In a context that is fairly longer, Obama said this:
It's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
He said it at a fundraiser to big-city, liberal donors from San Francisco.
This comment has been vetted and debriefed in columns and on talk shows and news programs. What's wrong with it? It manifests an elitism and he's out of touch. That's the Hillary interpretation. Others say he doesn't get history. The term "cling" was a bad choice of words---condescended by making them look weak and needy. These people have guns for pleasure and they attend church for faith, so his sociology is wrong. I haven't heard anyone say that the comments were 'stereotyping.' They thoughtlessly and callously stereotyped these rural and small-town whites, prejudicing their motives and convictions.
I'm not arguing that the pundits have been wrong. It's just that I haven't heard the point I'm about to give you and I think that it nails the Obama comment bullseye.
His comment revealed his Marxism. That's right Marxism. Blatant Marxism. I'm not exaggerating at all. I believe that Obama is a Marxist who believes that socialistic economics is the answer to most human ills.
One of the most quoted statements of Marx is that religion is the "opiate of the people," literally the "opiate of the masses." The exact quote is in the introduction of his 1843 work
Contribution to Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right sounds very much like the statement of Obama:
Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
Doesn't this sound familiar? Like everything was sex to Freud, everything was economics to Marx. If you've got problems, to the Marxist they're economic ones. Therefore, we explain everything by economics. Those poor middle class white workers are bitter, so they turn to religion and guns and more. Of course, Obama and other Marxists would want them to turn to government. They won't, says Obama, because they have been promised so much in the past by politicians and the government never did anything to deliver them.
This is the normal way of thinking for Obama that fits with his view of the world. It is the view of his church. Since he made the comment, he has been in spin control by saying that he is a "man of faith," and that faith has gotten him through troubled times. Real men of faith don't say that faith gets them through. The Lord Jesus Christ can get us through. And truly Jesus Christ gets us through a different kind of trouble then what Obama is thinking. The faith of a true man of faith is faith in God's Word as an unchanging absolute.
Obama has the social Jesus of liberation theology in mind. His Jesus leads out of socio-economic troubles. The Jesus of the Bible, the one and only Jesus, delivers us from sin. The Jesus of Obama delivers from oppression and poverty. Salvation of liberation theology is social and economic, not spiritual. When they say spiritual, they don't mean sin and damnation. They mean the spiritual discouragement that comes with poor social conditions, burdening the human spirit. Their Jesus will lift them out of the miry pit of economic despair.
Obama hung around Marxists all through college. He carefully chose them as his friends by his own testimony. Nothing was by accident. He had the most in common with Marxists. They spoke and thought the same way that he did.
When he made his comment, he was talking to other socialists who would be in sympathy with his interpretation of things. They are people that can't understand why their class warfare doesn't work with the working class white man. They refuse to believe that these men don't vote Democratic because of cultural reasons. The cultural conservatives that belie their social architecture believe in a literal, historical Jesus. They believe in the second amendment even as they interpret the Constitution literally. They don't believe in breaking the law, so they are against illegal immigration. They think that a different culture will ruin the America that they stand for.
So Obama gives a Marxist explanation. He sees these rurals in Pennsylvania small towns as the untapped proletariat. The Marxist believes that the bourgeoisie, the merchant class, and the capitalistic system exploit the working class. The proletariat has no means of production so must look for a job working for an upper class. The goal of the proletariat is finally to displace the capitalistic system with socialism. This is the change that Obama is looking for. The poverty is a kind of economic slavery from which the working class needs deliverance.
You may like Obama. If you do, you should at least take this into consideration. Incidentally, this has nothing to do with his race (read
Thomas Sowell, and here are
some Thomas Sowell quotes sent to me). If you don't think that Marxism is the solution for a successful society, then Obama isn't the man for you.
I thought you might want to know about the debate occurring at the debate blog of one of the Pyromaniacs, Frank Turk. He challenged me to a debate on the issue of the preservation of God's Word. I'm arguing for the perfect preservation of the NT in the textus receptus. He's arguing against that. We're about half way through. The format is ten questions each with no more than 1000 words for each answer. I'll leave it up to you to decide what you see occurring in the debate. Debates like this can be informative and interesting reading. I believe you'll see that the Scriptural and historic position of perfect preservation of Scripture holds up nicely under the scrutiny of others who doubt what God said He would do. The right position does more than hold up, but, again, that will be for you to decide.
