Twist His Tail!

“Look, i-i-if you've been successful, you didn't get there on your own.  You didn't get there on your own. I'm always struck by people who think, "Well, it must be because I was just so smart!”  There are a lot of smart people out there. "It must be because I worked harder than everybody else." Let me tell you something. There are a whole bunch of hardworkin' people out there!  If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help! If you’ve got a business - you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”  --Barack Obama

Well, okay so I have started 5 businesses and I suppose I should credit the government and the President with my success.  But among those 5 were also 3 that were failures and one that was just break-even.  So if Obama gets credit for my success, I want to know where the dickens was he when the businesses failed? Why didn’t he do a better job of marketing?  Why didn’t he get his kiester out of bed, come in at 4 am and work harder when things got rough?  And a friend of mine says he missed Barack too.  In fact they were working cattle and had a tough time with the darned bull.  Somebody yelled, “That’s enough, bull! Twist his tail! Twist his tail!”  He’s talking to you, Barack.

Sorry, having fun.  Everybody has been choking on this speech because of the obvious implication that we must then take from the rich and give to the poor.  Or the implication that the successful are merely lucky.  Or the indulgence of sloth.   May I point out that what he is preaching is called collective salvation/ collective guilt.  Christianity and Judaism don’t have this and say, “Each man must pay for his own sins.” “The wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life.”  But Liberation Theology and Islam hold that salvation and guilt are corporate.  Collective guilt is why Muslim fathers honor kill daughters—they fear for their own afterlife because of the sins of a family member.  Liberation Theology holds that the “gospel in a nutshell” we teach our children, “Jesus died for my sins” is dead wrong.  Jesus, they contend, came to earth to take from the rich and give to the poor.  He came for political liberation.  All you have to do is belong to a group, the poor, to deserve salvation.  And that is what Barack’s church and Rev. Wright teach.  And for exactly this reason, Liberation Theology has been declared a heresy by the Roman Catholic Church and has been condemned as non-Christian by just about every other church.