Tag Archives: Equality

Looking for a good movie this weekend? Try Dinesh D’Souza’s “2016”

A review of the movie”2016: Obama’s America” – a project of Indian-American Christian apologist Dinesh D’Souza.

Excerpt:

My wife and I went to see a showing of the film at the Regal theater in Winter Park Village. It was about three-quarters full. We didn’t go with a group but noticed that many in the audience came in groups of more than just a single couple. There were also examples of grandparents, parents and children. At the end of the film, the audience broke into loud and spontaneous applause. Was this only due to the film “playing to the choir”?

In part perhaps, but in the next few weeks I predict it will reach the audience we most need to reach -young voters -and are the most avid movie goers and the least likely to be reached by more traditional methods.

[…]Dinesh D’Souza is an engaging, attractive dark skinned immigrant from India whose life and career follows in parallel with Obama’s – born and married in the same years and able to judge American institutions and values from a third world perspective.

The film does not accept any of the more controversial attacks on Obama’s biography but seeks to explain how his own words and thoughts cited continually throughout the film from the President’s autobiography ‘Dreams From My Father’ are a thread running through his policies and are at the core of what motivates him and makes him intent on downsizing, disarming, and apologizing for America, abandoning out allies such as Great Britain, Israel and Poland, fawning and bowing before Muslim despots, and seeking to create a society where individual initiative, ambition and self-reliance are replaced by the collectivist goals that have failed all over the world.

[…]2016 examines Barack Obama’s relationship with his absent father who was an activist in the anti-colonial struggle against the British, and following independence became part of that elite clique who fostered a one party bureaucratic, socialist state in Kenya that crushed all local government and free initiative resulting in a downward spiral of economic stagnation and poverty shared by Obama’s half-brother in the slums of Nairobi.

[…]We follow the President’s life in where his mother remarries a local Indonesian man (also a Muslim, Lolo Soteiro),  who eventually becomes a successful businessman and in so doing, alienates Obama and his mother who believe they are betraying the socialist and collectivist legacy of Barack Obama Senior.

This psychological portrait is one that makes sense and can be understood and appreciated by many young people who are themselves the product of homes in which there is divorce and remarriage.

The President’s endorsement of the “Occupy Wall Street” movement extends to the world stage in which the antagonists are portrayed as the 99% – the occupied and the exploitative 1 % – the occupiers.

Obama emotionally sympathizes with all those he places in the category of the victims of the colonialist white European nations (the one-percenters), returning the bust of Churchill, the gift of the British government, praising Islam as a progressive force while denying its oppression of women, children, non-Muslim minorities, his  policies towards  third world nations such as Mexico and Brazil whom his policies have encouraged to develop their oil industries while retarding our own, secretly supporting Argentina in its attempt to seize the Falkland Islands from Britain by force, pressuring Israel (regarded too as “occupiers”) to retreat from defensible borders, total passivity in failing to support the millions of demonstrators in the street against the tyrannical regime of the mullahs in Iran, etc.

Most damning of all are the close associations of the President and his most important mentors ignored by the media and Senator John McCain’s campaign in 2004 – convicted terrorist Bill Ayers, the “Reverend Wright (God Damn America and its “Liberation Theology” church in Chicago) and long-time Communist party member Frank Marshall Davis.

This is a powerful film that will exert a profound influence. As the billboards and advertisements on television proclaim… Love Him or Hate Him, you need to see this film.

Does that sound good or what? There’s a lot of talk about how this election needs to be about grown up ideas. I think that these long form arguments elevate, rather than lower, the debate. We need to have adult conversations about who Obama is and what his policies are intended to achieve – what is his end game?

Trailer 1 of 3:

Trailer 2 of 3:

Trailer 3 of 3:

Here’s Dinesh explaining what his movie is about at CPAC 2012:

Keep in mind that Dinesh is a Christian apologist and has debated people like Christopher Hitchens. This is his newest project.

Go see it!

Richard Miniter: Obama canceled Bin Laden kill mission THREE TIMES

What kind of foreign policy do you get when you put radical leftists in charge?

This kind. (H/T Richard M.)

Excerpt:

At the urging of Valerie Jarrett, PresidentBarack Obama canceled the operation to kill Osama bin Laden on three separate occasions before finally approving the May 2, 2011 Navy SEAL mission, according to an explosive new book scheduled for release August 21. The Daily Caller has seen a portion of the chapter in which the stunning revelation appears.

In ”Leading From Behind: The Reluctant President and the Advisors Who Decide for Him,“ Richard Miniter writes that Obama canceled the “kill” mission in January 2011, again in February, and a third time in March. Obama’s close adviser Valerie Jarrett persuaded him to hold off each time, according to the book.

Miniter, a two-time New York Times best-selling author, cites an unnamed source with Joint Special Operations Command who had direct knowledge of the operation and its planning.

Obama administration officials also said after the raid that the president had delayed giving the order to kill the arch-terrorist the day before the operation was carried out, in what turned out to be his fourth moment of indecision. At the time, the White House blamed the delay on unfavorable weather conditions near bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

But when Miniter obtained that day’s weather reports from the U.S. Air Force Combat Meteorological Center, he said, they showed ideal conditions for the SEALs to carry out their orders.

“President Obama’s greatest success was actually his greatest failure,” Miniter told The Daily Caller Friday. ”Leading From Behind,“ he said, traces the arc of six key Obama administration decisions, and shows how the president made them — and, often, failed to make them.

Should we give Obama any credit for killing Bin Laden?

I’ve written before about how George W. Bush deserves credit for Bin Laden kill.

But there are a couple of other data points to add that recently emerged, as well.

First, the decision on the Bin Laden raid was made by the American Armed Forces, not by Barack Obama, as a newly released memo reveals.

Second, Obama had already drafted a memo to blame the military if the operation failed.

In fact, Obama has weakening our counter-terrorism and defense capabilities from the day he took office.

Excerpt:

Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., a senior member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, called the president’s victory lap in Afghanistan on the anniversary of the death of Osama bin Laden at the hands of the Navy SEALs “an attempt to shore up his national security credentials, because he has spent the past three years gutting our military.”

Indeed he has. “He cut the F-22, future combat system, C-17 and our ground-based interceptor in Poland, to name a few,” Inhofe noted.

[…]President Obama’s defense policies fulfill a campaign pledge he made to the far-left group Caucus for Priorities a month before the January 2008 Iowa caucuses. Caucus for Priorities is an offshoot of a bigger group, Priorities Action Fund, created by Ben Cohen, the peace activist and co-founder of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream.

In a video made for the group, Obama called for a further deterioration in our military strength.

“I will cut investments in unproven missile defense systems. I will not weaponize space. I will slow our development of future combat systems,” he said.

So far, he has kept his word.

In the video, he also vowed, “I will set a goal of a world without nuclear weapons. To seek that goal, I will not develop new nuclear weapons, I will seek a global ban on the production of fissile material and I will negotiate with Russia to take our ICBMs off hair-trigger alert, and to achieve deep cuts in our nuclear arsenals.”

He has kept that promise as well.

As the Heritage Foundation notes, since Obama took office, over 50 major weapons programs of more than $300 billion have been cut or delayed.

Obama, who betrayed Poland and Czechoslovakia on missile defense and shut down key weapon systems like the F-22 Raptor, has vowed to veto any changes to the mandated cuts, including $650 billion from defense as called for by the Budget Control Act over the next decade.

That comes on top of $460 billion in defense cuts already agreed to — a total of $1.1 trillion in defense cuts our commander in chief is OK with.

A 14-page analysis by the Republican majority staff of the House Armed Services Committee says the cumulative cuts will result in Army and Marine Corps losing 200,000 troops.

The Navy will shrink from 300 ships to 238 vessels and would lose two carrier battle groups needed to project American power and influence. Strategic bombers will fall from 153 to 101. Air Force fighters would drop by more than half, from 3,602 aircraft to 1,512 planes. These are real cuts, both in spending and in military capability.

In fact, the main priority of the Obama administration seems to be redirecting the U.S. military to fight global warming intervening in favor of South American socialist dictatorsdismantling our nuclear arsenal, allowing Iranian Islamists to rig elections and shoot pro-democracy protestersgiving drone technology to the Iranianssetting up the the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Libya, and handing over the keys to our European missile defense system to the Russians.

This is not the full list of how this man has been a disaster for world peace and national security. And it is a list that is ignored by his supporters who think with their emotions and who have their hands out for more of their share of their neighbor’s earnings.

Is gay marriage a threat to religious liberty and liberty of conscience?

Dr. Robert P. George makes the case in the Public Discourse.

Excerpt:

Since most liberals and even some conservatives, it seems, apparently have no understanding at all of the conjugal conception of marriage as a one-flesh union—not even enough of a grasp to consciously consider and reject it—they uncritically conceive marriage as sexual-romantic domestic partnership, as if it just couldn’t possibly be anything else. This is despite the fact that the conjugal conception has historically been embodied in our marriage laws, and explains their content (not just the requirement of spousal sexual complementarity, but also rules concerning consummation and annulability, norms of monogamy and sexual exclusivity, and the pledge of permanence of commitment) in ways that the sexual-romantic domestic partnership conception simply cannot. Still, having adopted the sexual-romantic domestic partnership idea, and seeing no alternative possible conception of marriage, they assume—and it is just that, an assumption, and a gratuitous one—that no actual reason exists for regarding sexual reproductive complementarity as integral to marriage. After all, two men or two women can have a romantic interest in each other, live together in a sexual partnership, care for each other, and so forth. So why can’t they be married? Those who think otherwise, having no rational basis, discriminate invidiously.

[…]Thus, advocates of redefinition are increasingly open in saying that they do not see these disputes about sex and marriage as honest disagreements among reasonable people of goodwill. They are, rather, battles between the forces of reason, enlightenment, and equality—those who would “expand the circle of inclusion”—on one side, and those of ignorance, bigotry, and discrimination—those who would exclude people out of “animus”—on the other. The “excluders” are to be treated just as racists are treated—since they are the equivalent of racists. Of course, we (in the United States, at least) don’t put racists in jail for expressing their opinions—we respect the First Amendment; but we don’t hesitate to stigmatize them and impose various forms of social and even civil disability upon them and their institutions. In the name of “marriage equality” and “non-discrimination,” liberty—especially religious liberty and the liberty of conscience—and genuine equality are undermined.

The fundamental error made by some supporters of conjugal marriage was and is, I believe, to imagine that a grand bargain could be struck with their opponents: “We will accept the legal redefinition of marriage; you will respect our right to act on our consciences without penalty, discrimination, or civil disabilities of any type. Same-sex partners will get marriage licenses, but no one will be forced for any reason to recognize those marriages or suffer discrimination or disabilities for declining to recognize them.” There was never any hope of such a bargain being accepted. Perhaps parts of such a bargain would be accepted by liberal forces temporarily for strategic or tactical reasons, as part of the political project of getting marriage redefined; but guarantees of religious liberty and non-discrimination for people who cannot in conscience accept same-sex marriage could then be eroded and eventually removed. After all, “full equality” requires that no quarter be given to the “bigots” who want to engage in “discrimination” (people with a “separate but equal” mindset) in the name of their retrograde religious beliefs. “Dignitarian” harm must be opposed as resolutely as more palpable forms of harm.

[…][T]here is, in my opinion, no chance—no chance—of persuading champions of sexual liberation (and it should be clear by now that this is the cause they serve), that they should respect, or permit the law to respect, the conscience rights of those with whom they disagree. Look at it from their point of view: Why should we permit “full equality” to be trumped by bigotry? Why should we respect religions and religious institutions that are “incubators of homophobia”? Bigotry, religiously based or not, must be smashed and eradicated. The law should certainly not give it recognition or lend it any standing or dignity.

The lesson, it seems to me, for those of us who believe that the conjugal conception of marriage is true and good, and who wish to protect the rights of our faithful and of our institutions to honor that belief in carrying out their vocations and missions, is that there is no alternative to winning the battle in the public square over the legal definition of marriage. The “grand bargain” is an illusion we should dismiss from our minds.

You can read about some examples of attacks against proponents of traditional marriage in my secular case against same-sex marriage.