Guest Editorial
By Lawrence Sellin, PhD | APRIL 1, 2015
Obama Administration: Fifth columnists and useful idiots
Never in the course of American history has so much harm been done to so many by so few.
A fifth column is any group of people who undermine a larger group such as a nation from within. The activities of a fifth column can be overt or clandestine, using sabotage, disinformation or espionage conducted to undermine a government or a country by agents or sympathizers, who act traitorously and subversively out of a secret sympathy with an enemy.
A useful idiot is someone who supports one side of an ideological debate, but who is manipulated by the leaders of their faction or is unaware of the ultimate agenda driving the ideology to which they subscribe.
The term has been used in a similar sense as fellow travelers, communist sympathizers in Western countries, who blindly supported Lenin, Stalin and the totalitarian aims of the Soviet Union. The implication was that, although the people in question naïvely thought of themselves as standing for an altruistic socialist cause, they were actually held in contempt and were being cynically used by the Communist Party of Soviet Union for subversive activities in their native Western countries.
Today, useful idiot or "Obama groupie" largely refers to naive, misinformed or willfully ignorant liberals, leftists or Islamist sympathizers dominating academia, the media and Hollywood.
Together with the assistance of fifth columnists, useful idiots and compliant Republicans, Barack Obama is succeeding to fundamentally transform the United States of America and reshape our position in the world.
Obama's fundamental transformation is simply a euphemism for the age-old revolutionary goal of undermining the existing order by fostering and exploiting uncertainty and instability.
The foreign policy of the Obama Administration has been one punctuated by the withdrawal of American leadership from the global stage ("leading from behind"); regime change in secular Egypt, Syria and Libya in favor of Islamic extremism; supporting Iran over Israel and passivity in the face of Russian and Chinese expansionism; all of which contributes to instability and the ultimate transformation of the existing world order at the expense of western democracy.
Obama's domestic agenda of economic and social instability has included the massive growth of government and national debt; policies that increase regulation and lessen personal liberty; greater racial and ethnic divisiveness; scorn for American values and traditions and an illegal immigration strategy meant to permanently change the demographics of the American population; all of which ostensibly calculated to produce a de facto oppressive one-party state.
It is not just Obama's leftist and Islamic personal history or that he surrounds himself with people of similar beliefs, but it has been his actions in office that lead many American to conclude that the Obama Administration, seemingly infiltrated by fifth columnists and buttressed by useful idiots, pursues policies that facilitate rather than oppose the aims of our enemies.
More shocking, however, is the extent by which members of Congress and the media have shielded Obama and his acolytes from any serious scrutiny, demanded any meaningful accountability or mounted any sustained opposition.
Those who raise legitimate questions or identify potential wrongdoing are presumed racist or mentally unbalanced misfits, in a situation where the truth is casually sacrificed by Democrats and Republicans alike in order to preserve a corrupt political status quo, as Obama drives the country off the cliff.
Similar to the Soviet Union or an Islamic state, the Obama Administration need not fear that any of its agencies will do anything about the lies or misconduct. Nor need it fear that there will be objections from the elected representatives of the people. Nor need it fear that the media will raise any but polite questions.
Not a day goes by when I don't shake my head in disbelief.
We are indeed transformed.
Lawrence Sellin, Ph.D. is a retired colonel with 29 years of service in the US Army Reserve and a veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq. Colonel Sellin is the author of "Restoring the Republic: Arguments for a Second American Revolution."
He receives email at [email protected].
