Over breakfast, my husband and I were discussing President Obama’s Cairo speech, wherein he lectured the West about the freedom of Muslim women to wear the hijab (Obama called it a hajib; is either correct?), but said nothing about Muslim nations giving them the freedom to not wear the covering, if they choose.
“He speaks here about nations not having the right to tell other nations what to do,” my husband mused, “but does precisely the opposite with regards to Israel; he’s always telling Israel what they can and can’t do.”
“Obama should be called “President Opposite,” I told him. “He’s like a boy with his hand in the cookie jar saying, ‘I don’t want a cookie.’ He says he doesn’t want to run banks, but he keeps them under his control. He says he doesn’t want to run the auto industry, but he turned down a proposal that could have saved them. Obama doesn’t want to control your health care except he does. He was like this even as a candidate, when he said he would use public funds for his election campaign, then amassed more donations than anyone in history. We’re going to spend our way into prosperity, too. No earmarks in the porkulus bill? it’s loaded up! Opposite.
I am learning that he says the precise opposite of what he actually does, and so everything he says must be held up to a mirror and read backwards. Actions speak louder than “words, just words.”
My husband did not get the campaign reference to the “just words” quote; he doesn’t follow politics much. He probably won’t remember Obama laughing at Sarah Palin back when she said during the 2008 campaign,
“Al Qaida terrorists still plot to inflict catastrophic harm on America, and he’s worried that someone won’t read them their rights.”
He won’t remember, either, that Obama said in February:
“Now, do [enemy combatants and terrorists] deserve miranda rights? Do they deserve to be treated like a shoplifter down the block? Of course not.”
So, my husband won’t realize the hypocrisy in this news:
…the Obama Justice Department has quietly ordered FBI agents to read Miranda rights to high value detainees captured and held at U.S. detention facilities in Afghanistan, according a senior Republican on the House Intelligence Committee.
More:
“The administration has decided to change the focus to law enforcement. Here’s the problem. You have foreign fighters who are targeting US troops today – foreign fighters who go to another country to kill Americans. We capture them…and they’re reading them their rights – Mirandizing these foreign fighters,” says Representative Mike Rogers, who recently met with military, intelligence and law enforcement officials on a fact-finding trip to Afghanistan.
Rogers, a former FBI special agent and U.S. Army officer, says the Obama administration has not briefed Congress on the new policy. “I was a little surprised to find it taking place when I showed up because we hadn’t been briefed on it, I didn’t know about it. We’re still trying to get to the bottom of it, but it is clearly a part of this new global justice initiative.”
Bookworm – who is by no means a conspiracy-loving sort – is beginning to wonder why it is our president has no paper trail at all, (thank you, intellectually incurious press) and why the man who campaigned on “transparency” never makes anything public. Opposite. He’s the opposite man, Bookie. If he touts “transparency,” it’s not going to be about him or his administration. His “transparency” will be about someone else, some other entity. Those 600,000 jobs he’s going to deliver? Opposite. That middle-class tax cut? Opposite.
I suppose I should be grateful that the president seems almost almost allergic to the notion of liberty or to its nuances But perhaps I should worry that he uses the name of Jesus so very much, except when he’s having it covered up.
Perhaps Obama should meditate on these words of Christ’s:
“Let your ‘Yes’ mean ‘Yes,’ and your ‘No’ mean ‘No.’ Anything more is from the evil one.”
Matt. 5:37
It is a rare thing, these days, to believe what anyone else says. We are under the dictatorship of relativism, where more and more frequently, it is a rare thing, even, to believe what you believe, enough to say you believe it.
The Dictatorship of Relativism, the era of relativistic thinking, is perhaps what was needed for an “Opposite” man to be elected president of the most powerful nation in the world. When “truth” can be anything, why…there are no lies, anymore. There are just other “truths,” other “perspectives.”
But actions will still and always, speak louder than words, just words.
Meanwhile, I do hope this Domestic Terrorist gets read his Miranda rights.
Related:
Good News! Obama gives Terrorists Miranda!
Michelle Malkin: Next, they get Teddies
June 10th, 2009 | 5:26 pm | #1
“Bookworm – who is by no means a conspiracy-loving sort – is beginning to wonder why it is our president has no paper trail at all…”
The Democrats were unwilling to nominate anyone with a public record. Obama fit their requirements in this regard; his thin record of “accomplishment” and expression of views was easily concealable. (Well, except for Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayres, Tony Rezko, Alex Giannoulias, et alii.) So the GOP had a hard time gainsaying his campaign claims of moderation.
Obama himself said he was a blank canvas onto which others project their own assumptions and preferences. Why assume that the Democrats’ kingmakers saw him any other way?
June 10th, 2009 | 5:30 pm | #2
I am learning that he says the precise opposite of what he actually does
The really frightening part is how easily he gets away with it. You talk to Obama supporters, or even people inclined to like Obama (which still, if you believe the polls, is a lot of people), and they repeat his words as though they were the actual reality, when the reality is completely the opposite. If you point this out, you’re being contrarian/ shrill/ a sore loser/ mean/ negative… in short, just what Obama has told them you’re being.
I’m not a conspiracy theorist, either, but I’m starting to look around my neigbhorhood for fleshy pods.
June 10th, 2009 | 6:11 pm | #3
I am simply looking for your e-mail address. Is it on the new site anywhere? Thanks for your help.
Lindsey
[that's funny, I thought I'd put that icon back in place. Thanks for the heads up theanchoress@gmail.com]
June 10th, 2009 | 6:40 pm | #4
Thank you very much!!!
June 10th, 2009 | 6:58 pm | #5
President Janus it is.
We can spend to the point of near oblivion, but practice fiscal restraint. Bush was evil and deceptive for not factoring the costs of the War on Terror into the budget, but the new health care plan, that won’t be part of the Pay as You Go, either.
June 10th, 2009 | 7:05 pm | #6
Miranda rights. In wartime. If Obama had been in Roosevelt’s place, there would have been a JAG lawyer with every front-line platoon, so they’d be able to read the rights to captured German soldiers.
“… the freedom of Muslim women to wear the hijab…”
Orwell would have been astonished at how prescient he was. That’s the freedom of Hobson’s choice.
Somebody ought to publish “The Unauthorized Biography of Obama’s Food Taster”.
June 10th, 2009 | 7:07 pm | #7
The way I see “IT” is that we’re all good and bad and we must learn to balance ourselves which is not always easy especially if we are The President of a great Nation.
I recall when sinner vic had me on a teeter totter and I was just hanging on for dear life and he said, kiss me or I’ll give you the ride of your life. I probably would have kissed him like Judas kissed Jesus but I must thank him cause he mooned me and I knew when and where to draw the line.
What are you talking about Victor?
You tell me, I’ll tell you and then we’ll both know!
Peace
June 10th, 2009 | 8:58 pm | #8
I have been thinking we should call President Obama the 180 degree man. It captures neatly his actual policy and has a certain ring to it that is both fantastical and illusiory.
June 10th, 2009 | 9:19 pm | #9
When the puzzle pieces of reality don’t fit… there’s a conspiracy.
June 10th, 2009 | 10:43 pm | #10
This man is very scary!
June 10th, 2009 | 11:19 pm | #11
Supreme Leader Obama is trying to have it all ways (not merely both ways). Whenever, on a whim, he wants to treat terrorism as a law enforcement problem, he will. However, whenever he wants to shoot some pirates in the head or drop laser-guided missiles on people, he will do away with all those niceties of due process. In short, he is a lawless authoritarian.
June 11th, 2009 | 12:05 am | #12
BHO is like a man with no fingerprints…the disappearing Cheshire Cat in Obamaland…and we could go on and on drawing parallels to those stories because it feels as if we have fallen down a rabbit hole!
June 11th, 2009 | 12:18 am | #13
Miranda is just the beginning. What to do about identifying and legally obtaining, securing and maintaining the chain of custody of evidence? What to do about stopping and interviewing witnesses, let alone producing them to testify in an American Court? What to do about obtaining search warrants? What to do about being able to articulate the exact crime committed by the individual taken into custody on the battlefield with hundreds of other “offenders?” The Administration is well aware of these pitfalls.
This is a gold mine for attorneys and a monumental disaster in terms of process, wasted time and horrific expense for our justice system. Better that our military execute them on the spot on the battlefield.
At that point, the executioner personally knows the bad guy is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
June 11th, 2009 | 12:22 am | #14
My comment about execution on the battlefield is a bit harsh, but I mean to use it as a way to point out the futility of the policy. It will simply allow the guilty to go free on technicalities.
June 11th, 2009 | 12:36 am | #15
“Somebody ought to publish ‘The Unauthorized Biography of Obama’s Food Taster’.”
Someone ought to do one for TOTUS, too.
June 11th, 2009 | 4:40 am | #16
My dear anchoress, that is the best blog article i have ever read. It wasn’t long, but it was deadly.
Canada had the prototype to Obama. His name was Pierre Elliot Trudeau; the movement was known as Trudeaumania. Canadians were enticed into putting into Power an unknown leftist Law Professor who kissed, or was kissed by pretty women (the public kissing was reserved for that gender) who found him ’sexy.’ In his years in Power, he expanded the federal budget by sixfold. He never had had experience running really anything in the past, but he looked good on TV. He was the perfect prototype to Obama; Canadians are still told by their MSM that our Pierre was, well, ‘cosmopolitan.’ But the price of such liberal leg-tingling would be seen in the form of a Nanny State, an over-taxed nation of metrosexual whiners, complaining about some insult to gays and jihadists to the unelected Human Rights Commissions that could cost Ezra Levant an hundred grand just to defend himself in legal bills – for publishing the Danish Cartoons in his news-magazine, while the complaining mullahs didn’t have to pay a cent – it was Trudeau that brought about this HRC “Just Society.” Sound familiar?
June 11th, 2009 | 9:50 am | #17
[...] Published June 11, 2009 Obama 0 Comments I didn’t coin this, the Anchoress did. I just can’t argue with her. President Obama does the opposite of what he says. Time and [...]
June 11th, 2009 | 10:11 am | #18
I was just thinking about the Serpent’s fingerprints all over our society today, too. Our parish is working through Jeff Cavin’s Great Adventure Bible Study, and we read Judges this week. What really stuck with me was the last verse of Judges, which is just as true today as it was when it was first written. (I expound a bit on my political blog, here.)
It’s all quite disconcerting. I sometimes fear this Nanny/Big Brother State who infringes on my every move (unless it concerns killing the unborn, but that’s a whole different story).
June 11th, 2009 | 10:13 am | #19
By the way, am I the only one who notices that, though Lucas meant for Palpatine to mirror Bush, the power grab is much closer to what Obama is doing? I’m sure someone more talented could write on that, or someone with more time…
June 11th, 2009 | 3:35 pm | #20
[...] it would have been my choice had Obama himself chosen to stay in Europe longer to just loll around. Get in some good smokes. Take the ice train to [...]
June 11th, 2009 | 3:38 pm | #21
[...] Miranda Rights for Terrorists & President Opposite – The Anchoress [...]
June 11th, 2009 | 6:00 pm | #22
[...] is President Obama. But I am starting to wonder if he should not also, quite accurately, be called President Opposite. Increasingly one gets the sense that everything he does is accompanied by the hypnotic [...]
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