Obama’s Politburo

Van Jones may have resigned, but he really wasn’t the problem.  Mr. Jones was merely the most visible symptom of a much larger issue.

The real question is why does Barack Obama surround himself with so many people who are on the radical fringe of American politics?  Van Jones is a self-avowed Marxist.  But many of the advisors and “czars” the President has around him are either outright socialists or have written or spoken in such a profoundly radical way over the years they would be considered persona non grata in any other administration, Republican or Democrat.  The answer to this question must be found in Obama’s political roots and reveals much about his inner thinking.

In 1995 Barack Obama published his first autobiography, Dreams from My Father:  A Story of Race and Inheritance.  In it he wrote about his years at Occidental College in California.

To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully.  The more politically active black students.  The foreign students.  The Chicanos.  The Marxist Professors and the structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets.  We smoked cigarettes and wore leather jackets.  At night, in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Franz Fanon, Eurocentrism,and patriarchy.  When we ground out our cigarettes in the hallway carpet or set our stereos so loud that the walls began to shake, we were resisting bourgeois society’s stifling constraints.  We weren’t indifferent or careless or insecure.  We were alienated.

Are we to believe that when Obama left college and went to Chicago he suddenly stopped choosing his “friends carefully.”  Or is it more likely he continued to choose the same friends he had before.  Hence his association with Bill Ayers, and the infamous Rev. Wright among others.

The President from his college days through today in the White House has continued to be associated with the most radical elements of the American body politic.  Domestic terrorists, black liberation theology, socialists, Marxists, radical environmentalists and any other wacko fringe element the left wing could conjure.  He is most comfortable with them.  And they are comfortable with him.

The President ran a moderate, center left, campaign and came in to office with the good wishes of the vast majority of the American people.  Even those who voted against him did the very American thing of acknowledging he was their President, wishing him well, and hoping he would have a successful term.  But he hasn’t governed as he ran.  Once elected, his radical leftist roots quickly emerged and he presented the most socialist agenda America has ever seen from a sitting President.  Of course there were voices warning us early on.

Sean Hannity drew vast amounts of criticism during the campaign for harping on Obama’s connections to radicals.  Time has proven him right.  Rush Limbaugh has roundly castigated for truthfully saying he hoped Obama failed if his agenda was the radical socialist agenda he expected.  Rush doesn’t sound so bad now, does he?

The American people have had the scales fall from their eyes.  They now realize they elected a radical in moderate’s clothing and they have begun the backlash.  You can see it in the polls, you can see it at the TEA parties, you can see it at the townhall meetings.  The President will speak to the nation on Wednesday before a joint session of Congress in a desperate bid to save his health care dream when a few short weeks ago he thought he had it in the bag.

Van Jones is gone and others may follow as the conservative blogs and talk radio begin to focus on others around the President.  But they aren’t the point.  They wouldn’t be there if they had to be approved by Congress.  They wouldn’t be there if the President wasn’t comfortable with their views.

The sad fact is Van Jones isn’t gone because he had the most despicable, radical, views.  The President was fine with those.  He is gone because he became a liablility to the larger goal of “transforming America.”