Of course, this is being openly debated. Question is – would America be headed for certain disaster if Obama truly is a socialist?

 Probably not. That would be more than tough to prove anyway. The real problem would come only if he acted like a Socialist. And there’s no question he’s doing that.

 Henry Lamb of WorldNetDaily gave notice that he saw the handwriting on the wall when the prescient columnist posted these notes on October 18, 2008:

Obama has declared that he believes every person has a "right" to health care. The Socialist Party USA believes every person has a "right" to health care.

Obama believes that labor unions should be allowed to organize without a secret ballot. The Socialist Party USA calls for unions to be recognized without a secret ballot.

The Socialist Party USA recognizes the "right" of adequate housing for everyone. Obama trained ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) workers to secure mortgages for unqualified people in sufficient numbers to collapse the housing and home financing industries.

The Socialist Party USA calls for an immediate withdrawal from Iraq. Obama says, "I will end this war," with never a reference to "winning" or "victory."

The Socialist Party USA calls for a "livable guaranteed annual income." Obama trained ACORN members to conduct "Living Wage" campaigns in cities around the country.

This is sufficient to reveal an unmistakable similarity between Obama's political beliefs and the beliefs of the Socialist Party USA. The tragedy is that Obama's supporters don't care. In fact, many of his supporters are delighted that he promises to usher in a new era of socialism, and push the memory of capitalism further into history.

http://www.wnd.com/index.php?pageId=78330

Convinced? Not so fast. Billy Wharton, editor of The Socialist Magazine and co-chair of the Socialist Party USA, proclaims in headlines: ‘Obama’s No Socialist. I Should Know.’

But what does the president himself say about the ticklish issue? This is excerpted from Wharton’s article:

A New York Times reporter recently pinned Obama down with the question, "Are you a socialist, as some people have suggested?" The normally unflappable politician stumbled through a response so unconvincing that it required a follow-up call in which Obama claimed impeccable free market credentials.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/13/AR2009031301899.html

 Doesn’t prove a thing, does it? Got a suggestion for you. If you want definitive information on the story, you might want to show up on Dec. 11 for the SPUSA National Office Holiday Party, 7:00-9:30 pm at 339 Lafayette Street (buzzer #11), New York City. For info on dress code for the shindig, political affiliation, or anything else, go here: natsec@socialistparty-usa.org

Good luck, have a ball, and tell ‘em Verne sent you.

Okay, let’s check out one more source -- Frank Llewellyn, the National Director of the Democratic Socialists of America, the country's largest socialist organization. If it offers any comfort, he disowned Obama, saying he is “most definitely not one of them.” Llewellyn added this pithy nugget:

We don't have a blueprint for socialism. We're not a party, we're a membership organization. We haven't organized ourselves as a party precisely because socialism as a political construct is so weak in this country.

We actually did support Obama over Bush and we often will make political choices if we think they're important. They're not based on which one is socialist, because usually in most cases, unless it's Bernie Sanders, there isn't a socialist alternative. But many times it's important to make a choice and we'll do that. We certainly thought Obama would be a better president for the country than John McCain.

http://search.aol.com/aol/search?query=frank+Llewellyn+Politics+Daily&s_it=keyword_rollover

 Don’t know about that. So where does that leave us? We got one commentator saying he probably is a socialist, and two socialists who say he isn’t. Throw in my vote (I get 73 votes since that’s my age, and it’s my poll) and what’s the final score? It’s 74-2 saying the man has really whacked-out leftist inclinations, okay?

But what does that prove? Well, you know the old saying – if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck . . . hey, maybe that’s it. Obama is a duck! Well, let’s pluck that bird!

For some, maybe.

For others, the date that will live in infamy is August 6, 1945. On this date, a U.S. B-29 bomber demolished Hiroshima with the first atomic bomb used as a military weapon.

Three days later, a second atomic bomb would level Nagasaki.

Many Japanese are predictably critical of these attacks, although it was they who drew first blood in a sneak attack at Pearl Harbor. Four years later, the atomic bomb would place an unforgettable explanation point to our retaliation.

But revisionist history in Japan justifies the ugly provocation at Pearl Harbor. So do those Americans who as a habit are bitterly critical of the U.S. armed forces at every opportunity.

The saga of victimhood renews itself every year. Already the airwaves are full of documentaries showing two Japanese cities flattened in a heartbeat. Smoking ruins. Utter desolation. Melted steel. People in agony with their skin burned off. Citizens saturated with radioactivity who would die by the thousands.

Do you sort of choke up when you see that? Actually, if the Japanese had been better scientists, today they might be feeling sorry for America, though I doubt it.

But they weren’t better scientists. Like any marauding society, they built every conceivable weapon of destruction they could muster, and used it mercilessly. They were known for their savagery.

But it wasn’t enough. The race for the technology that would end World War II in the Pacific went to the U.S.

Had it not been for that American superiority, which I know was a gift from God, mushroom clouds might eventually have blossomed over Honolulu, close to where it all started, and perhaps as well over Los Angeles and other U.S. population centers on the Pacific Coast.

As the American juggernaut rolled through the scattered Pacific atolls in costly assaults against entrenched Japanese land forces, Emperor Hirohito had the homefolks built up into a froth, ready to die fighting with guns, pitchforks, clubs, or whatever was at hand to repel the expected U.S. invaders.

Vicious propaganda had convinced average citizens that the invading Americans were insatiable monsters who would kill, maim, rape, torture and even cannibalize every Japanese who fell into the enemy’s clutches.

Mass suicides were anticipated, and a hellish incident on Okinawa fueled that belief. As American forces mopped up resistance on Okinawa to claim its vital airfield, terrified civilians raced to leap off island cliffs to escape the inhumane treatment they expected at the hands of the invading GIs.

It was a horrifying, senseless spectacle that the Americans sought in vain to prevent, although they did save many Okinawans from a tragic death at the foot of the cliffs, persuading them to surrender.

Several things had become clear to the Americans.

The Japanese on the mainland would fight and die to a man, many in banzai charges, and civilian suicides would extinguish many more lives.

And as many as a million American military combatants might be sacrificed in bloody amphibious assaults and vicious infighting.

But another option had appeared. A monster weapon – the atomic bomb – had emerged from U.S. tests ready for deployment.  

President Harry S. Truman, was a feisty, pragmatic man whose slogan was “The buck stops here.” He meant it. It was on his watch that history and fate brought together this fearsome weapon and the Japanese war machine which, though it teetered, would not fall.

Give-‘em-hell Harry decided to give ‘em hell. Realizing that deploying the atomic bomb against Imperial Japan could spare the lives of American troops and win the war, he did the right thing. Without looking back, he dispatched two B-29 bombers to Japan, each with an atomic payload.

The mushroom clouds that rose over Hiroshima, then Nagasaki, signaled that the “sleeping tiger” awakened by the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor had answered the indignity with a sudden, shocking response.

It was payback with stunning finality. But to this day, many Japanese – and some misguided Americans as well – still harbor a convenient disconnect between what started the war, and what ended it.

Between the years of 1968 and 1980, I traveled to Japan a dozen times or more, providing radio and television coverage to N.C. trade missions. I studied the Japanese language at N.C. State University, and, in Japan, avoided the cultural “cocoons” in which many Western visitors isolate themselves while there.

I learned many things about the Japanese during those visits, and made some Japanese friends whom I appreciated and admired.

While most of my time was spent in Tokyo, Kyoto and Osaka, I was asked many times if I wanted to visit Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I never cared to. I could not bear to join the ranks of simpering Western apologists who flaunted their guilt over the suffering and death caused by The Bomb. I did not – and do not – share that grief.

The Bomb saved American lives and – curious though it may seem – countless Japanese lives as well.

I don’t subscribe to the radical revisionist history taught not only in Japan, but slavishly devoured by many Westerners as well, alleging that America was the villain in that war, and Japan the victim.

That is a cruel, barbaric lie. That war was brought to us. We learned many cruel lessons from it, including the wisdom of peace through strength, which Ronald Reagan would later champion as a deterrent to enemies of America.

Anyway, for me there are now two dates that will live in infamy – Dec. 7, 1941. And January 20, 2009.

He bows to the King of Saudi Arabia. Excessive respect.

But he gives Prime Minister Gordon Brown a batch of DVD movies, and pointedly misses a joint press conference scheduled to take place when the British leader visited the U.S. in March of this year. Blatant disrespect.

He bows so deep to the Emperor of Japan that he seems to be looking for a lost contact lens. Excessive respect.

But he fails to even show up for the celebration of the fall of the onerous Berlin Wall – a major diplomatic blunder that causes a ripple of derision among America’s British and European allies. Clear and galling disrespect.

It would be easy to say that these disparate incidents have no relationship to one another. I disagree. I think they are disturbingly symbolic of the cultural contradictions that guide Mr. Obama’s erratic course through his presidency.

What could cause these curious clues to surface? Why would Obama have an Asian/Arab complex?

There may be some tantalizing clues in this excerpt from Biography.com:

Barack Hussein Obama was born Aug. 4, 1961, in Honolulu, Hawaii. His father, Barack Obama, Sr., was born of Luo ethnicity in Nyanza Province, Kenya. He grew up herding goats with his own father, who was a domestic servant to the British. Although reared among Muslims, Obama, Sr., became an atheist at some point.

Obama's mother, Ann Dunham, grew up in Wichita, Kansas. Her father worked on oil rigs during the Depression. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, he signed up for service in World War II and marched across Europe in Patton's army. Dunham's mother went to work on a bomber assembly line. After the war, they studied on the G.I. Bill, bought a house through the Federal Housing Program, and moved to Hawaii.

Meantime, Barack's father had won a scholarship that allowed him to leave Kenya pursue his dreams in Hawaii. At the time of his birth, Obama's parents were students at the East–West Center of the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

Obama's parents separated when he was two years old and later divorced. Obama's father went to Harvard to pursue Ph.D. studies and then returned to Kenya.

His mother married Lolo Soetoro, another East–West Center student from Indonesia. In 1967, the family moved to Jakarta, where Obama's half-sister Maya Soetoro Ng was born. Obama attended schools in Jakarta, where classes were taught in the Indonesian language.

Four years later when Barack (commonly known throughout his early years as "Barry") was ten, he returned to Hawaii to live with his maternal grandparents, Madelyn and Stanley Dunham, and later his mother (who died of ovarian cancer in 1995).

He was enrolled in the fifth grade at the esteemed Punahou Academy, graduating with honors in 1979. He was only one of three black students at the school. This is where Obama first became conscious of racism and what it meant to be an African-American.

The problem with this president is he shows a distressing tendency to carry these early negative impressions, perceived insults and fancied slights into adulthood, into the presidency, and finally into the very crucible of international diplomacy, where he awkwardly acts out his resentments and favoritism, dragging the United States of America into the muck. He seems driven by his own demons.

Barack Obama is not stupid. Far from it. I think he’s very intelligent. But he doesn’t seem to have a clue how to be head of the most powerful and influential nation in the world. (And the greatest, by the way.) He’s still campaigning, looking now to 2012, while still in the infancy of his first term.

Along the way, he is leaving the impression of suffering from a political and cultural schizophrenia that keeps us all wondering when the real Barack Obama will stand up.

*** The claim that Barack Obama was born in the United States is disputed. 

Sorry, Mr. President. Too many false starts. Go ahead. Go through the motions. But somehow I think you have far too many conflicted emotions, divided loyalties, and trackless cultural wanderings to be believed. At this moment you are merely emulating former U.S. presidents who did the right thing, parroting their tributes, taking cues from their actions, and reading heartfelt statements from your teleprompter.

Next week, you’ll be somebody else.

The liberal U.S. media essentially buried the first real clue to how Obama would react to this tragedy. I happened to see it in a live broadcast as Obama addressed a much-ballyhooed Tribal Nations pow-wow  at the White House. Obama took pains to remind his audience of American Indians that they have much to be resentful about.

“We know the history that we share. It's a history marked by violence and disease and deprivation. Treaties were violated. Promises were broken. You were told your lands, your religion, your cultures, your languages were not yours to keep,” the president declared. (WH transcript)

It is difficult to know exactly at what point the President knew of the Fort Hood mass murders, as the White House transcript I saw did not include these remarks, and there was a Nixonesque “tape gap” reported on the “verbatim” log of the proceedings.

But the live television coverage said it all. For perhaps two minutes, as CNN displayed a glaring on-screen banner proclaiming ‘BREAKING NEWS: Rampage at U.S. Army Post, 12 dead, including gunman, 2 suspects in custody’, Obama continued to schmooze with the crowd – unaware that the television audience was already way ahead of him and wondering when the president would catch on.

It seemed he didn’t want this unwelcome news to rain on his party. One reporter called it “surreal”, and I agree.

He bantered playfully with his subjects before switching finally into the solemn mood required when announcing that something frightful has happened.

President Clinton had the same crippling self-awareness, and was said to “fix his face” before coming to the podium so that his appearance would match the flavor of the occasion.

Obama is more cleverly superficial. “Deep down,” someone has said, “he’s shallow.”

Toby Hamden of Telegraph UK puts it this way, describing Obama’s curiously detached manner as he finally began to address the terrorist act at Fort Hood:

“Completely missing was the eloquence that Mr. Obama employs when talking about himself. Absent too was any sense that the President empathised with the families and comrades of those murdered. Mr. Obama seems a curiously bloodless president. If he experiences passion, he seldom shows it. It is often anyone's guess as to whether an event or issue truly moves him.”

By the time he reached Fort Hood, Obama’s speech writers had paved the way for him, and his speech was actually a tidy bit of memorializing.

Obama did manage this near miss at a display of revulsion for the Fort Hood murders:

“It may be hard to comprehend the twisted logic that led to this tragedy.  But this much we do know -- no faith justifies these murderous and craven acts; no just and loving God looks upon them with favor.  For what he has done, we know that the killer will be met with justice -- in this world, and the next.” (WH transcript)  

David Warren of RealClearPolitics summed it up rather effectively:

 “This deadly enemy of the West -- the Islamist ideology which holds all Jews, Christians, other non-Muslims, and a considerable number of Muslims, too, to be human filth in need of extermination -- is well infiltrated. Events like that at Fort Hood prove this, and from what I can see, the problem can only grow with the passage of time.”

Since the president speaks for himself, his words clearly speak for him.

Here’s what left me reaching for a tongue depressor as Obama, seemingly unmoved bythe horror and betrayal most of us felt, spoke to the nation in the Rose Garden of the wanton slaughter of valiant U.S. soldiers at Fort Hood:  

“We don’t know all the answers yet. And I would caution against jumping to conclusions until we have all the facts.”

Well, is that sappy enough for you? Thirteen unsuspecting soldiers gathered in a readiness area are fiendishly shot dead in a heartbeat – and an officer of the U.S. Army is the accused killer. The officer is a Muslim. Whether or not this fact figures into the motive for the slayings is not known. Yet it is a fact.

Our president has Muslim influences in his background. Whether or not this fact figures into what he said and how he said it is not known. Yet it is a fact.

Obama, of course, soon fell into the obligatory condolences and utterances of respect for the fallen, but for me the damage was done.

Dare we ask – what conclusions was he so afraid that we might reach prematurely? That because the suspected murderer is a Muslim, we might somehow, as a nation implicate all Muslims?

I don’t know. I do know that I resist being tempted to fall into that trap, no matter how bitter I might be over this senseless loss. And I have confidence that most of us will not feel that.

In America, the accused are innocent until proven guilty. Yes. But our nobler inclinations may be tested by what we do know about this situation. And the implications are stunning. If Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan is brought to trial, and if he is found guilty, I can promise that the bitter gall and sense of betrayal I will feel will be profound.

President Obama knows this. He is viewed as a man chronically unruffled by the vagaries of life in a world of conflict. So he paid homage to the pillars of justice that mark our society, as well he should have. It was the prudent thing to do.

But his words somehow sounded hollow when he spoke of what had happened. Forgive me if I’m wrong, and too harsh in my judgement, but insincerity, I think, is one of the telling flaws in this President’s character.