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One Big Awful Mistake America

October 9, 2013 07:12

Mad with power, a disregard for the law and ignorant of truth, our King Barack continues his “fundamental transformation” of America.

By Alan Caruba

The Face of Tyranny

The history of civilization dating back some five millennia is one of Obama the King unrelenting tyranny, rapaciousness, arrogance, and stupidity. The players and the places changed, but the slaughter was unremitting, the suffering broken only by occasional brief periods of peace, good weather and crops. For most of the past, war, famine, and disease killed most people.

During the famous soliloquy of Hamlet, he contemplates taking his own life, saying “There’s the respect that makes calamity of so long life–for who would bear the whips and scorns of time, the oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely, the pangs of despised love, the law’s delay, the insolence of office…”

This list of woes neatly sums up the times in which we live as Americans endure many of these same abuses from a President who seems to enjoy displaying his contempt for them. He has plunged the nation into the highest debt in its history, is using the government shutdown as a crisis to divert attention from recent failures, and is flirting with a national default that would create domestic and international havoc…all while blaming the Republicans, the real end game.

As an October 3rd Wall Street Journal editorial noted, however, “House GOP leaders also insist they don’t want a default, and they’ve already passed a bill to prevent it—not that the media have paid any attention. First sponsored in 2011 by California Republican Tom McClintock and Pennsylvania Senator Pat Toomey, the Full Faith and Credit Act is essentially an insurance policy against miscalculation. Their bill certifies that U.S. sovereign debt will always be repaid, on time and in full.”

It is beginning to dawn on a lot of people that Barack Obama is the face of tryanny, a man for whom the Constitution, the democratic process and its need for compromise, exist only to be spurned.

Any President who is happy to preside over closing the White House to public tours, who authorizes placing barricades around Washington War Memorial that is normally open 24 hours a day as well as the Normandy, France D-Day cemetery where our soldiers are buried, is more than merely heartless, but represents a level of evil intent never before seen in anyone who has held that office.

The closing of the Normandy cemetery reminded me that history records that resistance to such tyrants has given rise to the rights of those they governed. The brother of England’s Richard the Lionhearted, John, had inherited the throne and through his incompetence in 1203 had lost Normandy, the last remaining possession in Western France the English had conquered.

The ill will that his barons felt, in part from the constant taxation John imposed, led them to renounce their allegiance to the crown of England. In 1215 they assembled at Runnymede, a water meadow on the Thames and presented John with the Magna Carta that spelled out their rights and those of all Englishmen, protecting them and their property against arbitrary arrest and confiscation without due process of law.

King John was actually fortunate. History records that rulers who acted ruthlessly were often assassinated or beheaded. It was commonplace.

The history of the United States records that the colonists, British subjects, had enjoyed self-rule for easily a century before the British crown, George III, seeking to replenish the treasury in lieu of having fought the French and Indian War in 1763 on behalf of the colonies, imposed the Stamp Act in 1765. It evoked such resistance that it was repealed and replaced a year later with the Townshend Acts that imposed taxes on paper, paint, glass and tea imported from England. They were followed by more resistance and led to an altercation on March 5, 1770 that killed a number of citizens and became known as the Boston Massacre.

For a list of what Americans had come to regard as usurpations of Jefferson_tyranny_quote power by the king, one need only read the Declaration of Independence.

By then, the governing of the British empire had spawned a bureaucracy that was not only large, but “appallingly inefficient” noted historian Nathaniel Philbrick in his book, “Bunker Hill: A City, A Siege, a Revolution.” After the Boston Tea Party, the king sent a flotilla to seal off Boston Harbor and increased the army in America. By then, George III was in no mood to negotiate.

President Obama has said he, too, does not intend to negotiate with the House of Representatives, constitutionally the body of government empowered to authorize all expenditures for the maintenance of the government.

The House has sent any number of proposed measures to keep the entire government funded, but has also expressed its wish to defund or delay the implementation of the Affordable Care Act which is widely unpopular. Against the protest of millions it was imposed solely by the Democratic Party when it controlled both houses of Congress.

Modern-day Americans have been enduring what many regard as acts of tyranny and have begun to regard the President as not merely incompetent, but bent on a course of action to destroy the nation. This is the stuff of revolution.

What If? A Guide to Conspiracy Theories

When I was a rookie reporter, an editor said, “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.” It captures the spirit of skepticism that journalists need if they are to decipher all the things politicians and others in positions of power claim as the truth.

Journalists have to be more than stenographers taking down quotes. They need to connect the dots between what is being said and what is being done with what may or may not have occurred earlier. Do they match up? Do they make sense?

In normal times, there are always a bunch of conspiracy theories floating around, but in times such as we are living through, they multiply like mushrooms in dark, fecund places. They feed on fear.

Who are we to believe? Well, start by applying as much logic as possible. Too much of what the Obama administration has been doing lacks a logical explanation.

Why would the ATF sanction a program of gun-running to Mexican cartels? Why would anyone believe that “a video” was the reason a covert operation in Benghazi, Libya, was attacked? Why would the White House back the Muslim Brotherhood and shut off funds to the Egyptian military when countless Egyptians were in the streets demanding the overthrow of the MB regime?

Why would any President, in the face of overwhelming evidence, believe anything the Iranians told them about their nuclear weapons program? Why has the National Security Agency ramped up its surveillance and capture of every American’s phone calls and emails? If it is so effective, why didn’t the FBI put a phone tap on the Tsarnev brothers after receiving a tip from the Russians that they were potential terrorists?

Why? Why? Why?

Part of the problem is the fact that the President blatantly lies about everything. It is no longer possible to know if he is telling the truth and the odds are very high that he is not. Those around him also put their spin on events. When caught, Lois Lerner, formerly of the Internal Revenue Service, took the Fifth Amendment refusing to testify about a program to deliberately deny tax exempt status to groups that might affect the outcome of an election or question the legitimacy of the Obama regime.

Recall that James Clapper, Obama’s Director of National Intelligence, knowingly lied to a congressional committee and, when caught, explained that he gave “the least untruthful” answer to a question that he had previously been informed would be asked. And, of course, the former Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, went along with the “video” cover story regarding the Benghazi attack.

The Obama administration is a virtual hornet’s nest of deception that generates conspiracy theories.

The voters were promised that the Obama administration would be the obama_sorry_yet_icon “most transparent” administration. Instead, New York Times reporter, David E. Sanger who broke the story about the US-Israeli cyber-attacks on the Iranian nuclear program, found that twenty years of contacts within the government would no longer talk to him after his phone, text, and emails were examined. “This is the most closed, control-freak administration I’ve ever covered,”said Sanger.

Leonard Downie, Jr., former executive editor of The Washington Post, wrote a report about the regime’s tactics regarding the press, noting how at one point, “The Justice Department secretly subpoenaed and seized from telephone companies two months of records for 20 Associated Press phone lines and switchboards used by more than 100 reporters in four of its news bureaus.”

The D.C. press corps, at this point, must be among the most paranoid citizens of the nation’s capital. However, only the about Downie’s report suggests that there is a problem. As often as not, it is left to a hodge-podge of pundits and bloggers to cite statements and activities by the administration that suggest that they represent something far more dangerous to liberty than the usual government instinct to keep secrets. The consumer of the “What if?” questions raised has to take care not to be spooked by each new one.

What bothers many observers the most is the immense power of the presidency. It is based on a vast matrix of executive orders and legislation, to declare a national “emergency” and impose martial law. One such executive order gives the President the power to control every aspect of communications, transportation, agriculture, and other normal activities.

At that point, who will have the power to thwart the imposition of a totalitarian regime on Americans? It’s a question that needs an answer.

I, for one, take comfort in knowing that the members of the U.S. military take an oath to uphold the Constitution. It is not, as was the case of Nazi Germany, an oath to the Fuhrer or in our case the President.