From Monday’s Omega Letter by Jack Kinsella:

The Chameleon

One of President Bush’s first acts as president was to sign an executive order authorized what was dubbed, “The Faith-Based Initiative.”

The ACLU, the Looney Left and even the mainstream Democrats in both Houses went ballistic: “America isn’t a theocracy,” thundered the Left.

Helen Thomas, who inexplicably still occupies a seat in the White House briefing room reserved for real journalists, was probably the inspiration for the game show, “Jeopardy” for her skill at expressing her opinion in the form of a question.

“Mr. President, why do you refuse to respect the wall between the church and state? And you know that the mixing of religion and government for centuries has led to slaughter. I mean, the very fact that our country has stood in good stead by having the separation—why do you break it down?”

You see the question in there? No? You could if you agreed with Thomas’ opinion about a “wall between church and state”. If you could find such a wall mentioned in the Constitution, then you would understand what she meant about ‘breaking it down.’

Of course, no such wall actually exists. What does exist are these words: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof:”

What the President did (not Congress) was issue an Executive Order authorizing the government to work with ‘faith-based’ (ANY faith, Christian, Muslim, Jew, Buddhist, Zoroastrian, Bah-hai, even humanist) groups.

In essence, the Executive Order authorized faith-based groups to officially exist. No religion was established. If anything, the order lifted unConstitutional restrictions on the free exercise of faith.
But that didn’t stop the Left from demonizing the program at every opportunity. (Fascinating the way the Left goes ballistic at the mere mention of God, but have no objection to demons).

Until Barack Obama said, “Hey! You know what? This is a great idea!”

Now the Right hates the idea as much as the Left used to.

Assessment:

Over the course of a matter of weeks, Barack Hussein Obama has begun running to the right of John McCain.

In recent weeks, Obama has broken ranks with his liberal base on virtually every major issue they hoped to use against the Republicans in November.

Obama, the liberal anti-warrior who opposed the war ‘from the beginning’ and ‘would withdraw US forces from Iraq the day he took office’ has disappeared.

Now, Obama the Centrist favors listening to the commanders on the ground, (which has been the Bush position since 2003) and only withdrawing when it serves US strategic interests
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Obama led the fight against passage of the FISA law that would have retroactively granted telecommunications companies legal immunity for cooperating with the government.
(We’ll leave aside how helping one’s own government in wartime can be illegal for another day).
But Obama has reversed his position and voted in favor FISA — a law that he previously said was unconstitutional.

In his 1996 Illinois Senate bid, Obama said in his campaign questionnaire that he was morally and philosophically opposed to the death penalty.

Opposition to the death penalty is a bedrock principle of the Liberal Left. It is the ACLU’s cash cow — whenever they want to raise money, they take on some high-profile murderer and try to overturn his death sentence.

But Barack Obama the Presidential candidate only opposes the death sentence for murderers, evidently. When it comes to executing rapists, he’s as conservative as I am.

He slammed the Supreme Court’s recent decision to overturn the death sentence of a convicted rapist, saying at a June 6th news conference:
“I have said repeatedly that I think that the death penalty should be applied in very narrow circumstances for the most egregious of crimes ” Obama said that had the court “said we want to constrain the abilities of states to do this to make sure that it’s done in a careful and appropriate way, that would have been one thing. But it basically had a blanket prohibition and I disagree with that decision.”

In reporting Obama’s comments, CNN added helpfully (and untruthfully), “Obama has long supported the death penalty while criticizing the way it is sometimes applied.”
(In the real world, Obama opposed the death penalty — entirely –because he says it is ‘disproportionately applied to blacks” — but that was before he secured the Democratic nomination).

Barack Obama built his political career in part on his support for liberal-sponsored gun control laws.
Obama had previously not only favored Washington DC’s controversial ban on all handguns, Obama endorsed the Illinois effort to enact a state-side gun ban modeled after DC’s.

He also voted against a law that would make self-defense an affirmative defense to prosecution against unlawfully possessing a firearm. What does that mean in application?

Criminals who are already breaking the law have nothing to worry about, because Obama has made sure that law abiding citizens cannot carry a weapon to protect themselves against those criminals.
In the same questionnaire in which Obama listed his opposition to capital punishment, he pledged to support “the banning of all semi-automatic weapon sales and transfers.”
(While that sounds like military assault rifles, most handguns and many shotguns are also semi-automatics. In essence, it is a blanket ban on most everything other than a single shot .22 rifle).

Obama opposed the NRA, supported the ACLU’s position that the 2nd Amendment only applied to ‘militias’ and his position on gun control was among the issues that won him the most liberal voting record in the Senate.

But after the Supreme Court decision, Obama called a press conference to ‘reaffirm’ his view that the Second Amendment affords Americans an individual right to keep and bear arms — a complete and total reversal of his earlier position.

Obama the Liberal was in complete lock-step with the various pro-abortion groups and abortion lobbying groups like NARAL and Planned Parenthood.

Obama the Candidate went on record opposing the pro-abortion’s Number One argument favoring abortion as a health issue: the mental distress a ‘forced’ pregnancy puts on the mother.

In a magazine interview, Obama said, “I don’t think mental distress qualifies as the health of the mother. I think it has to be a serious physical issue that arises in pregnancy.”

Obama has also reversed himself on gay rights — now he favors restricting marriage to members of the opposite sex.

Finally, many months ago, Barack Obama, fearing the formidable Republican fund-raising machine, called on John McCain to join him in a pledge to accept public campaign funding, which would limit McCain’s fund-raising ability. McCain accepted the challenge and gave his word.

At the time, Obama never dreamed he would raise $150 million more than he could get from public financing. So last week, he opted out, keeping his $200 million and leaving McCain stuck with the $84 million spending cap.

Barack Obama, the most liberal lawmaker in the US Senate, is rapidly becoming the Dream Candidate — for the conservative Right.

He is now seemingly more conservative that John McCain on virtually all the issues that in the last general election belonged to the Republicans.

He has become a political chameleon, reversing virtually all the positions that the Democrats have run on for the past eight years; the Iraq war, gun control, abortion, gay rights, the death penalty and even on the role of religion in the public square.

Is Obama running on a platform of winning for change, or is he changing to win?

That question triggers a whole slew of other questions. Who is the real Barack Obama? What does he stand for? What does he stand against?

Is he a conservative? A liberal? A Democrat? A closet Republican? A Muslim? A Christian? Or a chameleon who is all things to all people?

“And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie: That they all might be damned who believed not the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness. ” (2nd Thessalonians 2:11-12)