Gary Bauer yesterday told members of the Campaign for Working Families that President Obama is going to try to “portray our candidate as an extremist” and “exploit religious bigotry” by attacking the religion of his Republican opponent:
I have been saying for months now that this election is going to be brutal. Obama can't run on "hope and change" again. It's going to be fear and smear in 2012. This week we got another indication of where the Obama campaign is headed.
In California this week, Obama's chief political strategist David Axelrod defended Barack Obama's former pastor, Jeremiah Wright. According to the report, Axelrod dismissed the 2008 Wright controversy by saying it was nothing more than "ninety seconds of vitriol plucked from thirty years of sermons by some enterprising opposition researcher."
Really? Why then did Barack Obama feel it was necessary to throw Wright under the bus and repudiate his outrageous statements and blatant racism? David Axelrod is not a dumb man, so why on earth is he opening up this can of worms now?
I truly hope I am wrong, but I fear this is a signal by the Obama campaign to their media allies that they are prepared to make a candidate's faith an issue in this year's campaign. They know going down this road will invite questions about Wright. That is why Axelrod may have pre-emptively signaled it was really "much ado about nothing" and that the Obama campaign is prepared to refight that battle.
Why? Because no matter the faith of the GOP nominee, radical secularists will portray our candidate as an extremist, and left-wing activists are prepared to exploit religious bigotry in an attempt to get Obama reelected. In fact, the polling data already indicates that for all the hype about religious intolerance on the right, there is more bigotry on the left!
Pre-emptively lashing out at the Obama campaign for fomenting “religious bigotry” about “the faith of the GOP nominee,” with zero evidence to substantiate his claim, may sound more credible if Bauer himself in 2010 hadn’t stoked fears about President Obama’s beliefs in a column Understanding Obama’s Islamophilia by claiming that he is part of a secularist-Islamist movement motivated by “their common disdain for Christianity” that seeks to herald in the “destruction of the Judeo-Christian philosophy that is the foundation of Western civilization”:
Obama’s left-wing progressivism varies with Islamism on many issues. But their adherents find common cause in a common enemy: the Judeo-Christian worldview at the heart of Western democracy.
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Progressives and Islamists are indeed on the same side. Their common disdain for Christianity explains why left-wing judges in America find any inkling of Christianity in the public square unconstitutional, while Islamist judges in the Middle East deem it executable.
Their common view that life is expendable explains the left’s embrace abortion-on-demand and why the Islamists don’t hesitate to deploy their own children for homicide bombings.
Their common totalitarian impulse explains why each group has as its governing objective to render its subjects entirely dependent on the state for everything in their lives, from education to healthcare.
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This alliance explains why the Obama State Department is spending taxpayer money to send Rauf to the Middle East on a goodwill tour. And it is why it will spend nearly $6 million of your tax money to restore, among other things, mosques and minaret around the world.
There’s a reason Obama won the Muslim American vote by more than nine to one, and why it is suspected that he received millions of dollars in contributions to his presidential campaign from Muslims abroad. It’s not because Muslims thought Obama would fight for gays in the military. It’s because they knew he’d treat Israel as more of an annoyance than an ally, and because he’d be sure to diminish America’s stature in the world. And they were right.
More fundamentally, left-wing progressivism and Islamism both hold that religious belief and reason are at odds. Of course, Islamists embrace faith and reject reason, while progressives value reason to the exclusion of faith. Eventually these groups may have to address their basic differences.
But there will be time for that later. For now, there’s a greater goal to achieve: the annihilation of moral accountability and individual liberty and the destruction of the Judeo-Christian philosophy that is the foundation of Western civilization.
