Most people associate “brilliant analysis” with thinking that mirrors our own. I admit to that in my own thinking. With that confession, I suggest you read Stanley Kurtz essay in National Review online Samantha Power’s Power. It explains Obama through the writing and opinions of Samantha Power who is Obama’s senior director of multilateral affairs for the National Security Council. He has done the scholarship to explain exactly why Barack Obama’s foreign policies are designed to transfer America’s military power and distribute it to multinational institutions like the United Nations, much as he wants to “redistribute the wealth” in the US.
I have written about this frequently, which is why I find Kurtz’s analysis so compelling. For previous essays and short comments see:
Read the whole thing.
A few highlights:
Power might best be characterized as a pragmatic radical. Her outlook is “post-American,” an excellent example of what John Fonte has called “transnational progressivism.” Power means to slowly dismantle American sovereignty in favor of a constraining and ultimately redistributive regime of international law. It’s an odd position for a member of the president’s National Security Council, but then Power is no ordinary NSC staffer.
Power as a Chomsky acolyte:
Power makes it clear that she largely shares Chomsky’s policy goals, above all the curbing of American power via the building up of international law and related doctrines of “human rights.” In other words, Power sees herself as the clever sort of radical who works from within established institutions, without ever really sacrificing her rebellious ideals.
The reasons behind the reasons:
The important thing about Power is not that she favors humanitarian intervention, but that she seeks to use such military actions to transform America by undoing its sovereignty and immobilizing it, Gulliver-style, in an unfriendly international system.
Samantha Power has a lot to teach us about Barack Obama. She herself draws analogies between the need to redistribute wealth via health-care coverage and the need to divide military and diplomatic power (and, implicitly, wealth) more evenly through the international system. Power regularly invokes arguments for international law derived from America’s Founders and the West’s great liberal thinkers, as if her goal were the founding of a government of the world. In truth, that is what Power is up to, even if she sees her project as a long-term collective effort necessarily extending beyond her own lifetime.
Power and Obama as masters of disguise:
On rare occasions, Power comes straight out and admits that the sorts of interventions she favors constitute an almost pure cost to American national interest, traditionally defined. More often, she retreats into the language of “pragmatism” and “self-interest” to justify what she knows Americans will not support on its own terms. That is Samantha Power’s way and, not coincidentally, Barack Obama’s way as well.
At some point, after we’ve all done our best to fit the president’s puzzling Libyan adventure into our accustomed conceptual frameworks, we just might wake up and discover what has been going on behind the curtain. When we do, the answer will be found in the writings of Samantha Power.
I have said many times that with many people, and especially with Barack Obama, that you learn much more about them by seeing who their friends are than by listening to them talk. They are practiced are using mirrors to hide their actual beliefs by reflecting your own beliefs back at you. To know and understand Obama you have to understand that he IS Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers, Samantha Power, Van Jones, and all the other Leftists and radicals that he grew up with and has brought into his administration. This is what he believes and this is how he thinks, no matter how it’s disguised to make you think that he agrees with your ideals. His aim is radical transformation via misdirection.
1 comment:
This is what gets me about the controversy over Obama's birth certificate: It wouldn't matter if he'd been born in Kansas at Noon on the Fourth of July. He'd still be an alien insofar as the values and aspirations of the vast majority of the American people are concerned.
Also, infiltration and subversion are time-tested tactics of the Left, as exemplified by the execrable Frances Fox Piven.
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