'Barack Hussein Obama': The Name Should Have Been Enough
Some of what I deal with here may be found in a 2012 discussion of the subject, but in the light of current events, especially regarding Joe Biden’s devastating presidency, a revisit and update may be opportune. There are historical dynamics when the present, despite certain cosmetic changes, is still and essentially the past.
What do we know of Joe Biden? We know he is a venal liar and a professional grifter. We know he is neither an honorable nor productive man. He does not appear to have done an honest day’s labor in his life. From his early days in government, he was a nasty piece of work, and today he is a puddle of neural sludge.
We know that Biden is not in charge of his party or domestic and foreign policy. We know he is a mere puppet whose strings are pulled by others. Secretary of State Antony Blinken seems to be in ventriloquial command, but Blinken is a career politician of little demonstrable intelligence — “never the sharpest penny in the pantry,” says Stephen Green — though he can play a blues guitar. It is, rather, pretty much an open secret who the master puppeteer seems to be, a man who continues to reside in Washington and who is currently serving his third if unacknowledged term as president.
We have to be clear and resolute about this and not worry about the political invective and cries of bigotry that will be hurled our way for breaking the taboos of political correctness. A man with a spotty record, a controversial digital birth certificate, and a career, academic and otherwise, in which some critical documentation seems to be missing or sealed, should never have been a viable candidate for the presidency. No less disturbing, a man with a name like Barrack Hussein Obama with its Islamic vibe and dramatic otherness—forget Barry Soetoro—should never have been vaulted into the Oval Office without prior scrutiny.
Names like George Washington, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George Bush, and a host of others, whether one likes their bearers or not, ring American. One might say that disastrous presidents like Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, Woodrow Wilson, or Jimmy Carter hid behind their commonplace names, which covered for their dubious administrations.
A name like Barack Hussein Obama is different. It is, in effect, a kind of aptronym. It tells you right up front that the name does not ring American, no more than the man who goes by that name seems American in his conduct, programs, legislative acts, executive orders, and overall convictions. A man whose belief in American exceptionalism is oddly qualified as something no different from belief in British or Greek exceptionalism is not presidential material. It tells you that the policies pursued by the bearer of this name would not likely benefit the nation.
A man who acts like a sleazy colporteur, deceitfully claiming in his Cairo speech that “Islam has always been a part of America's story” and that “since our founding, American Muslims have enriched the United States” is living up to his name. Of course, Islam did figure in the history of the United States — one thinks of the Barbary Wars against Muslim pirates prosecuted by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison between 1801 and 1815. (Today’s Yemeni rebels’ disruption of Red Sea shipping traffic is successfully repeating the Barbary practice in the absence of a Jefferson, Madison — or Trump.)
In the final analysis, the name tells you that even if Obama had been born in Camden or Trenton or Gobbler’s Knob, he remains a foreigner in the American landscape. It did not require the acumen of Punxsutawney Phil to predict the political weather and a prolonged winter. The shadow was visibly there. Obama may have been the president of the United States, but he was not an “American” president. He may have been a native-born American but he was a foreigner all the same, an expatriate of sorts by lineage, disposition, training and sentiment.
As Roger Kimball wrote, the most serious question about Obama is “who he really is and where his true allegiance lies.” The answer to that question was evident early in his career to any observant person. As Kimball continued, “Tens or hundreds of thousands of people will suffer because of our naïveté and Barack Obama’s malevolent stupidity.”
Linda Goudsmit in RenewAmerica regards Obama as “a wolf in presidential clothing,” a soft-sell, gifted con man advancing the creed of Fabian socialism, a man who engaged in an “eight year campaign to weaken America and prepare it for socialism — the prerequisite for America’s participation in one world government.” She argues persuasively that “Obama’s Leftist Culture War is a well-coordinated well-funded war of deception designed to shatter America from the inside… Foolish Americans, conned by Obama's ‘presidential’ appearance and behavior, haven't realized that THEY are the enemy.”
The fact is that “Barack Obama was a radical crack-smoking leftist tutored by his radical socialist mentors Saul Alinsky, Bill Ayers, and economists Cloward & Piven,” not to mention the rabid communist poet Frank Marshall Davis, an apparent father figure. Moreover, in dedicating the New Smithsonian African American Museum, Obama quoted black poet Langston Hughes’ “I, too, am American.” Obama did not quote Hughes’ paean to Stalin and the Soviet Union:
Goodbye,
Christ Jesus Lord God Jehova,
Beat it on away from here now.
Make way for a new guy with no religion at all—
A real guy named
Marx Communist Lenin Peasant Stalin Worker ME—
I said, ME!
Nor did Obama mention that Hughes proposed changing the initialism USA to USSA.
Goudsmit makes an important point. Obama was all “appearance,” he “cut his hair, put on a suit, and blended in,” appealing to the sympathetic nature of the American electorate as well as to the radical enthusiasms of miseducated youth and always impressionable women. His name, which should have been a dead giveaway, became an asset.
For many, the name was exotic, signifying a kind of transformation of the customary, the core of Obama’s schtick which brought us to the brink of the social, political, and economic derelictions we are experiencing now. For me, the name was a warning sign, which led me to examine the man and what was known of his conduct. I was not wrong in my prognosis.
Matt Margolis and Mark Noonan conclude their 2018 volume "The Worst President in History" by reminding the next generation that they “will have to pay for the mistake of electing Obama twice,” that they will need to “reject the regressive, failed ideas still promulgated by the left,” and that they must learn to place “a higher value on America’s deeper principles.” They will also have to polish up their smarts.
The American Almanach de Gotha is peppered with problematic presidents — which is human, all too human — but none sports anything remotely like so bizarre and alien a monicker as “Barack Hussein Obama,” a name which requires more looking into before being accepted at face value. At the very least, in an American context that goes back to the Mayflower and a European-origin colonial nation, it is a name that needs to be stopped and frisked before being allowed to pass.
That was my reaction when I began reading about the blazing comet that everyone was raving about. This had nothing to do with the color of his skin but with the shallow flamboyance of his utterances and the singularity of the name. After just a few days of research it became abundantly clear that, if ever catapulted to higher office, the carrier of that name would lead America into terra incognita, into what would be for America the foreign realm of — in Goudsmit’s words — “a pro-collectivist disinformation campaign, ideological censorship, propagandized educational curricula, and partisan hiring and firing practices particularly at the university level.” It was also clear that the man who sat in Pastor Jeremiah Wright’s contaminated pews would eventually reveal himself as a bone-deep antisemite and a pro-Islamic stalwart.
Indeed, I had warned my Israeli colleagues, some of them prominent figures in literature, journalism, and government, who were all gaga over Obama’s comforting July 23, 2008 Sderot address to the Israeli people, that he was not to be trusted and would eventually do everything he possibly could to harm the Jewish state. All that was needed to arrive at this conclusion was a modicum of research into Obama’s history and a close reading of his body language and purring inflection. The lie could not have been more obvious. The response I received was to accuse me of advanced paranoia. How things have changed!
In itself, the name is just a name; in itself, a mere piece of personal nomenclature. I fully recognize that. Some people, reading this, might quickly jump to pejorative conclusions. But in the fraught political realm of a traditionally Christian Republic with a long history of both turmoil and success, the name invoked a hermeneutic of suspicion. It was a signal that triggered curiosity, if nothing more at first, and I was astonished that no one I knew saw the name as an invitation for further study and correct discernment. It might well have proven innocuous; at the same time, an iota of investigative journalism might have saved the country two terms of an Ozempic presidency.
As for Joe Biden, whose name is not obviously provocative but whose abominable record as a politician should have been, he is not, as I once argued, the worst president in American history, for he is not the real president at all. Barack Hussein Obama is. Interestingly, Servando Gonzalez in his 2016 takedown of Obama "The Puppet and His Puppeteers" casts Obama not as the puppeteer but as the puppet whose strings are being pulled by a shadowy, powerful body of influential policy brokers, the Council on Foreign Relations. Whether his thesis is a conspiracy theory or a conspiracy fact remains moot. What is undoubtedly certain is that Biden is Obama’s creature.
Stephen Green remarks that Biden “remains the worst human being ever to occupy the White House.” Though far more suave and laminated than Biden, Obama could give Biden a run for these questionable honors. An accomplished manipulator whose own nastiness is filtered through a fine mesh of teleprompter elegance, the bearer of that unaccommodating name, shimmering with insincerity, is still playing his inapposite, destabilizing game.
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