Free To Save America: Stopping Obama's Secular-Socialist Machine by Newt Gingrich Page A

any mineworkers in Libby, Montana, who were exposed to asbestos.
    Additionally, Democratic senators from Nebraska, Vermont, Massachusetts, Michigan, Connecticut, Montana, South Dakota, North Dakota, and Hawaii secured bonuses in the Medicare payments for hospitals in their states worth more than $2 billion.
    Although the so-called “reconciliation bill” stripped out some of these abuses, they were only removed due to widespread public outrage—the politicians, who make deals like this all the time, were slow to realize the American people were paying close attention.
    When asked about this extraordinary abuse of taxpayer dollars, Senate majority leader Harry Reid suggested senators who didn’t get a payoff were not doing their job. “I don’t know if there is a senator
that doesn’t have something in this bill that is important to them,” he said. “And if they don’t have something in it important to them, then it doesn’t speak well of them.”
    At some point in American history, a Senate majority leader may have made a bolder statement extolling corruption and vote-buying—but I’m unaware of it.

THE DISCONNECT BETWEEN CANDIDATE OBAMA AND PRESIDENT OBAMA
    The lies and corruption of the Pelosi-Reid Congress are extraordinary, but they pale in comparison to the gaping disconnect between the promises of candidate Obama and the governing of President Obama.
    Hidden beneath the pleasant campaign facade of Senator Obama was a ruthless willingness to replace “the audacity of hope” with “the audacity of raw, ruthless power.” He has brought the corrupt, Chicago-style politics he learned in his youth to the White House. Combined with Pelosi and Reid, Obama has created a powerful political machine in Washington unlike anything seen in my lifetime.
    The creation of this machine was enabled by the elite media, which was so fawningly supportive of candidate Obama and so unwilling to dig into his past, render critical judgment, or ask critical questions, that the Obama team arrogantly came to believe it could break any promise and get away with it.
    President Obama hides his duplicity behind secrecy, clever language, and legalisms. Like President Reagan, Obama possesses captivating, eloquent rhetorical gifts. While Reagan used rhetoric to clarify and educate, however, Obama uses his skills to confuse and deflect. These are profoundly different models of leadership. But then, clarity was Reagan’s ally, since he was a conservative who articulated the values of the American people. In contrast, as an apologist for the
secular-socialist Left, Obama knows clarity is his opponent; the less the American people understand about what he’s doing, the better.
    That’s why Obama’s most honest comments have been those when he went “off message.” In an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle he said, “So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can; it’s just that it will bankrupt them because they’re going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted.” This was a striking, unscripted comment; Obama’s normal campaign rhetoric did not include promises to bankrupt our own coal industry.
    And who can forget that at a private fundraiser in liberal San Francisco, Obama declared that small-town folk “get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”
    These are two examples of Obama’s fundamental deception of the American people. While he promised a new dawn of abundant energy, he actually planned to declare war on the coal industry; and while he publicly praised the goodness of the American people, he really thinks we’re a bunch of angry, racist, gun-toting, religious extremists.
    Perhaps more than anything else, Obama campaigned on the unshakeable vow to make Washington more transparent and accountable. Yet, after a full year of