Alien Obama - Part I

When we think of aliens our imagination may turn to the spacemen of the Roswell, NM or to the melded Robert Heinlein* sort. Of more recent vintage, sliders, conjured up by sci-fi writers who follow eleven-dimension physics -- parallel universes in "inner" space. Or infiltrated spies. More mundane, we may simply consider immigrants -- especially those reared outside the Western Tradition.

Whatever the kind of alien, the term conveys a sense of strangeness, otherness. It means strange, foreign, of or belonging to another. A person who is among us but not of us. It is notable that"Alien" and "Alias" derive from a common root.

Which brings to our president. Is he an alien or an alias, or both? If an alias, we might say, Obama A.K.A.... How to finish the sentence? Is he an original thinker or is he a creature of puppeteers? As I said in an earlier post, we know what he is by his actions and by those of his words that manage to make sense. But we do not know who he is.

I confess that I find it extremely difficult to understand, let alone characterize Mr. Obama and his stranger-than-Haight-Ashbury cohort. Most of their pronouncements are, to me, so outrageous -- so alien -- that I hardly know how to respond. Cognitive overload.

Of many examples, here are two. Mr. Obama on several occasions has put forward his view of "negative" and "positive" rights. Negative rights (one suspects that the adjective was deliberately chosen for its darker connotation) are the very ones spelled out in the Bill of Rights -- those crafted to protect the people from the otherwise inevitable abuse of government power. Positive rights -- those Mr. Obama favors, on the other hand, are those which would enable the government to exercise its power over the people -- always for "good" purposes, of course!

Then there is his stated and demonstrated disdain for notions of private property. Wealth is accumulated for the purposes of sharing -- redistribution; private enterprise, on its face, is not compatible with that view. These ideas are certainly alien to our founding principles.

James Lewis, in a fine article appearing in the American Thinker, captures the idea especially well.

And yet the Obama "birther" debate is important. What's important about it is the feeling a growing number of Americans have in their bones that Obama is foreign -- to our traditions, loyalties and shared understandings about the nature of America. In a way the legal debate matters less than that bone-deep sense that Obama is fundamentally "Other than American".

[snip]

This is not a secret. Obama is foreign to America in a way that has little to do with his birth certificate. He could be American-born and still think in this very anti-American way. A lot of people are. But whatever he is legally, there is not a shred of doubt that he is steeped in an Anti-American way of thinking.



In the concluding Part II I will try to point out that the more we learn about Mr. Obama the more questions are raised.


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Stranger in a Strange Land