Barack Obama’s Thanksgiving Message Emulates Bush’s, Ditches Pro-Life Words

National   |   Steven Ertelt   |   Nov 26, 2009   |   9:00AM   |   WASHINGTON, DC

Barack Obama’s Thanksgiving Message Emulates Bush’s, Ditches Pro-Life Words

by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor
November 26
, 2009

Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) — The Thanksgiving proclamation the White House issued on behalf of President Barack Obama is creating a bit of a controversy. The dustup doesn’t concern what the traditional holiday message from the president says, but rather what it doesn’t say.

The proclamation has already raised eyebrows for its brevity — coming in at just over 400 words and failing to note any accomplishments during Obama’s administration to this point.

Given that, for the pro-life community, Obama’s main accomplishment is aggressively promoting abortion funding at American taxpayers’ expense, there is another facet of the Thanksgiving message that is noteworthy.

Blogger Jill Stanek noticed the difference, primarily because her daughter had a hand in writing the final proclamation President George W. Bush issued last year.

"Daughter Daena worked as a writer, of proclamations in part, for President Bush during the last 18 months of his 2nd term. Coincidentally, Daena wrote Bush’s last Thanksgiving proclamation in 2008," Stanek said.

Stanek compared the 2008 and 2009 proclamations and found that Obama’s speechwriters essentially followed the Bush template — with two notable exceptions.

"I compared President Bush’s last and President Obama’s first and found the Obama writer pretty much followed Daena’s template, with the exception of excluding personal acknowledgment of Who to be thankful to," Stanek noted.

Bush’s proclamation reads: "On this day, let us all give thanks to God who blessed our Nation’s first days and who blesses us today. May He continue to guide and watch over our families and our country always."

"Obama’s only mention of God was in a quote by George Washington," Stanek observed. "And Daena made sure President Bush’s proclamation was chock full of thanksgiving for life."

Bush’s Thanksgiving message last year read: "We recognize that all of these blessings, and life itself, come not from the hand of man but from Almighty God…. Having arrived in the New World, these early settlers gave thanks to the Author of Life."

"Today, as we look back on the beginnings of our democracy, Americans recall that we live in a land of many blessings where every person has the right to live, work, and worship in freedom," it added.

Stanek concludes, "Of course, Obama’s pro-death team scrubbed all that."

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