Obama's Rule Book - Learn About Them

Now finally you can get answers on why you have always felt those strange feelings about how odd the Obama presidency started out running so fast and hard to drive the whole country into the toilet financially while growing government intrusion everywhere.

My book review contains excerpted materials directly from "Barack Obama's Rules For Revolution" book by David Horowitz, conservative speaker and writer, to illustrate some of the factual content. The author's extensive research, easy to understand terminology and storyline provide an informative overview to help understand who, what, why and where Saul Alinsky's "Rules For Radicals" book fits into President Obama's life as a community organizer and Alinsky's's agenda in planning our country's future.  It also tells how Hillery Clinton met Saul Alinsky personally, wrote her college thesis on his book, "Rules for Radicals", and has followed his program herself - you really can't make this stuff up!  

Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals is first of all a comradely critique of the sixties’ New Left. What bothers Alinsky about these radicals is their honesty - which may have been their only Rules For Radicals by Saul Alinskyredeeming feature. While the Communist Left pretended to be Jeffersonian Democrats and “progressives” and formed “popular fronts” with liberals, the New Left radicals disdained these deceptions, regarding them as a display of weakness. To distinguish themselves from such popular front politics, sixties radicals said they were revolutionaries and proud of it. New Left radicals despised and attacked liberals and created riots at Democratic Party conventions. Their typical slogans were “Up against the wall motherf-ker” and “Off the pig”, telegraphing exactly how they felt about those who opposed them.

The most basic principle of Alinsky’s advice to radicals is to lie to their opponents and disarm them by pretending to be moderates and liberals. Deception is the radical’s most important weapon, and it has been a prominent one since the end of the sixties. Racial arsonists such as Al Sharpton and Jeremiah Wright pose as civil rights activists; anti-American radicals such as Bill Ayers pose as patriotic progressives; socialists pose as liberals. The mark of their success is reflected in the fact that conservatives collude in the deception and call them liberals as well.

Alinsky writes of the “revolutionary force” of the 1960s that its activists were “one moment reminiscent of the idealistic early Christians yet they also urge violence and cry ‘Burn the system down!’. They have no illusions about the system, but plenty of Stokley Carmichael & Alinskyillusions about the way to change our world. It is to this point that I have written this book. I once had a Trotskyist mentor named Isaac Deutscher who was critical of the New Left in the same way Alinsky is. He said that American radicals such as Stokely Carmichael were “radical” in form and “moderate” in content; they spoke loudly but carried a small stick. Instead, he said, they should be moderate in form and radical in content. New Left radicals despised and attacked liberals 'world as it is’ and ‘the world as it should be’. And he said that, all too often, we accept the distance between the two and we settle for the 'world as it is’, even when it doesn’t reflect our values and aspirations.”

In the same vein, Alinsky chides New Leftists for being “rhetorical radicals” rather than “realistic.” New Leftists scared people but didn’t have the power to back up their threats. The most important thing for radicals, according to Alinsky, is to 'deal with the world as it is' and not 'as they might want it to be'. Alinsky added, "As an organizer I start from the world as it is, not as I would like it to be. That we accept the 'world as it is' does not in any sense weaken our desire to change it into what we believe the 'world should be' - it is necessary to begin where 'the world is' if we are going to change it to what we think the 'world should be'. That means working in the system."

This is the passage from which Michelle Obama selected lines to sum up her husband’s vision at the Democratic convention that nominated him for president in August 2008. Referring to a visit he made to Chicago neighborhoods, she said:

“And Barack stood up that day, and he spoke words that have stayed with me ever since. He talked about ‘the world as it is’ and ‘the world as it should be.’ And he said that, all too often, we accept the distance between the two and we settle for the world as it is, even when it doesn’t reflect our values and aspirations.” She concluded: “All of us are driven by a simple belief that the world as it is just won’t do - that we have an obligation to fight for the world as it should be."

The Alinsky Strategy: Boring From Within

Conservatives think of war as a metaphor when applied to politics. For radicals, the war is real. That is why when partisans of the left go into battle, they set out to destroy their opponents by stigmatizing them as “racists,” “sexists,” “homophobes” and “Islamophobes.” It is also why they so often pretend to be what they are not (“liberals” for example) and rarely say what they mean. Deception for them is a military tactic in a war that is designed to eliminate the enemy.

CLICK ON PICTURE TO READ BOOK ONLINEBarack Obama’s Rules for Revolution

The Alinsky Model

David Horowitz

“We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” - Barack Obama, Election Eve, 2008.

Barack Obama is an enigma, a mystery in a puzzle. He won the 2008 presidential election claiming to be a moderate and wanting to bring Americans together and govern from the center. But since he took office, his actions have been far from moderate. He has apologized to foreign dictators abroad for sins he alleges his own country committed, by-passed congress through executive orders and appointed other radicals to top White House posts. He has used the economic crisis to take over whole industries and has nationalized the health care system. In his first term in office, these actions had already made his presidency one of the most polarizing in history. The second term has only exacerbated more problems in both national and international affairs.

The online book has a small footprint due to its "pocketbook size", only fifty-six pages, so it is a quick read.  It does offer, still, a complete overview which will not disappoint the reader of Saul Alinsky's book.  (CLICK ON THE PICTURE TO READ THE BOOK ONLINE) 

Copyright 2009

David Horowitz Freedom Center

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