{"id":536,"date":"2012-08-13T17:46:28","date_gmt":"2012-08-13T21:46:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/?p=536"},"modified":"2012-08-13T17:46:28","modified_gmt":"2012-08-13T21:46:28","slug":"obama-a-just-man","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/2012\/08\/obama-a-just-man.html","title":{"rendered":"Obama: A Just Man?"},"content":{"rendered":"

President Barack Obama is not <\/em>a \u201cnice guy.\u201d<\/p>\n

From Republican campaign strategist Ed Rollins and Republican House Speaker John Boehner to Republican presidential contenders John McCain and Mitt Romney, far too many Republicans have fueled the popular perception that Obama is a nice guy.<\/p>\n

This perception is an illusion.\u00a0 But it is a most dangerous illusion, for it has permitted our President to advance his militantly leftist agenda.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In The Republic, <\/em>Socrates engages several friends in a discussion over the nature of justice and its relationship to the good life. The question to which they attend is:\u00a0<\/p>\n

Which is more beneficial for its possessor, justice or injustice?<\/p>\n

Glaucon, a brother of Plato, contends that the unjust man is actually better off than the just man\u2014so long as he is not recognized as an unjust man. <\/em>\u00a0Injustice is superior to justice, Glaucon reasons, because the unjust man knows no limits while the just man imposes constraints upon himself.\u00a0 So, for example, the just person will abide by the terms of a contract even after he realizes that he may have more to gain by violating them.\u00a0 The unjust man, in sharp contrast, will have no such reservations.<\/p>\n

But if the unjust man is recognized as such, then others will not only deprive him of the opportunity to treat them unjustly; in addition to this social ostracism, he could as well face legal punishment.<\/p>\n

To substantiate his position, Glaucon alludes to the legendary figure of Gyges.<\/p>\n

Gyges was said to have been a poor, obscure shepherd who happens to stumble upon a magical ring, a ring that endows him with the ability to become invisible at will.\u00a0 With his new found power, Gyges manages to have the King murdered, seduce his wife, and assume control over the kingdom.<\/p>\n

Glaucon\u2019s point is clear. As long as a person is thought by all to be just, his unjust character is essentially invisible.\u00a0 He then has both the ability and the will to pursue his wants at all costs\u2014including and particularly the cost of treating others unjustly.<\/p>\n

Thus, injustice is better than justice, and the unjust person is better off than the just person\u2014as long as injustice goes undetected.<\/p>\n

This debate that transpired close to 2500 years ago assumes new significance in light of the rise of Barack Obama.<\/p>\n

Obama became nationally<\/em> recognized eight years ago when he gave the keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention.\u00a0 Immediately, something like a trans-partisan consensus emerged on the speech\u2019s inspirational character, and both Democrat and non-Democrat alike began to view Obama as a rising star, a \u201cnew\u201d kind of politician.<\/p>\n

Even in 2008, when Obama became a presidential contender in the Democratic primaries, few and far between were those Republicans who were disposed to assail him with just a fraction of the aggression with which they attacked Hillary Clinton. In fact, Obama was regularly being depicted by Republican commentators as the beleaguered contestant in that race, the unsuspecting and undeserving victim of theClintonkilling machine.<\/p>\n

Then Obama became the Democrats\u2019 presidential nominee.<\/p>\n

He became the focus of Republicans\u2019 attacks, it is true, but even so, the tendency on the part of his opponents\u2014including John McCain\u2014to qualify their criticisms with assurances that Obama was a good and talented man persisted.<\/p>\n

When Obama became the first black American president, it seemed that the entire planet erupted in rapture.<\/p>\n

And Republicans went right along with it, joining the celebration of this \u201chistoric\u201d election.<\/p>\n

Obama\u2019s election to the office of the presidency promised to redeemAmericaof her checkered racial history. He was going to be our first \u201cpost-racial\u201d president, a bipartisan politician who would usher in a new millennium full of \u201chope and change.\u201d<\/p>\n

To this day\u2014after four years of a disastrous first term comprised of effort after effort to fulfill his promise to \u201cfundamentally transform\u201d the country\u2014Obama\u2019s personal likeability numbers remain reasonably high.\u00a0 And though it has been a couple of months since he has said as much, even the presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney had expressed on more than one occasion his admiration for Obama as a person<\/em>: \u201cHe\u2019s a nice guy; he\u2019s just in over his head.\u201d<\/p>\n

Romney is no longer referring to Obama as a nice guy.\u00a0 Indeed, he should not, for in doing so, he flatters no one while revealing himself to be astonishingly na\u00efve.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Given the relentless campaign that Obama is currently waging against him, and, specifically, the latest super PAC ad that implicates Romney in the death <\/em>of the wife of a steel worker, it is no longer possible (if it ever was) to sustain either the claim that Obama is a nice guy or the claim that Romney really <\/em>believes that he is a nice guy.<\/p>\n

Obama is most emphatically not <\/em>a nice guy.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Some of us\u2014those of us who actually looked into Obama\u2019s past\u2014have always known this.<\/p>\n

In Christopher Nolan\u2019s Batman Begins, <\/em>the lead character\u2019s love interest tells him: \u201cIt\u2019s not who we are underneath, but what we do, that defines us.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 Nice guys, or good guys, do not do the sorts of things that Obama has done over the course of his career.<\/p>\n

A nice guy does not ally himself with all manner of anti-Americans, from unrepentant domestic terrorists like Bill Ayers to self-avowed \u201cBlack Liberation\u201d theologians like Jeremiah Wright. \u00a0<\/p>\n

More tellingly, a nice guy doesn\u2019t ally himself with anti-Americans while trying to convince voters that he is actually a great American patriot, let alone someone who deserves to become the President of the United States of America.<\/em><\/p>\n

In other words, a nice guy is not a person who is chronically deceptive.<\/p>\n

A nice guy does not make promises\u2014like the promise of a \u201ctransparent\u201d administration\u2014that he does not keep.<\/p>\n

A nice guy does not seek, as Obama successfully sought to do in 1996 while running for a State Senate office in Illinois, to eliminate three <\/em>of his Democratic rivals from the ballot while invalidating the legions of signatures that they accumulated in voters\u2019 petitions.<\/p>\n

A nice guy doesn\u2019t use his position of power to bully the operators of businesses and coerce millions upon millions of people to acquiesce in \u201cthe fundamental transformation\u201d\u2014the destruction, <\/em>as David Limbaugh more aptly puts it\u2014of their homeland, their lives.<\/p>\n

A nice guy doesn\u2019t exacerbate racial tensions by availing himself of \u201cthe race card\u201d whenever it suits his purposes to do so.<\/p>\n

And a nice guy most certainly does not <\/em>exploit the tragedy of a person\u2019s death by baselessly accusing his competitor of being complicit in it.<\/p>\n

Like Gyges, Obama has heretofore managed to preserve for himself the image of the just man.\u00a0 But unlike Gyges, that fa\u00e7ade is cracking.\u00a0<\/p>\n

If we would only open our eyes and connect the dots, we will readily discover for ourselves that Obama is not a just man at all.<\/p>\n

originally published at American Thinker as “Is Obama Just or Unjust?”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

President Barack Obama is not a \u201cnice guy.\u201d From Republican campaign strategist Ed Rollins and Republican House Speaker John Boehner to Republican presidential contenders John McCain and Mitt Romney, far too many Republicans have fueled the popular perception that Obama is a nice guy. 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