IBD:
“We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America,” candidate Barack Hussein Obama said on Oct. 30, 2008, just before his election as our 44th president. Was it just rhetoric?
Many no doubt thought it was, chalking it up to boilerplate election-eve hot air. But now are we seeing — some would say tragically — what he meant.
Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani is being raked over the coals for saying he doesn’t really believe the president loves America, and he probably didn’t do himself or the Republican any favors by saying that. Democrats seem to be having a field day with his blunt remark.
But can the case be made? If you love something, do you seek to fundamentally transform it while endlessly summarizing its flaws?
This is the president, after all, who sat for two decades in the pews of Trinity United Church, where the Rev. Jeremiah Wright ranted that we should be saying not “God Bless America” but “God damn America” and that 9/11 was just one of America’s chickens “coming home to roost.”
The record does not show Obama ever walked out in protest, but it is recorded that Wright married the Obamas, baptized their daughters and is credited with the title to Obama’s book, “The Audacity of Hope.”
This is the president who served on a board with Bill Ayers, the Weather Underground terrorist who helped launch Obama’s political career in 1996, when Illinois state Sen. Alice Palmer introduced him to some of the district’s influential liberals.
What was essentially Obama’s first fundraiser was held at the home of Ayers and his terrorist wife, the equally infamous Bernadine Dohrn.
And of course we all remember Michelle Obama’s remark during the 2008 campaign: “For the first time in my adult lifetime, I’m really proud of my country.” Before that, might we assume she was somewhat ashamed of what her husband would later apologize for?
It is Barack Obama who repeatedly injected race into his campaigns, starting with a private meeting of donors in San Francisco on April 6, 2008, at which he famously told them of “small towns in Pennsylvania” and the Midwest beset by job losses in a changing economy.
