President Barack Obama’s recent speech in Osawatomie, Kansas is being hailed by the left and the mainstream media for its renewed focus on inequality–and for its crafty use of Republican president Theodore Roosevelt to push socialist themes.

Even some conservative observers are hailing the speech–not for its divisive substance, but for the fact that Obama is no longer attempting to hide his radical views in moderate rhetoric.

Indeed, the choice of Osawatomie may be more significant than the Roosevelt conceit or Obama’s maternal family roots.

Osawatomie was the site of a historic battle between abolitionist John Brown and pro-slavery forces (who were backed by the Democrats of the age). Though Brown’s men were defeated, his audacious tactics earned him the nickname “Osawatomie.” Obama may have chosen deliberately to cast his struggle against “the rich” in the same emotive terms.

Obama alluded to Osawatomie in his autobiography, Dreams from My Father, in discussing his Kansas ancestors (p. 12):

…Kansas had entered the Union free only after a violent precursor to the Civil War, the battle in which John Brown’s sword tasted first blood…

Obama also cited John Brown as one of his historical inspirations in his second autobiography, The Audacity of Hope. In a passage that almost anticipates the radical themes of this week’s speech, he writes (p. 97):

The best I can do in the face of our history is remind myself that it has not always been the pragmatist, the voice of reason, or the force of compromise, that has created the conditions for liberty… It was the wild-eyed prophecies of John Brown, his willingness to spill blood and not just words on behalf of his visions, that helped force the issue of a nation half slave and half free.

Obama conspicuously neglected to mention Osawatomie’s history in his speech on Tuesday, but the town is clearly important to Obama’s personal identity, as well as to the way he understands his political destiny.

Given that Kansas is not a swing state, the choice of setting likely had more to do with the symbolism of Osawatomie Brown than electoral votes. In Obama’s revision of history, the Republicans are the slave-owners, the villains in “the defining issue of our time.”

Also interesting is the fact that the official organ of the Weather Underground Organization in the 1970s was called Osawatomie, in an attempt to cloak the group’s radical struggle in the mantle of John Brown’s fight against slavery. (more…)

It is a time-honored tactic of radicals to accuse their enemies of what they do in order to convert a negative into a positive, as the master of political agitation Saul Alinsky taught.

This explains the Left’s newfound interest in the lie that the Tea Party is comprised of “terrorists.”

Unless you think petitioning the government for lower spending is somehow akin to flying airplanes into buildings, you’ve got to agree with Sarah Palin, whose recent salvos on the topic are dead-on.

As President Obama and his merry band of Marxists continue driving America off a cliff, Palin (and columnist Charles Krauthammer) have been pushing back hard against the liberal talking point that Tea Party supporters are terrorists.

Her comments came after Vice President Joe Biden, Congressman Mike Doyle (D-Pa.), and their socialist buddies at MSNBC recently breathed new life into the “terrorist” smear. Because President Obama, who himself has ties to real, live terrorists, has not upbraided the vice president, we can safely assume he agrees with Biden.

Said Palin on Fox News Channel:

(more…)

Newsletters published by the Chicago chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America show President Barack Obama actively participated in a 1996 rally co-sponsored by the group and held at The University of Chicago during his first campaign for the Illinois state Senate.

The president’s defenders, including Obama himself, have sought to deflect questions about his socialist connections and dismiss them as partisan hyperbole or as guilt by association ̶ regarding his connections with William Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, and Frank Marshall Davis.

But an article in the March-April 2000 edition of the Chicago DSA’s newsletter, The New Ground, detailing its recommendations for the March 2000 Democratic primaries suggests the group considered Obama one of its own.

“When Obama participated in a 1996 U[niversity] of C[hicago] Y[oung] D[emocratic] S[ocialists] Townhall Meeting on Economic Insecurity, much of what he had to say was well within the mainstream of European social democracy,” Chicago DSA writer Robert Roman wrote, contrasting it with his group’s less enthusiastic recommendation of former Black Panther, Rep. Bobby Rush, saying he “hasn’t always been the ideal Congressman from a left perspective.”

Rush went on to defeat Obama in the Democratic congressional primary, handing the future president his first and only electoral defeat thus far.

(more…)

From the April 2010 issue of Townhall magazine: Brandon Darby learned something from Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela. Once a hard-core radical who sided with progressive revolutionaries, Darby prevented a left-wing terrorist attack on the 2008 GOP convention. Now, this America-loving patriot is the target of the domestic extremists he once called “friends.”

Did you know that a courageous former radical helped to avert a planned left-wing terrorist attack at the 2008 Republican National Convention that might have killed who knows how many Americans?

Neither did I until recently.

That’s because if you disrupt a terrorist attack on Americans by Islamic fundamentalists as Northwest Flight 253 passenger Jasper Schuringa did on Christmas Day, you’re a hero; however, if you take the initiative to undermine a terrorist attack on Americans by supposedly well intentioned left-wing fundamentalists, you might as well be a terrorist yourself.

Brandon Darby, who in recent years also refused leftists’ invitations to get involved in Venezuelan communist subversion here in America and in anti-Israeli terrorism in Palestine, learned this unpalatable truth the hard way.

(more…)

Hamas rally, March 30, 2005 (Reuters/Nayef Hashlamoun)

[Note: This is the latest segment in an ongoing series about Code Pink and its co-founder Jodie Evans. Click here to read earlier articles.]

How deep are the ties between the so-called antiwar group Code Pink and the terrorist group Hamas?  Deep enough that Hamas guaranteed Code Pink’s safety when the group led an international delegation of anti-Israel leftists to Gaza in late December for the ‘Gaza Freedom March.’

Code Pink claims to have delivered “tens of thousands of dollars in humanitarian aid” to Hamas-controlled Gaza to protest a blockade of the terrorist enclave by the civilized world.

Before Code Pink departed for Egypt where the march was based, co-founder Medea Benjamin told the Western Massachusetts publication The Reminder that Hamas “has pledged to ensure our safety.”

(more…)

[Note: This is the latest segment in an ongoing series about Code Pink and its co-founder Jodie Evans. Click here to read earlier articles.]

“We hope the Egyptians get so annoyed they just want to get rid of us.” Jodie Evans, Cairo, December 29, 2009

Top President Barack Obama funder Jodie Evans and her terrorist sympathizing group Code Pink have provoked a violent crisis in Egypt over an attempt to deliver ‘humanitarian aid’ to Hamas-run Gaza to mark the one-year anniversary of Israel’s response to repeated provocations by Hamas terrorists. Evans was joined in Cairo by Obama pals Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dorhn, both former terrorists with the Weather Underground.

(more…)