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About AJ DiCintio A.J. DiCintio is a Featured Writer for The New Media Journal. He first exercised his polemical skills arguing with friends on the street corners of the working class neighborhood where he grew up. Retired from teaching, he now applies those skills, somewhat honed and polished by experience, to social/political affairs.

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AJ DiCintio

Liberal Is As Liberal Does
August 19, 2010

The most important aspect of the irrefutable truth popularized by "Forrest Gump” is that it gives rise to countless corollaries. For example, without fearing an iota of criticism, we can look toward one end of the spectrum of reality and say "Hydrogen is as hydrogen does” and then the other to observe "Liberal is as liberal does.”

Actually, the last statement has been swirling in my mind since the President weighed-in on the issue of whether a mosque and Islamic cultural center ought to be constructed near NYC’s Ground Zero.

To review, here’s what Obama said the first time he spoke about the controversial project:

I understand the emotions that this issue engenders. Ground zero is, indeed, hallowed ground...This is America, and our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakable. The principle that people of all faiths are welcome in this country, and will not be treated differently by their government, is essential to who we are.

Then, a day later he issued this perfectly Clintonian clarification to obscure the fact that his words indicate he ultimately supports building the mosque:

I was not commenting, and I will not comment, on the wisdom of making the decision to put a mosque there. . . I was commenting very specifically on the right people have that dates back to our founding. That’s what our country is about.

Now, with respect to both statements, two reactions immediately come to mind: One is "How quintessentially liberal!” the other "How perfectly Alinskyian!”

And why not those conclusions, because for the vast majority of the American people, the controversy revolves not around the right to build a mosque but the wisdom of making the decision to put [one] there.

However, instead of speaking thoughtfully about that crucial issue, including in his remarks some truths about human nature and the nature of a society called a nation, Obama chose to engage in the insidious "relationship-building” ("I understand” and "hallowed ground”) that Saul Alinsky taught is necessary to prepare the public for what is, essentially, the message of liberal superiority, which Obama delivered in the form of an officious, insulting lecture about the Constitution.

Of course, as Alinsky instructed his followers, a liberal "radical” or "organizer” doesn’t succeed by proudly and fully announcing the totality of his true beliefs and goals, explaining why Obama didn’t say what he surely believes: that building a mosque near Ground Zero is, on balance, a good thing.

That kind of perverse forbearance is, of course, nothing new; for he has consistently done the same with respect to other issues.

For instance, he has never precisely explained what America will look like if it adopts the entire Obama agenda or what caused him to admire Marxist professors or what he thinks about Marxists now or what kind of curriculum his committee partner and former domestic terrorist Bill Ayers had in mind for Chicago public school students desperately in need of a sound academic education.

Obama’s statements about the mosque don’t, however, simply play the old liberal game of concealment; they also serve as a signal for liberal elites of the media and academia to do what they do best, that is, demonize those who disagree with dogmas liberals regard as self-evident truths.

In fact, "important” liberal reporters, commentators, editorialists, and professors have already begun to "objectively” and routinely refer to opponents of the Ground Zero mosque as racist, bigoted, nativist, ugly American, anti-Muslim Know-Nothings.

Yes, adhering to Alinsky’s Rule #13, "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, polarize it,” is old hat for liberals, who, for instance, have for years been ignoring crucially important social, political, economic, and environmental questions that pertain to the issues of borders, immigration, and citizenship in favor of vilifying the great majority of Americans with the filthy name calling mentioned above.

Moreover, liberals long ago found that viciously maligning opponents is quite an easy thing to do — specifically, from the moment they accepted Alinsky’s dictum that mocks "means-and-ends moralists” while insisting that "the end justifies almost any means.”

Finally (but certainly not the final word about how liberal behavior defines liberals), there is the fact that with respect to his position regarding the Ground Zero mosque, Obama has placed himself outside the super-landslide majority of American opinion, with a recent CNN poll reporting that nearly 70% of the public oppose construction while only 29% favor it.

The problem for Obama, however, lies not in this single disparity but in the fact that it serves as a metaphor for nearly all of his major policy decisions, as exemplified by the enormous opposition to his programs that, for example, "reform” healthcare through dangerous centralization and frightful bureaucracy building, win wars by encouraging soldiers to exhibit "courageous restraint,” and promote prosperity through the "generational theft” of mad, unfair, pork-laden spending and borrowing based upon the notion that money really does grow on trees.

Even a citizen who has acquired only a smidgen of political sophistication would guess that the in-your-face contempt with which Obama reacts to all of these enormous disconnects may also be connected to Alinsky.

And that person would be correct; for it was Chicago’s "father of community organizing” who taught that in politics "One acts decisively only in the conviction that all the angels are on one side and all the devils on the other.”

However, their arrogance and Rules for Radicals notwithstanding, latter-day Alinskyites currently face a big problem, because since ’08, the "other side” has been on the receiving end of a hard lesson about the truth that liberal is as liberal does.

As a result, the odds are that the "devils” will be doing some self-defining of their own, in the form of a hell of a lot of hell-raising come November.