Scary comparison

I recently read a short article in Commentary (by George Russell) that reminded me of Jim Jones. Jim Jones of Jonestown and the mass suicide of 909 followers in 1978.

I knew Jim Jones and worked with him on occasion. I do not know Barack Obama but the parallels are horrifying.  

Jim was a socialist whose church sermons, sound to me, very much like Obama’s Chicago church of Jeremiah Wright. Jim claimed to be half black. Jim was a master of politics in San Francisco and was welcomed and supported by every prominent politician and public figure. The press adored him. Sound familiar.

Jim was somewhat paranoid and became much more so when a small local magazine article finally exposed the bizarre side of him. (I advised him to ignore it...he ignored me and fought back). I never saw his mean or cruel side but I know he was deeply committed to his socialist values and the communal ideas of communism. He moved his large church to the commune in Leftist Guyanna.  He hated the rich and excoriated them regularly. All his church members gave their savings to the church.

Obama has always promoted his own socialist views. Obama clearly has a mean streak. He sent back the gift bust of Winston Churchill the first week he was in office.  He scared the weak and elderly in July of 2011 with his imaginary threat to cut off Social Security checks. He went out of his way to try and start a class war and hasn’t stopped in the past five months. (Obama always attacks the ‘millionaires and billionaires, Wall Street, hedge fund managers and people who fly in private jets’.)

Obama, like the occupy movement he created, has been treated with deference and worship by the mainstream media. It is fair to use the Jim Jones metaphor that "the media has swallowed the Obama Kool-Aid".

Jim Jones enchanted the black community much like Obama.  Both are like the Pied Piper of Hamlin for the black community.

The power of Jim Jones and his message have not been studied at all. I fear therefore that the parallels with Obama are so great that we may have Obama for a second term simply based on the parallels in charisma and our propensity to swallow Kool-Aid.

It is significant and not ironic that attacks on the blindness of the press and the Left as drinking ‘Obama’s Kool-aid’ are using the Kool-aid phrase directly coming from Jim Jones. The parallels are disturbing.