About the Author:  Born in Boston, I lived and worked in the D.C. area for a time, but have spent most of my life in Tennessee, where I graduated from the University of Tennessee. My political philosophy could best be described as eclectic, though mostly right of center. Read more from this author

Queen of the Potomac, Photo: SPLASH NEWS

Author and fellow blogger, Michael Zak, reminded me about an interesting statement made by Michelle Obama last February at UCLA:

Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zones. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.

Normally, one wouldn’t go too far with such a statement, thinking it typical, if a little bit creepy, political rhetoric.  When considered against the background of Obama’s “Public Service” plans, however, the unease builds substantially.

According to the official campaign website, Obama has a plan for “Universal Voluntary Public Service”.  Correct me if I’m wrong, but if we’re doing it universally, is it really voluntary?  And what about the parts of the plan that are specifically noted as NOT being voluntary? 

Let’s go back a moment and read what Obama said in a speech in December, 2007, as he was campaigning in Iowa:

“Your own story and the American story are not separate — they are shared. And they will both be enriched if we stand up together, and answer a new call to service to meet the challenges of our new century … I won’t just ask for your vote as a candidate; I will ask for your service and your active citizenship when I am president of the United States. This will not be a call issued in one speech or program; this will be a cause of my presidency.”

Now we have both Pharaobama and his head concubine (or Queen of the Potomac, whatever) talking about it, so perhaps we need a closer look at the plan itself.

First, on Obama’s website, we have the public service section heading, “Enable All Americans to Serve to Meet the Nation’s Challenges.”  That’s rather vague, but it turns out that this is “enabling” in the same sort of sense that the income tax enables you to serve your country financially. 

Let’s look at what you get to do if you want to attend college (these are all copied and pasted from his website):

• Require 100 Hours of Service in College: Obama and Biden will establish a new American Opportunity Tax Credit that is worth $4,000 a year in exchange for 100 hours of public service a year.
• Promote College Serve-Study: Obama and Biden will ensure that at least 25 percent of College Work-Study funds are used to support public service opportunities instead of jobs in dining halls and libraries.

Kind of brings new meaning to the idea of voluntary, does it not?  Requiring you to do work that you get paid for?  I suppose you could avoid this by not going to college, but what about folks like the liberal trolls on this site who spent 8 years in undergraduate school?  That would be 800 hours of voluntarily required paid public service. 

(And, on a personal note regarding bullet # 2, I worked in the library at my university, and guess what, Barry?  Someone has to put back the hundreds of books pulled off the shelves every couple of hours, manage checking out books, and help people find relevant research articles and microfilm (do they still use microfilm?), etc.  And while I never worked in a dining hall in college, I have worked in a dining hall at a rescue mission, and I’m pretty sure there is actual work involved.)

Back from my personal rant, let’s keep looking at the details surrounding the education part of the plan:

• Expand Service-Learning in Our Nation’s Schools: Obama and Biden will set a goal that all middle and high school students do 50 hours of community service a year. They will develop national guidelines for service- learning and will give schools better tools both to develop programs and to document student experience. Green Job Corps: Obama and Biden will create an energy-focused youth jobs program to provide disadvantaged youth with service opportunities weatherizing buildings and getting practical experience in fast-growing career fields.
• Expand YouthBuild Program: Obama and Biden will expand the YouthBuild program, which gives disadvantaged young people the chance to complete their high school education, learn valuable skills and build affordable housing in their communities. They will grow the program so that 50,000 low-income young people a year a chance to learn construction job skills and complete high school.

So all the videos of the Nazi youth, I mean, the Obama youth that we’ve been getting in the last week are only the tip of the iceberg.  Are you prepared to have your child indoctrinated into the Obama community?  “(Developing) national guidelines for service-learning” is a step way out of bounds.  Read a bit about what types of programs Obama helped funnel money to back in his Illinois days, and you’ll see that this is a very slippery slope. 

When put in charge of over $100 million in the Chicago Annenburg Challenge to help improve Chicago’s disastrous school system, Obama, along with domestic terrorist William Ayers (who was responsible for getting the money to begin with), decided to grant the money to exterior groups instead of to the schools themselves.  These groups were very active politically.  According to Stanley Kurtz of NRO, under Obama and Ayers, the CAC attempted to advance an agenda that “flowed from Mr. Ayers’s educational philosophy, which called for infusing students and their parents with a radical political commitment, and which downplayed achievement tests in favor of activism.”  And in fact, Ayers, who is openly communist, shares the same political/economic philosophies as the Black Liberation Theology preached by Reverend Wright at the church Obama attended for twenty years.

Essentially, and I don’t feel this is going too far at all, Obama is going to mandate directed public service for children and young adults, turning America into a country teeming with little community organizers who fall in line behind the secular, socialist ideas of Obama.

But what if you are already out of school and not yet indoctrinated?  Don’t worry, Obama has a plan for you, too.  Along with a vast expansion of AmeriCorps and the Peace Corps, Obama wants to create a Classroom Corps, a Health Corps, a Clean Energy Corps,  a Veterans Corps, and a Homeland Security Corps.

Too old for that crap?  Retired and enjoying time with the grand kids and pursuing all those hobbies you never had time for before?  That really isn’t the best use of you as a government resource:

• Engage Retiring Americans in Service on a Large Scale: Older Americans have a wide range of skills and knowledge to contribute. Obama and Biden will expand and improve programs that connect individuals over the age of 55 to quality volunteer opportunities.

Next to the rest of Pharaobama’s public works projects, this statement seems almost innocuous and practically voluntary.  In fact, let’s go ahead and call it voluntary.  But what types of programs will “retiring” Americans be connected to?  As with everything else, one can only imagine the worst.  Who knows, maybe you could even get to volunteer your time for a Presidential Truth Squad.  Or maybe you’ll just be shepherding all the tiny community organizers around.  And if seniors don’t want to participate can we be certain there won’t be incentives like the payments to college students?  Once you incentivize it, it no longer becomes voluntary for everyone by becoming a necessity for many.

I know what you are saying at this point.  It probably goes something like, “Over my dead body.”  You aren’t volunteering, and you won’t be compelled.  You may even have gone back and reviewed the second amendment as a reference for that day when the foreman rings your doorbell.  Well, put the gun down, Granny Clampett.  It won’t be a foreman coming for most of us, it’ll be the revenuer–steady, Granny.  After all, you don’t send out millions of microorganizers with a wave and a smile.  It’ll take money, lots of it.

Back to the campaign site, “Invest in the Nonprofit Sector:”

• Social Investment Fund Network: Obama and Biden will create a Social Investment Fund Network to use federal seed money to leverage private sector funding to improve local innovation, test the impact of new ideas and expand successful programs to scale.
• Social Entrepreneurship Agency for Nonprofits: Barack Obama and Joe Biden will a create an agency within the Corporation for National and Community Service dedicated to building the capacity and effectiveness of the nonprofit sector.

I’m willing to bet you never could imagine a day when, at your own tax-paying expense, your child was going door to door under the ACORN banner while supervised by your elderly grandmother.  But that’s Pharaobama for you, making impossible dreams come true.

Again, I have to ask, what are you doing to win the election?

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