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SyndicateSaul, Barack, and Me, Part II
By Robert Ringer - Saturday, December 19, 2009
By Robert Ringer
In the Prologue to Rules for Radicals, Saul Alinsky expressed his contempt for “the Weathermen and their like,” pointing out that there are no rules for revolution, but there are “rules for radicals who want to change the world.”
He believed in “a pragmatic attack on the system,” and pointed out that the rules one follows make “the difference between being a realistic radical and being a rhetorical one who uses tired old words and slogans” — e.g., “pig” (for police), “white fascist racist,” and “motherf_____.” He felt that by acting in such a stereotypical fashion, young radicals only succeeded in turning people off.
Alinsky then went on to explain that it was of critical importance for a young activist to “communicate within the experience of his audience” — which, he said, specifically ruled out attacks on the American flag. Clearly, Alinsky would have seen Obama as a model radical — smooth talking, non-threatening, even wearing an American flag pin on his lapel during the presidential campaign after people became upset with him for refusing to do so.
Alinsky made a special point of saying that if the real radical finds that having long hair sets up psychological barriers to communication and organization, he cuts his hair. Again, a picture of clean-cut Obama comes to mind — nary a dreadlock to be found on his smooth, radical head.
Perhaps one of the most important clues Alinsky gave us to the coming of BHO and the modern progressives was when he said:
“As an organizer, I start from where the world is, as it is, not as I would like it to be. That we accept the world as it is does not in any sense weaken our desire to change it into what we believe it should be — it is necessary to begin where the world is if we are going to change it to what we think it should be. That means working in [my emphasis] the system.”
Again, Alinksy pragmatism at its best — and I certainly agree with him. I have long emphasized the importance of maintaining an accurate perception of reality. Reality isn’t the way you wish things to be; it’s the way they actually are. The way you wish things to be can be your goal, but to reach that goal you have to start by dealing with today’s reality.
Obama dutifully followed the Alinksy model as a community organizer, working his way up through the system, ultimately leading him into the stench of politics. Politics is what brought the enemy inside the gates, eventually leading to his being briefed on the most high-level U.S. security secrets. Was I the only U.S. citizen to cringe when the gracious George Bush showed him around the White House and handed him the keys to the country?
Sadly, a large percentage of Americans still have no clue, and simply see Obama’s radical agenda to fundamentally transform the U.S. as “not being up to the task” or simply “lacking experience.” These include the many supposedly conservative commentators who continue to say things like, “I just can’t understand why he would do something like that if he knows the American public is against it.” These are the ghosts of people past — people who, throughout history, have insisted, “It could never happen here.”
Clearly, Alinsky had the right rules. It’s just that they were intended and used for the wrong agenda. But there is no questioning that the guy was good at his craft. Even iconic conservative William F. Buckley, Jr. described Alinsky as “very close to being an organizational genius.” Never confuse genius or stupidity with good or evil. As history has repeatedly shown, a brilliant person can have immoral objectives.
Rules for Radicals:
“Any revolutionary change must be preceded by a passive, affirmative, non-challenging attitude toward change among the mass of our people. They must feel so frustrated, so defeated, so lost, so futureless in the prevailing system that they are willing to let go of the past and chance the future.”
Millions of people are in so much financial pain as a result of the government’s corruption, illegal spending programs, and regulation of the economy that they are willing to “chance the future” (read, “change you can believe in”). Again, Obama is not the Antichrist. He is simply the right community organizer in the right place at the right time.
He possesses the ideal qualities for a community organizer with a large, hidden agenda. He is slick; he is shameless; he is soulless. It is his mission to take the ball over the capitalist’s goal line and score the winning touchdown for socialism.
Now, with more than half the country against him, he must resort to bribery, threats, and any other means necessary to get the ball across the goal line before a massive number of his Congressional partners in crime are thrown out of office in less than a year.
Rules for Radicals:
“To bring on this reformation requires that the organizer work inside the system, among not only the middle class but the 40 percent of American families … whose incomes range from $5,000 to $10,000 a year. [Remember, this was 1971.] … If we fail to communicate with them, if we don’t encourage them to form alliances with us, they will move to the right.”
You simply can’t gain and maintain power without the support of the middle and lower classes — particularly without the so-called independent voters (i.e., those who do not harbor any hard and fast philosophical beliefs). The socialists lost this group under Reagan, then again under George W. Bush.
What Alinsky’s well-groomed Chicago disciple managed to do to regain the White House for the left was anesthetize enough middle-class and lower-class voters to ignore his track record in government, his radical associations, and his constant contradictions of his previously recorded statements. And, above all, buy into The Great Obama Lie: that he is a patriotic, middle-of-the-road American. Hmm … something about getting the government we deserve comes to mind here.
Next: Saul Alinsky pays a sincere tribute to the openness of U.S. society and acknowledges it as a big advantage that the radical would not have in places such as Russia, China, or Cuba.
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Copyright © 2012 Robert Ringer
ROBERT RINGER is a New York Times #1 bestselling author and host of the highly acclaimed Liberty Education Interview Series, which features interviews with top political, economic, and social leaders. He has appeared on Fox News, Fox Business, The Tonight Show, Today, The Dennis Miller Show, Good Morning America, The Lars Larson Show, ABC Nightline, and The Charlie Rose Show, and has been the subject of feature articles in such major publications as Time, People, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Barron's, and The New York Times.
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7 Responses to “Saul, Barack, and Me, Part II”
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Another excellent essay, Robert. No, you aren’t the only one to cringe when G W Bush handed the keys to the country to BHO; I cringe every time I am reminded that Nancy Pelosi is still Speaker of the House and that Harry Reid is the Senate Majority Leader.
Thank you for helping me educate the people I know who voted for BHO and are disillusioned by the “change” he brought. Our only hope is to somehow minimize the destruction brought on by the enemies of freedom until we can throw enough of them out in 2010 and begin the long, slow journey to taking our country back from the radicals.
As someone once astutely pointed out (and yes, it was of course you Robert), which is the unvarnished universal truth behind all human behavior,(I’m paraphrasing from memory) “Don’t listen to what people say. Watch what they do. Their actions reveal their honest and true intentions and motivations.”
Words are abstracts and as such, words have been recognized to be good for only two worldly things…..deceiving others, as well as wooing women.
Some of us already know, recognize, and understand the sophistry and demagoguery exhibited and illustrated on a daily basis, by politicians and political activists. It’s the other people who are still wet behind the ears or too gullible to know better how “the game” is played, that need to be addressed and educated.
Hoffer’s “true believers”. They will be the ruination of us all.
Please pardon my rose-colored view, but from what I am seeing there are a lot of Liberty-loving people using the very same tactics espoused by people like Saul Alinsky, which I think is a very good thing. What we need is to have more “training” for those who seek Liberty, to bring them up to speed on how best to achieve their goals. The big challenge at this time is to survive the onslaught by those like Reid, Pelosi and Obama until enough people can be convinced to do something peaceful and constructive.
The primary rule and agenda for Radicals, a.k.a. Communist subversives, is DESTABILIZATION. Destabilize the family; destabilize religion and the church by casting P.C. aspersions and proscriptions upon public depictions of Christmas and Christianity; destabilize moral/ethical values by substituing an “equality” criteria, thereby elevating morally bankrupt life style people as socially acceptable, and academic corruptors of the young generation as the parental proxy for “values” indoctrination.
Destabilize the foundation for society by emasculating young men, and inculcating a masculinine psychology and physiogomy in young women via incessant television subliminal suggestion inconsistent with the natural male/female dichotomy, as evolved over millions of years, beginning with the division of labor and traditional relative roles in society.
Also destablize this nation via a massive demographics/immigration restructuring and demolition. And Destabilize our entire globe via the promulgating of imponderable, unsupportable “crises,” and with it unsuportable cost and micro-management, as pertains to the ecology and doom and gloom media-induced hysteria spouted by reckless, demagogic, irresponsible, duplicitous public officials. And destabilize our national economy and render our international financial and currency leverage relatively impotent, via rampant inflation of the dollar, and via the exponential expansion of government long-term debt, to the point of economic collapse and a severe (upcoming) monetary devaluation. Further destabilize and impede the natural flow of goods and services via confiscatory taxation, so that massive indebtedness plagues the vast majority of households in this nation.
And finally, destabilize the freedoms, upon which this nation was founded, along with our Constitutional guarantees consistent with individual sovereignty and initiative to forge a properous, moral, and ever-increasing standard of living for succeeding generations as virtually non-existent, from erstwhile freedoms of speech and choice, to the point whereby, today, all our personal and private activity is monitored and codified, and a vast range of NORMAL human behavior is criminalized so that those holding power and dominion over our lives can further profit and subjugate the rest of us who enfranchised them, via the “democratic process,” in the first place.
The supremacy of God in our national consciousness has been usurped by the Godless, and our lot has become an insufferable daily burden, with little hope for redress, now or forever.
I wish Mr. Ringer and everybody who reads and participates on his blog both a very joyful holiday season and a happy new year.
What a crazy year it’s been! Nothing would surprise me in 2010. Nothing! Before I comment on Saul Alinsky, here are my twelve educated guesses for 2010:
1) Obama’s approval rating drops below Bush’s lowest number.
2)Glenn Beck gets shot.
3)The official rate of inflation jumps past 6% as the real inflation rate is more than double that number.
4)The next 911, without any warning, happens, causing market turmoil and talk of a draft.
5)The Tea Parties triple in size as violence erupts.
6)Israel makes its preemptive move on Iran and Syria.
7)China develops its first brand name.
8)Casual dress starts to lose its appeal and respect as elegant fashion quietly makes a comeback.
9)The King of Thailand dies resulting in an all out civil war between the Red Shirts and Yellow Shirts that destabilizes the region.
10)The U.K.’s credit rating drops below BBB.
11)The number of billionaires worldwide increases dramatically past record levels as millionaires are viewed as chicken feeders.
12) The frustrated, bewildered, riped-off, and desperate masses turn to and embrace a form of neo-survivalism as a means of self-preservation.
O.K. I agree, Saul Alinsky was a thinker and William F. Buckley, Jr. was right in his assessment. In fact, my opinion was and is almost identical to that of Mr. Buckley’s. Saul Alinsky was correspondingly the same kind of evil genius that Professor James Moriarty was(i.e.the fictional character and the archenemy of the detective Sherlock Holmes). That’s how I’ve always thought of the man.
Moreover, it’s been my personal and real life experience that when two such diametrically opposed individuals meet, that lunch inevitably ends up
only one way. Yes, the meeting ends the same way that Professor James Moriarty and Detective Sherlock Holmes’s personal meetings always ended.
Life this year, well, it’s been kind of funny, yet kind of strange. For instance, I find it truly fascinating that Mr. Ringer can suggest in a previous
blog that nuking a foreign country is acceptable, yet having lunch and intellectually conjugating with a “fantasy friend” the likes of Saul Alinsky(aka Professor Moriarty) is O.K. —-and might actually be enjoyable. Wow! What a contrast. Hey, how about
lunch with سامة
بن محمد بن عوض بن لادن ?(Osama Bin Laden)
I mean after all, Osama is both braver and smarter than Bush and Obama combined. And if somebody had to pick somebody else to share a foxhole with and fight a common enemy, then it would make a lot of sense to
pick a fighter and not a coward like some of our most recent presidents, right? So at least you can respect his talent, right? I mean just look at this guy Bin Laden. He laid it all on the line and gave up his elegant life in exchange for a cave. And look! Here he has got the most powerful country in the world spending billions chasing him in circles. Osama is a hero to millions!
And here America is killing hundreds of thousands of innocent people. Our troops are needlessly dieing. Time and again this Osama has outfoxed and out-lucked the “awakened giant”(aka the U.S.A. aka the blundering giant). The world hates America more and more with each passing day. So then, if you want to have lunch with somebody evil, a real heavyweight, forget that plague bearing flea Alinsky because Osama is your man.
The disgusting fact is that America has military bases in 150 countries. And in all these many years, America still hasn’t learned how useless military conquest is in the end. It reminds me of sand; the
tighter you squeeze it, and the more it slips through your fingers. That’s America’s foreign policy now and in 2010! America, the blundering giant, is a country desperately griping and squeezing handfuls of foreign sand while trying to maintain a worldwide empire.
My holiday wish is that people see the light. When are people going to learn that being an empire that blows things up does not lead to a lasting victory.
Is there not one human on earth that understands that meaning of a CULTURAL VICTORY? Richard Nixon, as bad as he was, seemed to have a dim awareness of what a cultural victory was about when he opened up a
dialog and visited China. Robert McNamara, later in life and before he died, also seemed to understand. Sadly, Saul Alinsky understood what an evil cultural victory was. And now we are are going to reap what he sowed.
But evil does not only lurk in the hearts of socialists. No dear friends, sadly, it does not. Think about this: Declassified documents indicate that General MacArthur planned to drop as many as 50 nuclear bombs on China before President Truman fired him. Now, what if General MacArthur actually did nuke China? Do you think that would have been the right
thing to do?
Currently, when I visit China, I leave a third world airport in America and arrive in a modern airport built by a winning culture that is focused on economics and not war. I ride on a train that travels up to 350mph to cities that are modern and safe. Yes, it is true that rent-a-slaves are the backbone of China and the country is run by a bunch of
ruthless, face-saving communists. But those disgusting facts won’t change the more important fact that very soon in 15 to 20 years from now China will be the next economic superpower if America doesn’t act in its own best interest. Why?
Surprise! Because China has it more “right on” on a growing number of issues than America does,that’s why.
There’s a lesson to be learned from history. That’s why I say it’s time to close down all the military bases that are located on foreign sand, bring back the troops, and focus on winning a CULTURAL and
ECONOMIC VICTORY right here in America.
When America is attacked in the future, then let the military proportionally destroy whatever needs destroying and kill whomever needs killing. That’s it. No more nation building. No more blowing up
and rebuilding. Do some killing and then just let sand be turned back into sand and dust be turned back into to dust and ashes to ashes; Leave it that way and go home.
As far as Saul Alinsky is concerned, individuals like him make me lose my appetite. Genius or no genius, I’m glad that little flea that infected so many with the plague of socialism is dust. I hope all those who think like him join him real soon. As far as Osama goes: Shoot on sight and let the dogs eat him for lunch………
Mr. Ringer has a perception of reality that has gotten blurred since he wrote “Looking out for #1″ . I would like to remind Mr Ringer that Conservatives and Liberials simply argue over the Propaganda they have been given by the news media. Mr. Ringer has been seduced into believing the conservative propganda and argueing its merits.
A rational examination of the facts shows us that their has been a deliberate and well organized effort by the Big Corporations and wall street using their Whore the U.S. Goverment to eliminate the middle class and create a permenant under class.
Outstanding essay by Robert Ringer. I really do believe that many people are coming to the same conclusion. The lie behind BHO, like Man Made Climate Change (MMCC) is being revealed.
Note that as Ringer regards Alinsky, I similarly view BHO. I find him to be a brilliant and masterful politician. I believe he is a loving father and husband who is doing what he feels is best. Even though we are diametrically opposed politically, I see him as interesting in many ways. If this were merely an academic discussion, I have long felt that a theoretical debate with BHO would be similar to that described by Ringer in his discussion of Alinsky.
Not surprisingly, Team Obama cloaked BHO in Conservatism or at least a middle of the road illusion to get him elected President. Note that most on the left campaign to the center because they know the independents are largely conservative right of center. But at least BHO was honest enough to let his true message slip out. If you were listening, he is only doing as POTUS, what he said he would do as a candidate. Obama, like most Socialists, sees himself as the keeper of the truth who knows better what we all need than we each do individually. As much as I disagree, I am happy to have that debate any day on a level playing field. My beef is more with the co-conspirators, The Left, as I describe below, who have all but destroyed the idea of a free and fair press as keepers of the truth.
“The Left” (generic term for main stream media, pop culture and academia) attacks with a relentless fierce determination to demonize any nay-sayers of their message and especially their most current icons, BHO and MMCC. Detractors are labeled as conspiracy theorist red-neck loons and “flat-earthers” respectively. The two greatest lies of our generation and perhaps of civilization (BHO and MMCC) are being revealed, as part of the true conspiracy. I believe the ultimate goal of modern Socialists, as supported by The Left, is the implementation of Alinsky’s “Rules” to create a socialist utopia as they envision it, and to eradicate liberty.
We are in a fight of good vs evil. I believe that most who support liberal causes are not evil and bad people, but they have been immersed in the soup of an overwhelming message by “The Left” to keep them blinded to the truth. It is much easier to stir the soup with the “poor is me”, and “them vs us” messages of The Left versus the truth that Conservatism is by far the more humane, caring and nurturing philosophy. Where true Conservatism looks to lift up all people to their highest potential, Liberalism wants to keep all people down at the same predetermined level, (deemed “enough”) by the elitist ruling class of The Left. Thank you, but I choose the former over the latter. As Winston Churchill once said, “If you are not liberal at twenty, you have no heart, and if you are not conservative at forty, you have no brain.” Fact is we all have a brain, but we are in a “Matrix” sort of existence where most see what The Left programs and not what is real.
The Left is like a tsunami which floods their message over the land compared to the trickle of a relative few who stand for truth and liberty. The fact that millions making up a majority will swim against the flood of The Left to seek out the trickle of truth is evidence of Conservatism being the true embodiment of the human condition. Or more to the point, the natural state of all humans is to be free. It is in our DNA.
We will fight the good fight and hopefully prevail. I believe the future of America and mankind is at stake. Liberty’s torch must not be extinguished by Socialism/The Left or that beacon which shines round the world to illuminate hope will be forever lost.