WHEN A PRESIDENT DOES NOT KNOW THE CONSTITUTION

He says that heathcare is a civil right.

From Pajamas Media:

President Obama views civil rights not as protections for individuals against racially discriminatory treatment, but as a lever to produce fundamental economic redistribution. He believes, I argued, that the United States continues to be plagued by pervasive “structural inequality,” and that getting rid of it “requires the eradication of all manifestations of ‘inequality,’ whether or not the inequality was caused by discriminatory barriers.” Moreover, he stated in his speech to the NAACP convention on July 16, the most imposing “barrier” to equality today is not discrimination in the traditional sense but the very nature and structure of the American economy.

“Our task of reducing these structural inequalities,” he said, “has been made more difficult by the state, and structure, of the broader economy; an economy fueled by a cycle of boom and bust; an economy built not on a rock, but sand.”

The president has said many times that reforming health “insurance” is the linchpin of his effort to transform the economy, and he repeated that argument in Portsmouth:

Because even before this recession hit, we had an economy that was working pretty well for the wealthiest Americans. It was working pretty well for Wall Street bankers. It was working pretty well for big corporations, but it wasn’t working so well for everybody else. It was an economy of bubbles and busts. And we can’t go back to that kind of economy. If we want this country to succeed in the 21st century and if we want our children to succeed in the 21st century, then we’re going to have to take the steps necessary to lay a new foundation for economic growth. We need to build an economy that works for everybody and not just some people.

Now, health insurance reform is one of those pillars that we need to build up that new foundation.

So employer-provided private insurance is just one more bit of “structural inequality” to eradicate. And, despite the president’s assertion in Portsmouth that “I have not said that I was a single-payer supporter,” he has in fact said so, and more than once. “If I were designing a system from scratch, I would probably go ahead with a single-payer system,” he told a town hall meeting in New Mexico as recently as last August. And he was even more explicit in 2003, complete with road map:

I happen to be a proponent of a single payer universal health care program. I see no reason why the United States of America, the wealthiest country in the history of the world, spending 14 percent of its gross national product on health care cannot provide basic health insurance to everybody. … A single payer health care plan, a universal health care plan. And that’s what I’d like to see. But as all of you know, we may not get there immediately. Because first we have to take back the White House, we have to take back the Senate, and we have to take back the House.

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In short, President Obama’s health care vision — prohibiting private insurer “discrimination” — is of a piece with his civil rights vision of eradicating all “structural inequalities.” And both are manifestations of his overarching goal of replacing “boom and bust” capitalism, “built on sand,” with a system that would promote a massive redistribution of wealth.

Indeed, in a candid interview on WBEZ, a public radio station in Chicago,

on January 18, 2001, then state senator and Chicago law professor Obama was critical of the civil rights movement for relying too heavily on the courts because the Constitution, “at least as it’s been interpreted” by the Supreme Court, “never entered into the issues of redistribution of wealth, and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society.”

The audio of that interview can be found here and here (the video has been removed from YouTube)

Can I call him a Marxist now?