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Obama Slams Business, Belittles Success

By    |   Wednesday, 25 July 2012 08:33 AM EDT

Ronald Kessler reporting from Washington, D.C. — Most Americans find President Obama’s recent comments belittling success to be shocking. But if you paid attention to what the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr. was preaching for the 20 years Obama sat in his pews, you were not at all surprised.

During a talk in Roanoke, Va., Obama diminished successful people by saying no one gets there on his own. "If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen,” Obama said.

Obama cited the fact that everyone needs teachers, roads, and bridges. Well, of course they do. But to detract from the achievement of any successful person — whether a student graduating from college or a Thomas Alva Edison, Steve Jobs, or Bill Gates — is to attack the very essence of what makes America great.

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Referring to Obama’s comment as “foolishness,” Mitt Romney aptly said the president wants Americans to be “ashamed of success.” The presidential candidate said he found it “extraordinary that a philosophy of that nature would be spoken by the president of the United States.”

Yet the Rev. Wright, Obama’s self-described mentor and sounding board, espoused views that similarly belittled success.

Wright’s philosophy, which he called the "Black Value System," denounced “our racist competitive society” and included the disavowal of the pursuit of “middle-classness.”

That was defined as a way American society seduced blacks into achieving economic success, thus snaring them rather than “killing them off directly” or “placing them in concentration camps.”

“We are only able to maintain our level of living by making sure that Third World people live in grinding poverty,” Wright has said. “God d*** America!”

As a community organizer, Obama’s job was to make people more dependent on the government and to further victimhood and self-pity. “A community organizer organizes people who have had difficulty producing,” Alphonso Jackson, President George W. Bush’s secretary of Housing and Urban Development, has told me. “When you are a community organizer, what you get most of the time is people telling you what their problems are and why they don’t succeed.”

In many cases, they are blacks who blame their lack of achievement on whites. “When I was running public housing in Dallas, blacks would come in and tell me, ‘You know, we can’t do this because the white man keeps us from doing this,’ and I would always say, ‘Well I did, and I came up in a segregated environment,’” says Jackson, who is African-American. “I said, ‘You can do it, if you choose to do it.’”

Beyond revealing his warped view of the American dream, Obama’s comment highlights the class envy that his campaign is founded on. The Obama campaign never misses a chance to portray Romney as diabolical because he is rich and successful.

Yet Obama himself is rich and successful. If someone belittled his success by saying he owes it to teachers, roads, and bridges, that individual would rightly be seen as envious.

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Calling Obama’s comment wrong and “insulting,” Romney suggested that Obama was essentially saying that Steve Jobs didn’t build Apple and Ray Kroc didn’t build McDonald’s.

“I want Americans to welcome and to celebrate success,” Romney said. “I don’t want government to take credit for what the individuals of America accomplish.” More than anything, that defines the difference between Mitt Romney and the president.

Ronald Kessler is chief Washington correspondent of Newsmax.com. He is the New York Times best-selling author of books on the Secret Service, FBI, and CIA. Read more reports from Ronald Kessler — Click Here Now.
 

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2012-33-25
Wednesday, 25 July 2012 08:33 AM
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