its principles can be marshaled--however faithlessly--into a rationale for dissolving American constitutional democracy.

This explains how Obama can purport to have found Christ through the baleful Jeremiah Wright. It explains how he could sit comfortably for twenty years in Rev. Wright's Trinity Church in Chicago, soaking up the fiery pastor's Black Liberation Theology, a pseudo-Christian Marxism colored in anti-Semitic hues, defined most clearly by its anti-Americanism. Sure, when Wright became an electoral issue for Obama, the candidate cast him aside, much as he had cast his Islamic heritage aside, pretending to have been absent or wearing earplugs during the Rev's more bombastic Sundays. But the truth was always there for anyone willing to see it: The grievance-mongering, race-obsessed Obama had imbibed enough to find in Wright the inspiration for his second bestselling me-book, The Audacity of Hope, and to parrot such standard Wright tropes as: "White folks' greed runs a world in need." It should have surprised no one when Obama staffed his White House with race-baiting Marxists, including "Green Jobs Czar" Van Jones, an admitted communist who, when not claiming 9/11 was somehow both America's just desert and an inside job, brooded about "white polluters" conspiring to "steer poison into the people of color communities."

Neocommunism is leftism liberated by the collapse of the Soviet Union. Many naively believed the Soviet demise would be a cautionary tale for the left, a warning against the hubris of big-government schemes to perfect man and society. The opposite, instead, is the case. David Horowitz, today's most eloquent and incisive observer of the revolutionary left, the movement in which he was raised and on which he turned so fiercely, offers a perfect diagnosis:

Far from instilling humility in progressives..., the collapse of socialism has revived their self-righteousness and renergized their assault on the democratic West. The disappearance of the Soviet block has had only one consequence of note. It has lifted the burden of having to defend...an indefensible regime. Because the utopian vision is no longer anchored in the reality of an actually existing socialist state, the left can now indulge its nihilistic agendas without restraint.

Nihilism is the key. Today's hard left is defined by what it is against: the United States, free-market capitalism, and any foreign policy premised on defending American interests or promoting individual liberty. Only this part of the agenda is concrete, leaving neocommunism elastic enough to strike alliances with any movement that shares it. What neocommunists are for, by contrast, is a set of abstractions--"social justice," "equality," "redistributive rights," the "rule of law," and, of course, "our values." The details of those can be worked out later, once the more pressing imperative of undoing the existing order has been realized.

This explains Obama's ruinous spending, the trillions in debt, far surpassing in just a few months the total debt accumulated since the nation's founding. Not content with that accomplishment, the president is rushing headlong to bankrupt the treasury permanently with additional trillions for nationalized healthcare and crushing tax increases--which experience assures us will reduce total revenues available for redistribution--including a "cap and trade" energy scheme that will nullify industry's capacity to generate value. Critics from the right and what used to be the mainstream left are dumbfounded, wondering aloud whether the new administration is in over its head. This drastically underestimates Obama. Quite the opposite of overwhelmed, he has methodically done exactly what was predicted by those who took the time, during the 2008 campaign, to study his radical background: exploiting the new administration's wind-at-its-back period to crush the capitalist system under an enormous commitment of future dollars, a commitment that will be nigh impossible to roll back once the public is finally roused from its slumbers. This "change" is not designed to create a new system. Its purpose is to destroy the old one. What comes next is negotiable.

The more closely you look at Palpatine's background, history,and associations, the more impossible it becomes to believe that he is just an economically naive, run-of-the-mill Democrat. He really did teach Alinskyite tactics, and Saul Alinsky really did teach his students to do just as Mr. McCarthy describes.

It is no longer possible to give Palpatine and rather a lot of his fellow Democrats the benefit of the doubt.