The Clintonian Cynicism and Deception of Obama and His Supporters

As I noted in my previous post, Bill Clinton was the conduit for the Obama Administration’s corrupt offer of federal offices to candidates in exchange for their withdrawal from the Democratic Primary in order to clear the field for other Democratic candidates favored by the Administration.

Liberal Democratic supporters of the Obama Administration have falsely used the “everybody does it” defense – which is not a defense, but an admission – in order to excuse the scandal, just as they did when Clinton was accused of perjury and obstruction of justice for lying under oath in a federal sexual harassment lawsuit. As I explained in my previous post, this cynical defense of the Obama Administration is false. Even the scandal-prone Clinton Administration, for example, was never accused of offering offices in exchange for political favors, just as the allegation liberal Democrats’ made in defense of Clinton about all the Presidents or Founding Fathers committing such crimes or even that they had committed adultery is either false or – at worst – in a few cases, unprovable. In both cases, the liberal Democrats’ cynically impugned others, including many innocent people, in order to make the President they supported seem less bad by comparison.

Indeed, this scandal reveals a tactic of the corrupt Clinton Administration the Obama Administration itself and its supporters have copied: repeatedly denying an allegation for months in order to cover it up and then, once the Administration is forced to admit the allegations are true, declaring that there is nothing new to the charges, dismissing them as old news, and then accusing its critics of focusing on the past for political advantage and instead of on the “real issues” the Administration claims it is addressing.

These examples are part of a broader pattern of Clintonian tactics Obama has adopted. Obama makes Clintonian-style misleading statements that allow people to read falsely into them what they want without lying, which, like the defense offered of his Administration by its liberal Democratic supporters, depends upon a cynical view of the ignorance of the people, as well as an arrogant confidence in his ability to fool them.

As a presidential candidate, Clinton made statements that allowed people to read into them whatever they wanted. For example, he stated that he was against the “brain dead politics” of Congress. Because Democrats were in the majority in Congress at the time, Republicans thought that he was sounding moderate by criticizing his own party, while Democrats thought that he was sounding liberal by referring to the significant Republican minority they blamed for blocking them from taxing and spending more. The massive tax and spend policies Clinton pursued once in office (despite his labeling of his plan that he correctly predicted would increase the deficit as a “deficit reduction plan”) proved that he had fooled the Republicans by leading them to draw a false conclusion.

Another example was when Clinton was asked by a reporter whether he had been unfaithful to his wife. He replied that he had “caused pain in” in his marriage. The media reported that he had thereby admitted to adultery, which made him seem forthright, contrite and humble. The apparent admission of infidelity appeared to definitively address the allegations of adultery made against him by Gennifer Flowers that were damaging his campaign. However, a closer examination of Clinton’s words reveals that he did not admit to adultery, only to having “caused pain,” which could have been for the most minor peccadillo that was not even in the category of a sin against marriage, or perhaps even was because of some idiosyncrasy his wife found unacceptable. Indeed, he has never admitted adultery with Flowers or any of the several other women who claimed they were his mistresses, even after a test found his DNA on Monica Lewinsky’s dress. Using careful legal language, he only admitted vaguely to “an inappropriate relationship” with Lewinsky. To this day, his most ardent supporters deny that he ever committed adultery with her.

Similarly, when asked as a presidential candidate whether he were a Muslim or a Christian, Obama declared that he “prays to Jesus every night.” His statement allowed Christians to read into it that he was a Christian while Muslims could read into it that he was not denying he was a Muslim because of the absence of anything in his statement that specifically rejected Islam. Muslims accept Jesus as a prophet. Although some Christians falsely equate prayer with worship, prayer means “asking;” most Christians believe that God permits the living to ask the holy souls in Heaven for their intercession, as the Bible says that He is more receptive to the prayers of the righteous, and that with God, all things are possible. Therefore, Obama’s admission that he prays to Jesus does not necessarily mean his acceptance of Jesus as Divine, which is the most basic definition of a Christian. It is unclear what Obama’s religious views exactly are, as he has repudiated the church responsible for his supposed conversion to Christianity – an anti-American Black Nationalist church that honored the leader of the largest Black Muslim organization in the United States. He then made a Clintonian declaration that he now disagreed with its pastor's radical statements, without ever stating with what he specifically disagreed.

I would prefer to give Obama the benefit of the doubt, but his habit of adopting Clinton’s style of deception makes it clear that he has failed to answer the important question about his religion adequately. I suspect that he is a Christian, but that he does not want to publicly reject Islam, either because he once made the shahada (the witness of the basic Muslim tenet), and thus would be regarded by Muslims as an apostate for rejecting Islam, or, as part of his foreign policy, because he wants to fool Muslims into believing that he shares their faith.

We conservatives must be careful to examine Obama’s words carefully without either cynically assuming he is lying or naively assuming he is telling the truth. We ought to ask Obama better questions in order to draw out the truth.