Real problem with Obama is that citizens of the global superpower twice elected him to office-Mark Steyn

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It helped that Obama ran unopposed.

2/20/15, "O Beautiful, For Specious Guys...," Mark Steyn

"The real problem with Obama is that the citizens of the global superpower twice elected him to office. Yet one way to look at the current "leader of the free world" is this: If he were working for the other side, what exactly would he be doing differently?...

"Violent extremism" may have nothing to do with Islam, yet Obama's summit on "violent extremism" was oddly preoccupied with Islam, to the extent of according it a special deference:

A Muslim prayer was recited at the start of the second day of the White House summit on "Countering Violent Extremism," but no other religious text was presented during the portion of the event that was open to the press.
Imam Sheikh Sa'ad Musse Roble, president of the World Peace Organization in Minneapolis, Minn., recited a "verse from the Quran" following remarks by Obama administration officials and Democratic members of Congress.

But hey, what's so odd about that? "Islam has been woven into the fabric of our country since its founding," says the President. You might think that Islam has been entirely irrelevant to "the fabric of our country" for its first two centuries, and you might further think that Islam, being self-segregating, tends not to weave itself into anybody's fabric but instead tends to unravel it - as it's doing in, say, Copenhagen, where 500 mourners turned up for the funeral of an ISIS-supporting Jew-hating anti-free-speech murderer.

But President Obama knows better than you. So he organized a summit dedicated to creating and promoting a self-invented phantom enemy. Conveniently enough, the main problem with "violent extremists" is that its principal victims are Muslims. No, no, I don't mean the thousands of Muslims being slaughtered, beheaded, burned alive, raped, sold into sex slavery, etc, etc, in Syria, Iraq, Libya, Nigeria, and so on. The Muslims most at risk are right here in America. Just ask Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson:

We in the administration and the government should give voice to the plight of Muslims living in this country and the discrimination that they face. And so I personally have committed to speak out about the situation that very often people in the Muslim community in this country face. The fact that there are 1.6 billion Muslims in the world and the Islamic faith is one about peace and brotherhood.

I opposed the creation of the Department of Homeland Security on the basic Thatcherite principle that if you create a government bureaucracy in order to deal with a problem you'll never be rid of the problem. But I underestimated the creativity of our rulers: The DHS was set up because 19 Muslims flew planes into skyscrapers and killed thousands of people. Thirteen years later, the head of the DHS thinks his department's priority should be to "give voice to the plight of Muslims" who have the misfortune to live in America.

How about "the plight of Muslims" who live in Muslim countries? 

As I wrote in 2006 in the very prologue of the highly prescient America Alone:

In the 2005 rankings of Freedom House's survey of personal liberty and democracy around the world, five of the eight countries with the lowest "freedom" score were Muslim. Of the 46 Muslim majority nations in the world, only three were free. Of the 16 nations in which Muslims form between 20 and 50 per cent of the population, only another three were ranked as free: Benin, Serbia and Montenegro, and Suriname. It will be interesting to follow France's fortunes as a fourth member of that group.

The "plight" of Muslim communities in America and the west is that they enjoy freedoms they could never dream of back in Somalia or Syria or anywhere else - but that they value those freedoms less than they value the pre-eminence of Islam....

If you were a "moderate Muslim", what would you make of an extraordinary week in which the global superpower has piled up a mountain of preposterous, mutually contradictory official lies all designed to flatter you: Islam has been part of the fabric of America since the 18th century, and yet the plight of Muslims in this country and the discrimination they face has never been worse. We are at war with the mysterious shadowy Empire of Violentia-Extremistan, which is nothing to do with Islam, yet necessitates the saying of Muslim prayers - and Muslim prayers only - at official US government events....

I have quoted before my old friend Theodore Dalrymple on the purposes of lies in totalitarian societies:

In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control.

We are at war with a depraved enemy, but we cannot be allowed to assert our moral superiority even to head-choppers, rapists, slavers and immolators. Thus the priority of Barack ("Hey, how 'bout those Crusades?") Obama has been to undermine our sense of probity, and make us not merely equivalent to but worse than our enemies. That was the purpose of this last week of Official Lies."

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Comment: Obama won because he ran unopposed. Republican candidates in 2008 and 2012 had no intention of beating him or any democrat. The GOP Establishment would elect Obama again in 2016 if they could:

12/12/13: "If RINOs are not replaced, and if a genuine opposition party is not established, nothing can save the Constitution-or the representative democracy and freedoms that are the heritage of this country." (end of article)

12/12/2013, "The Nuclear Option: Misplaced Conservative Outrage," American Thinker, by Lester Jackson

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