White House transcript hides Obama’s chattering-class gaffe
By Neil MunroWhite House officials have quietly changed an official transcript to hide President Barack Obama’s embarrassing historical error during his international press conference with French President Francois Hollande.
Obama’s error came when he misnamed Alexis de Tocqueville, a clear-eyed Frenchman who explained the subtle miracle of American culture and democracy in the 1830s. His book is a classic, partly because his insights about Americans’ social equality and civic society have become commonplace among centrists and conservatives.
But Obama called him “Alex” in front of the French and U.S. press, and while facing banks of TV cameras.
The White House’s official transcript, however, hides the presidential error by using the correct name. It now says that Obama declared: “Alexis de Tocqueville — that great son of France who chronicled our American democracy.”
Obama’s error was slight, but badly timed, partly because Obama is holding a state dinner for Hollande tonight.
Also, the error is an embarrassment for a president who claims to have been a constitutional scholar, and a judicious student of American history.
It’s also embarrassing for Obama’s many chattering-class supporters in politics, academia and the media, who have tried to portray Obama as exemplar of what they want to see in a president — a nuanced, reflective and careful thinker.
Camp: IRS Targeted Established Conservative Groups for Audits, Too
By Dave Camp...On Tuesday, House Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp (R., Mich.) said his committee’s continuing investigation has found that the IRS also singled out established conservative tax-exempt groups for audits.
“We now know that the IRS targeted not only right-leaning applicants, but also right-leaning groups that were already operating as 501(c)(4)s,” Mr. Camp said in a statement. “At Washington, DC’s direction, dozens of groups operating as 501(c)(4)s were flagged for IRS surveillance, including monitoring of the groups’ activities, websites and any other publicly available information. Of these groups, 83% were right-leaning. And of the groups the IRS selected for audit, 100% were right-leaning.”
...In response, the committee’s top Democrat said Republicans continue to exaggerate the matter to suit their political purposes.
PK'S NOTE: This is also absolutely illegal. But who's keeping track anymore?
Companies Must Now Swear — to the IRS — That None of Their Layoffs Are Because of Obamacare
By Bryan Preston
This is one way to skew the Obamacare stats and turn the IRS into the Democrats’ personal political army in a stroke.
Consider what administration officials announcing the new exemption for medium-sized employers had to say about firms that might fire workers to get under the threshold and avoid hugely expensive new requirements of the law. Obama officials made clear in a press briefing that firms would not be allowed to lay off workers to get into the preferred class of those businesses with 50 to 99 employees. How will the feds know what employers were thinking when hiring and firing? Simple. Firms will be required to certify to the IRS – under penalty of perjury – that ObamaCare was not a motivating factor in their staffing decisions. To avoid ObamaCare costs you must swear that you are not trying to avoid ObamaCare costs. You can duck the law, but only if you promise not to say so.Company officials will be trapped in a catch-22. They can lay off as many people as they want because of Obamacare. But because they’ll have to swear to the IRS that their decisions had nothing to do with Obamacare, they can’t speak publicly about what’s happening. What a great way to silence the people who are on the front lines of dealing with Obamacare’s horrific effects.
Obama Frees America From the Tyranny of Law
Executive orders aim to prevent ‘Constitution-lock.’
By Charles C W Cooke...“Executive lawmaking” sounds so harsh, don’t you think? Perhaps conceive of it instead as the executive branch’s “liberating“ itself from that pesky “Constitution-lock” we’ve heard so much about. After all, the alternative is just too depressing: “Whatever the stated reason for the new delay,” Kontorovich’s colleague at Volokh, Jonathan H. Adler, adjudged candidly, “it is illegal,” and “the increasing brazenness with which the Administration is disregarding inconvenient or ill-conceived portions of its signature legislative achievement lowers the bar to a disturbing degree.” Fair enough. But how rich and how various have been those reasons! “Why do you care: you like the outcome?” the president’s critics have been asked, just one among a host of unconvincing defenses that have included, “well, I don’t like Congress,” “think of it more as that the White House is improving the law,” “this is too important for the rules,” “look, Obama won,” and, perhaps my all-time favorite, “what are you going to do about it anyway?”
In court? Not too much, in all likelihood. As so often, nobody seems to have standing. Legally, though, this isn’t even a close one. Obamcare’s text clearly instructs that the employer mandate is to come into effect on January 1 of this year, and, as Adler adroitly demonstrates, the established rule is that if Congress explicitly enacts a deadline without including the means by which that deadline may be changed, the president is required to enforce the law as written. “The Executive Branch is supposed to faithfully execute the laws Congress enacts, not rewrite them,” Adler concludes — a sentiment that should surprise nobody who has even a rudimentary grasp of American civics. Obamacare contains no exception to that rule.
Still, with his signature legislation on the line and the ghastly prospect of a fully Republican Congress presiding over his final two years, this is all proving a touch restrictive for our intrepid, transforming hero. Thus have we been treated to an intriguing paradox: When Congress wishes to delay or amend Obamacare, it risks upsetting the entire American settlement — nullifying a law that was apparently set in aspic, never to be touched; but when Obama wishes to delay or amend Obamacare, he is merely ensuring that it works properly. Indeed, if Congress so much as hints that it would be willing to pass an alteration to the law, the administration takes it as read that it has been granted the moral permission to act on its own; but if Congress wouldn’t be willing to pass a change, then the president is forced to act in order to counter what we are reliably informed is unprecedented obstruction. It’s awfully clever.
This approach seems to have convinced the press corps, even in such cases as it is patently obvious that the government’s changes have nothing to do with the government and everything to do with politics. Almost every media outlet openly acknowledged yesterday that the newest delay was the product of electoral expedience — “in a midterm election year, the WH simply did not need any more healthcare headaches,” CBS’s Major Garrett averred, his eyebrows remaining level — and yet in not a single case did anybody ask the next question, “how is this remotely acceptable?” Certainly, I comprehend the temptation toward cynicism that the abject hypocrisy of politics can yield. I empathize, too, with those who have come to the resigned conclusion that all legal opinions are driven by partisan preference and that each and every challenge to the process by which things are achieved is ultimately a cloaked objection to the outcome at hand. As conservatives had a poor record of calling out executive overreach when George W. Bush was president, the progressive response to Obama’s accelerating domestic imperialism has thus far been to cheer and ask for more. But are we to conclude that this make it acceptable? Of course not.
“They seem to not understand that it’s not the delay we oppose,” Red Alert’s Allen Ginzburg sighed yesterday, “but the President circumventing the legislature to do it.” Quite so. And they seem not to understand, either, that the system, which is supposed to sit above the politics of the day, is the product not of the last election cycle but of a centuries-old struggle between lawmakers and executives — one that runs through the Magna Carta, the English Civil War, the Glorious Revolution, the American Revolution, the drafting of the Constitution and the consequent fight between the federalists and anti-federalists, a fight that set the stage for the political cleavages with which we still contend today.
In the heat of battle, it might appear to its apologists as if Obamacare is worth the destruction of the established order.
Chilling: Why An Underreported, ‘Significant Incident of Domestic Terrorism’ Might Not Be a Failed Attack at All
By Elizabeth Kreft- On April 16, 2013 six men launched an attack on a critical power station in California.
- The attack consisted of hundreds of AK-47 rounds being unleashed on 10 large transformers — and it was first called “vandalism.”
- But the former chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission calls it “the most significant incident of domestic terrorism involving the grid that has ever occurred.”
- It has largely gone unreported, although TheBlaze did cover it last December.
- Dr. Peter Vincent Pry tells TheBlaze, “If it was a terrorist attack, the electric power industry and the media are almost certainly in error to describe it as a ‘failed attack.’”
- Former CIA director James Woolsey adds, “Without electricity we aren’t a civilization, and this is a major societal vulnerability.”
Repeal the Debt Ceiling
The borrowing limit has a become a tool to increase spending.
... Republicans are never willing to shoot their debt-limit hostage, so the limit has now become Democratic leverage against Republicans. Why continue the pretense of fighting over a debt limit that doesn't limit debt?Before it created the debt ceiling in 1917, Congress had to vote to approve each new government bond issue, specifying the amount to be borrowed and the terms. This is in stark contrast to today's practice, when Treasury is generally free to borrow at will until it hits the statutory borrowing limit. Congress could repeal the debt ceiling and go back to approving each new debt issue.
Returning to the pre-1917 practice might provide better negotiating leverage to limit taxes and spending. It would also make Congress again directly responsible for government borrowing, returning some political accountability for federal debt accumulation that hasn't existed for nearly 100 years.
We realize this is precisely why Congress won't do it. But wouldn't it be nice to be free of more debt-ceiling melodrama that is designed to make voters think Washington cares about the debt but does nothing to reduce it?
Attorney General Eric Holder Calls for Lifting Bans on Felons' Voting Rights
By Caroline SchaefferSpeaking at a civil rights conference at Georgetown University, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder called on 11 states to lift their ban on voting rights for ex-felons, saying these laws disproportionally affect minorities.
The New York Times says Holder described these bans as a “vestige of the racist policies of the South after the Civil War.” Wait, is Holder saying that maintaining a standard of voting that a person must be a law abiding-citizen is a racist policy? Because a felon is defined as someone who has broken a felony statute. And I’m pretty sure anyone of any race can be guilty of that – because the standard is based on a behavior and not a skin color.
If the Attorney General believes that such standards are prejudiced because the justice system is rigged against minorities, then he should focus his time and attention on that issue (without resorting to dismissal of just penalties for crimes that were actually committed). But one suspects this is about something else: the fact that felons tend to vote Democrat.
Why say that? Because Eric Holder is remarkably less interested in ensuring that all military members have the ability to vote than making sure felons do. Military members are over 30% representative of “minority” groups, even higher than the general population, so are “hurdles” to voting for servicemen a reflection of “racist” policies?
Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) once pointed out that as many as 1 in 4 military members were disenfranchised in the 2008 election. Despite the passage of the Military and Overseas Voter Empowerment (MOVE) Act to help remedy the situation, requests for absentee ballots in the U.S. military dropped by 70% by the 2012 election- including in the closely contested battleground states of Virginia and Ohio.
Domestic surveillance will be a vehicle for oppression, sooner or later
By Ed MorrisseyGlenn Reynolds’ latest column for USA Today is worth noting for its clear warning on the corrosive nature of domestic spying. The NSA claims it’s not conducting the kind of snooping of which Glenn warns, but then again, they didn’t admit to the surveillance they were conducting until it became impossible to deny. And that, Glenn says, is the problem:
But if the federal government has broad domestic-spying powers, and if those are controlled by the executive branch without significant oversight, then the president has the power to snoop on political enemies, getting an advantage in countering their plans, and gathering material that can be used to blackmail or destroy them. With such power in the executive, the traditional role of the other branches as checks would be seriously undermined, and our system of government would veer toward what James Madison in The Federalist No. 47 called “the very definition of tyranny,”that is, “the accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands.”In other words, we need to adhere to the Constitution for all law-enforcement activity within the US. NSA’s external mission can exist in accordance with that without much change, if any at all. That seems pretty simple to me, and a pretty good principle to follow.
That such widespread spying power exists, of course, doesn’t prove that it has actually been abused. But the temptation to make use of such a power for self-serving political ends is likely to be very great. And, given the secrecy surrounding such programs, outsiders might never know. In fact, given the compartmentalization that goes on in the intelligence world, almost everyone at the NSA might be acting properly, completely unaware that one small section is devoted to gather political intelligence. We can hope, of course, that such abuses would leak out, but they might not.
Rather than counting on leakers to protect us, we need strong structural controls that don’t depend on people being heroically honest or unusually immune to political temptation, two characteristics not in oversupply among our political class. That means that the government shouldn’t be able to spy on Americans without a warrant — a warrant that comes from a different branch of government, and requires probable cause. The government should also have to keep a clear record of who was spied on, and why, and of exactly who had access to the information once it was gathered. We need the kind of extensive audit trails for access to information that, as the Edward Snowden experience clearly illustrates, don’t currently exist.
In addition, we need civil damages — with, perhaps, a waiver of governmental immunities — for abuse of power here. Perhaps we should have bounties for whistleblowers, too, to help encourage wrongdoing to be aired.
Dependency, Not Poverty
By Walter E WilliamsThere is no material poverty in the U.S. Here are a few facts about people whom the Census Bureau labels as poor. Dr. Robert Rector and Rachel Sheffield, in their study "Understanding Poverty in the United States: Surprising Facts About America's Poor" (http://tinyurl.com/448flj8), report that 80 percent of poor households have air conditioning; nearly three-quarters have a car or truck, and 31 percent have two or more. Two-thirds have cable or satellite TV. Half have one or more computers. Forty-two percent own their homes. Poor Americans have more living space than the typical non-poor person in Sweden, France or the U.K. What we have in our nation are dependency and poverty of the spirit, with people making unwise choices and leading pathological lives aided and abetted by the welfare state.
The Census Bureau pegs the poverty rate among blacks at 35 percent and among whites at 13 percent. The illegitimacy rate among blacks is 72 percent, and among whites it's 30 percent. A statistic that one doesn't hear much about is that the poverty rate among black married families has been in the single digits for more than two decades, currently at 8 percent. For married white families, it's 5 percent. Now the politically incorrect questions: Whose fault is it to have children without the benefit of marriage and risk a life of dependency? Do people have free will, or are they governed by instincts?
There may be some pinhead sociologists who blame the weak black family structure on racial discrimination. But why was the black illegitimacy rate only 14 percent in 1940, and why, as Dr. Thomas Sowell reports, do we find that census data "going back a hundred years, when blacks were just one generation out of slavery ... showed that a slightly higher percentage of black adults had married than white adults. This fact remained true in every census from 1890 to 1940"? Is anyone willing to advance the argument that the reason the illegitimacy rate among blacks was lower and marriage rates higher in earlier periods was there was less racial discrimination and greater opportunity?
No one can blame a person if he starts out in life poor, because how one starts out is not his fault. If he stays poor, he is to blame because it is his fault. Avoiding long-term poverty is not rocket science. First, graduate from high school. Second, get married before you have children, and stay married. Third, work at any kind of job, even one that starts out paying the minimum wage. And finally, avoid engaging in criminal behavior. It turns out that a married couple, each earning the minimum wage, would earn an annual combined income of $30,000. The Census Bureau poverty line for a family of two is $15,500, and for a family of four, it's $23,000. By the way, no adult who starts out earning the minimum wage does so for very long.
Since President Lyndon Johnson declared war on poverty, the nation has spent about $18 trillion at the federal, state and local levels of government on programs justified by the "need" to deal with some aspect of poverty. In a column of mine in 1995, I pointed out that at that time, the nation had spent $5.4 trillion on the War on Poverty, and with that princely sum, "you could purchase every U.S. factory, all manufacturing equipment, and every office building. With what's left over, one could buy every airline, trucking company and our commercial maritime fleet. If you're still in the shopping mood, you could also buy every television, radio and power company, plus every retail and wholesale store in the entire nation" (http://tinyurl.com/kmhy6es). Today's total of $18 trillion spent on poverty means you could purchase everything produced in our country each year and then some.
There's very little guts in the political arena to address the basic causes of poverty. To do so risks being labeled as racist, sexist, uncaring and insensitive. That means today's dependency is likely to become permanent.
Former Obama labor secretary did not report union-funded private jet trips to the FEC
By Patrick HowleyFormer Obama administration Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis took thousands of dollars of free trips on a union’s jet to “avoid freeway traffic” and did not report the trips as required by federal law, according to a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court against union leaders.Solis traveled on a private jet owned by the International Union of Operating Engineers (IUOE) Local 12 in a series of pricey trips that she did not report to the Federal Election Commission, according to a report on the lawsuit by Hews Media Group. The trips occurred in 2009, and some were intended to fly her to Washington, D.C. when she was being considered for the Obama cabinet post.
...The Daily Caller reported late last week that the Department of Labor under both Solis and her successor, Thomas Perez, engaged in racial discrimination and discrimination against workers with disabilities and longtime non-college educated employees, according to an internal assessment prepared by American Federation of Government Employees
(AFGE) Local 12, which represents low-ranking Department of Labor
staffers. Solis hated AFGE Local 12 during her time at the Labor
Department, insiders said.Culture of Corruption Postscript: The Hilda Solis Files
By Michelle Malkin...Question: Why did she step down from her cushy White House post? Inquiring local reporters in Los Angeles wanted to know.
Last week, the Los Angeles Times reported that her resignation coincided with an FBI inquiry into her role at an Obama reelection campaign fundraiser in 2012. When the paper asked the Solis campaign whether she had informed Obama of the FBI probe, a spokesman responded tersely: "It is inappropriate for a cabinet official to (discuss) private communications with the president."
Oh, now we care about what's appropriate? LOL.
It also turns out that for the entire last year she served as President Obama's labor secretary, Solis had retained a high-priced Washington, D.C., law firm "to address legal issues" involving the fundraiser and possible violations of the federal Hatch Act -- which prevents cabinet members from directly grubbing for campaign cash. Solis had incurred a debt of between $50,000 and $100,000 for the legal bills. Her campaign says it's almost "all" paid off, but won't specify by how much.
On Monday, the latest eruption of corruptocracy shook the Solis machine. Hews Media Group-Community News obtained a lawsuit filed in California's Central U.S. District Court claiming that Solis "was provided thousands of dollars worth of free private jet travel without declaring the trips on the federal government required forms, paid for by the powerful International Union of Operating Engineers based in Pasadena during the same period she was undergoing confirmation hearings to become part of Obama's cabinet." IUOE Local 12 owns a Cessna Citation XL jet, which ferried Solis back and forth between the coasts. IUOE First Vice President William Waggoner, a defendant in the suit, reportedly bragged to fellow union officials that he was providing her transportation.
...Jet-setting union crony Solis has the gall to brag about her record fighting income inequality and defending Big Labor rights. Maybe she should focus less on closing the wage gap and more on closing her truth and ethics gap.
The Privileged People
By John StosselPoliticians say, "We're all equal," and pretend that they represent everyone. But, in fact, they constantly pick winners and losers. America is now like the place described in George Orwell's book "Animal Farm": "All animals are equal," but some are "more equal than others." "Animal Farm" was about Communism, but today the allegory applies to our bloated democracy, too.
During the "fiscal cliff" negotiations that Congress and the media made sound so tough -- as if every last penny were pinched -- Congress still managed to slip in plenty of special deals for cronies.
--NASCAR got $70 million for new racetracks.
--Algae growers got $60 million.
--Hollywood film producers got a $430 million tax break.
...Politicians doling out favors quietly shift where society's resources flow, who gets employed, what ideas are pursued.
It distorts the economy and the culture -- and it turns us into a nation of favor-seekers instead of creators and producers.
What about all the new businesses that would have gotten investment money but didn't have Gore on their boards? What new ideas might have thrived if old industries weren't coddled? We don't know. We will never know the greatness of what might have existed had the state not sucked the oxygen out of the incubator.
Because of government's favor-granting, Washington, D.C., is now the place where the well-connected go to get rich. For the first time in history, six of the richest counties in the U.S. surround D.C. When a small group of people gets to dispense $3.6 trillion and set rules that can help or kill your idea, you want to suck up to them.
As long as government has the power to grant favors, cronies and their lobbyists will seek those favors out.
The privileged win. The people lose.
Why Democrats Hate Work
By Ben Shapiro...But, of course, people can only do what they want by taxing other Americans, borrowing from foreign creditors, and burdening future generations with unsustainable debt. And unfortunately, Schumer's proclamation that the greatest beneficiaries of Obamacare will be single mothers turns out to be false: One of the studies relied upon by the CBO stated that those who benefit from the end of job lock are disproportionately white, single and of work age.
In reality, the Democratic vision of the world centers on the notion that work itself is a great evil to be avoided, and that any program allowing people to free themselves of work -- whether to finger-paint or start a garage band -- is an unmitigated good. "Job lock," according to the definition Reid gives, goes by another name, according to those who live in the real world: "having a job." There are times that everyone hates his or her job. Were they freed from the economic consequences of having these jobs, they'd drop out of the workforce.
There are only two problems with this strategy: First, someone has to pay for it; second, it is not the recipe for human fulfillment. Leisure time is only leisure time when it is earned; otherwise, leisure time devolves into soul-killing lassitude. There's a reason so many new retirees, freed from the treadmill of work, promptly keel over on the golf course: Work fulfills us. It keeps us going.
How Much Does It Cost to Be Ambassador to Hungary?
By Jeffrey Goldberg...Who is Colleen Bell? Bell is a soap opera producer -- “The Bold and the Beautiful” is her masterwork -- who was nominated by Barack Obama's administration to serve as U.S. ambassador to Hungary. Bell, one of Obama’s larger fundraising “bundlers,” bought this nomination with more than $500,000 of mostly other people’s money.
At her confirmation hearing last month, McCain asked Bell an exceedingly simple question: “What are our strategic interests in Hungary?”
She gave the following imperishable answer: “Well, we have our strategic interests, in terms of what are our key priorities in Hungary, I think our key priorities are to improve upon, as I mentioned, the security relationship and also the law enforcement and to promote business opportunities, increase trade-- ”
McCain interrupted her: “I’d like to ask again what our strategic interests in Hungary are.”
Bell plowed ahead. “Our strategic interests are to work collaboratively as NATO allies, to work to promote and protect the security, both -- for both countries and for -- and for the world, to continue working together on the cause of human rights around the world, to build that side of our relationship while also maintaining and pursuing some difficult conversations that might be necessary in the coming years.”
To which McCain replied, witheringly, “Great answer.”
Bell’s performance didn't draw much media attention, mainly because she was blessed to be testifying that same day with the administration’s nominee to serve as ambassador to Norway, the Long Island hotelier George Tsunis, who didn't seem to know that Norway is a monarchy, and who also called a party in Norway’s ruling coalition a “fringe” element given to spewing hatred. Tsunis, like Bell, and an unfortunately large number of other Obama nominees for ambassadorial slots in consequential countries, is also a bundler.
...The corruption here is multilayered. There is the corruption of governance and diplomacy, in which ambassadorships are sold to the highest bidder. And then there is a more subtle form of corruption, in which the people’s representatives are made to feel as if they must provide cover for the corrupt practices of the executive branch.
Hereditary Democracy?
By James Longstreet
Thomas
Paine once said, "Hereditary government violates the rights of the
governed." Of course Paine referred to the likes of monarchs and
generational rule by birth. However, is our current condition so
distant?
Birth alone may not occasion the chain reaction, per se, but the money accumulated, the networking that is passed along in families, and the media visibility advantages of birth to a high government official are not of little consequence.
Ted Cruz once opined that the conflict, the political contest in this country is not between the Democrats and the Republicans, but between the entrenched established politicians and the citizenry. (I paraphrase). Too much money and too much time are required to rise to high elective office and only the most driven and well-heeled can meet the criteria. The election cycles begin to blend together and the same characters, or their kin, take the stage.
The pool of candidates sometimes seems a puddle. Almost insurmountable is the power that comes with the inheritance of the previously elected relative. Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush may very well be the choices in 2016, the end products of two giant power structures cultivated over the decades. Foundations and speaking fees do a poor job of masking money collected for past and future influence.
And those other potential candidates, those who come from the politically unwashed citizenry, soon meet scathing excavations into their past. Accuracy of accusations be damned. The mere accusatory exercise can be embarrassing and damaging even if proven inaccurate and later withdrawn on page 12. Cleansing one's past seems like step one for office seekers. That can require some expensive janitorial work.
Bill and Hillary Clinton left office in 2000. They were all but broke. Legal bills had been a draining burden. Flash forward. Bill Clinton made $17 Million last year in speaking engagements. Hillary can knock out $400,000 for a monotone vapid speech rife with platitudes and banalities. The Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation seems to create quite a flow of money each year. (Some questions raised.)
And then there is Jeb Bush. Too bad his name isn't George. We could have had a George III just 250 years after England. A full circle, if you will.
Birth alone may not occasion the chain reaction, per se, but the money accumulated, the networking that is passed along in families, and the media visibility advantages of birth to a high government official are not of little consequence.
Ted Cruz once opined that the conflict, the political contest in this country is not between the Democrats and the Republicans, but between the entrenched established politicians and the citizenry. (I paraphrase). Too much money and too much time are required to rise to high elective office and only the most driven and well-heeled can meet the criteria. The election cycles begin to blend together and the same characters, or their kin, take the stage.
The pool of candidates sometimes seems a puddle. Almost insurmountable is the power that comes with the inheritance of the previously elected relative. Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush may very well be the choices in 2016, the end products of two giant power structures cultivated over the decades. Foundations and speaking fees do a poor job of masking money collected for past and future influence.
And those other potential candidates, those who come from the politically unwashed citizenry, soon meet scathing excavations into their past. Accuracy of accusations be damned. The mere accusatory exercise can be embarrassing and damaging even if proven inaccurate and later withdrawn on page 12. Cleansing one's past seems like step one for office seekers. That can require some expensive janitorial work.
Bill and Hillary Clinton left office in 2000. They were all but broke. Legal bills had been a draining burden. Flash forward. Bill Clinton made $17 Million last year in speaking engagements. Hillary can knock out $400,000 for a monotone vapid speech rife with platitudes and banalities. The Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation seems to create quite a flow of money each year. (Some questions raised.)
And then there is Jeb Bush. Too bad his name isn't George. We could have had a George III just 250 years after England. A full circle, if you will.
Obama's Fate
By J R Dunn
It's
no surprise that Barack Obama's authoritarian streak is revealing
itself at last. It was always there; clearly apparent in his rhetoric
(e.g., his envy of Chinese president Xi Jin-ping's powers), his abuse of
executive orders, his threats against Congress, his sultan with
fly-whisk attitudes toward his opposition, and even his vacations, which
reek more of third-world trash gamboling on the Riviera than any
American leader (George W. Bush settled his mind by clearing brush in
Texas, Reagan at his ranch in Santa Barbara. Obama unfortunately finds
the brush already cleared in Martha's Vineyard and Hawaii.) The sole question that remains is how anyone can deny it.
Obama comes by his attitude toward government honestly enough. Just before the 2012 election I published a piece here at AT analyzing Obama's political background. He spent most of his formative years in Indonesia, exposed almost exclusively to the influences of Indonesian culture -- Islam, mass public corruption, and a political system based on two-fisted authoritarianism. Obama's political heritage is rooted in the postwar Islamic strongman role pioneered by Gamel Abdul Nasser, the leader of Egypt from 1953 to 1970, and then refined by numerous other such figures, including Achmed Sukarno and Mohammed Suharto of Indonesia.
Sukarno was a colorful leader who controlled a populist coalition of the military, the peasants, and the intelligentsia (among them a powerful communist party), through a three-ring political circus in which the main attraction was Sukarno's never-ending one-man battle against the West. After nearly two decades of this, the country was in serious danger of going into the dumpster -- Sukarno had pulled Indonesia out of the UN and was kissing up to the Chinese, in the process turning ever larger sections of government over to the local communists. This lost him the military, always a mistake for a third-world strongman, and in 1965 things came to a head with a bungled coup (planned by whom? -- something that remains uncertain to this day) in which a number of military officers were murdered. The army struck back, and after a confused interlude featuring massacres across the country, the communists were out (most of them -- estimates range up to half a million -- dead), Sukarno was under house arrest, and General Suharto had ended up as maximum leader.
Suharto ran the country as his personal fiefdom for the next thirty-odd years. At the end of that period he had distinguished himself as possibly the most corrupt ruler in history, with a fortune of thirty billion plus stashed in various foreign banks. His avaricious family, which controlled most of the county's industry, pocketed at least as much. Under Suharto's control, Indonesia became notorious for its atrocities in West Irian and East Timor, at the same time meandering its way to a vague prosperity that in no way matched nearby Singapore and Malaysia. (To give Suharto due credit, he did not allow dogs to eat off the china.)
This was the political culture in which Barack Obama came to consciousness. This is the way of life he was first exposed to, and obviously enough, the way he thinks things should be. A single all-powerful ruler, lazy and with few demands on his time, his dictates carried out by a loyal cabal, a terrified and obedient opposition, total corruption, show initiatives that are meant solely as theater with no concrete results expected, and levels of luxury unattainable even by the world's billionaires. This is the program he is attempting to carry out, the system he wishes to put in place. It is not communist, it is not socialist, it is not democratic, any more than Nasser, who probably used the word as often as Lenin, was a socialist. It is pure third-world authoritarianism. This is what half of the American electorate, largely consisting of Low Information Voter boobs assisted by mulish conservatives, put into office two times in a row in the sophisticated, technologically-advanced 21st century.
When he eventually turned his eyes toward politics, Obama gravitated to the single place in the United States that most resembles a third-world tyranny -- Chicago. Controlled for years by a single party, and for much of that period by a single family (the Daleys), Chicago embodies Indonesian corruption and authoritarianism (if not climate) to a point beyond the understanding of luckier Americans. (Among other techniques of control, when a Chicago precinct captain ascertains that a voter has cast his vote the wrong way, the miscreant's garbage cans -- owned by the city -- are confiscated, and he's left on his own to solve the problem of family waste disposal. Suharto never came up with anything more effective than this.)
So it's no surprise that Dinesh D'Souza should be facing heavy penalties for a "crime" that earns wrist-slaps for Democratic supporters, that the degradation of the IRS should be, not punished, but applauded and supported by the likes of Charles Schumer, that Bill DeBlasio should choose to punish his own voters -- that is, inhabitants of the Upper East Side who made the error of voting against him in the primaries before coming around in the general election --by withholding the plows during the recent blizzard (as pure a piece of Suhartoism as you will find in this country), that Andrew Cuomo, son of America's foremost Thomas Aquinas scholar, should call for the removal of nearly half his state's population for thought crimes. They are following the example of their party leader, a boy who was raised among the wolves, who spent six years in one of the most odious political cultures of the mid-20th century. And we expect him, all grown up, to act as a true heir of Washington and Lincoln?
All this raises two questions: the first, how a healthy polity could have elected such a creature. We will skip that for now, since I will shortly be laughing too hard to type.
The second, and more urgent is: how far can this go?
Many on the right insist that they know the answer to that: that it will go all the way, that the jackboots will begin stomping, the barbed wire will go up, the Constitution will vanish and the commonwealth, under the thumb of President-for-Life Obama the First, will subside into third-world lassitude, violence, and corruption.
All this is supposed to happen when Obama does two things: calls off any new elections and declares martial law. The kindest thing we can say about this thesis is that it was worked out in ignorance of the actual political and legal mechanics. (e.g., there is no provision for "calling off elections" or declaring martial law in federal statute. Obama would have to appeal to Congress for the first and the state governors for the second, in neither case with hopes of success.) We must not take counsel of our fears.
We need only ask ourselves how Obama's political mentor Mohammed Suharto would have ended up if he'd tried his game in the United States. Thirty years of absolute power would be unlikely; more like thirty years in Leavenworth. An uneducated medieval polity is the starting point for such a train of events, not the finishing point.
Which doesn't mean that we can rest easy; much unpleasantness can and will occur. Consider New York State. Andrew Cuomo governs downtown Albany and New York City. He pays attention to nothing else in the state -- the Mohawk Valley, the Finger Lakes, the Adirondacks, may as well not exist. He acts for two interfaced elites -- political in Albany and financial in NYC. The rest of the state is peasantry, without jobs, without hope, without a future, enabled to subsist by federal welfare programs.
Now, what in the world does this remind us of? What else is New York State but a temperate zone third-world country? (It even features the governorship handed off from father to son -- granted a brief interlude -- much as we see in such regimes.)
This is what the Democrats have in mind for the rest of the country. The prospect we're facing is not 1984, or Nazi Germany, or even Suharto's Indonesia. It is contemporary Argentina, controlled by elites, bouncing from one political extreme to the other, run by an ever more bizarre train of lunatics, with a government that relates to the people in much the same way that a parasite relates to its host.
Can this be stopped? Only if we begin acting like citizens of a republic, which may well be too much to ask.
All the same, I tend to view the world though the eyes of a novelist, in which seemingly unrelated events and activities -- the subplots -- inexorably intertwine over time to bring about a grand climax. Looking at the current political situation, I sense the approach of nemesis. Our antagonists have gone a little too far. They have said too much, have threatened too many people, and have done so in words that they can't back off from. How can Cuomo explain away his contempt for millions of citizens of his state? How can Schumer excuse his call for a government agency to act outside the law? How can Obama convince the country, in light of his trail of abuses and rhetoric, that he's just one more president like any other?
The simple answer is, they can't. They have been too defiant, have acted with too much arrogance, have been too blatant, too ugly, and have revealed too much. Now the balance must be restored, one way or another, with or without the cooperation of the political classes of this county -- and perhaps of any classes at all.
It will not be by revolution, or uprising, or a walkout by Congress, or a blazing speech by an opponent. It will come by way of something minor -- a curse overheard on the golf course, an insult thrown at a helpless citizen, a sick child denied treatment under ObamaCare. Then the collapse will come, like a sudden clash of cymbals. The Furies will be unleashed. In the same way that an avalanche is unleashed by a mere footstep, events will spin out of control, impossible to stop or direct. The forces have been building up for years. Eventually, they will burst forth. When that happens, there will be nothing human that can stop them. Study the fate of the Romanovs, the Hapsburgs, the Hashemites, and Soviets, the Ceaucescus, Qaddafi, Mubharak... and for that matter, Achmad Sukarno himself. The pattern is clear... the only question is how much time remains.
Obama comes by his attitude toward government honestly enough. Just before the 2012 election I published a piece here at AT analyzing Obama's political background. He spent most of his formative years in Indonesia, exposed almost exclusively to the influences of Indonesian culture -- Islam, mass public corruption, and a political system based on two-fisted authoritarianism. Obama's political heritage is rooted in the postwar Islamic strongman role pioneered by Gamel Abdul Nasser, the leader of Egypt from 1953 to 1970, and then refined by numerous other such figures, including Achmed Sukarno and Mohammed Suharto of Indonesia.
Sukarno was a colorful leader who controlled a populist coalition of the military, the peasants, and the intelligentsia (among them a powerful communist party), through a three-ring political circus in which the main attraction was Sukarno's never-ending one-man battle against the West. After nearly two decades of this, the country was in serious danger of going into the dumpster -- Sukarno had pulled Indonesia out of the UN and was kissing up to the Chinese, in the process turning ever larger sections of government over to the local communists. This lost him the military, always a mistake for a third-world strongman, and in 1965 things came to a head with a bungled coup (planned by whom? -- something that remains uncertain to this day) in which a number of military officers were murdered. The army struck back, and after a confused interlude featuring massacres across the country, the communists were out (most of them -- estimates range up to half a million -- dead), Sukarno was under house arrest, and General Suharto had ended up as maximum leader.
Suharto ran the country as his personal fiefdom for the next thirty-odd years. At the end of that period he had distinguished himself as possibly the most corrupt ruler in history, with a fortune of thirty billion plus stashed in various foreign banks. His avaricious family, which controlled most of the county's industry, pocketed at least as much. Under Suharto's control, Indonesia became notorious for its atrocities in West Irian and East Timor, at the same time meandering its way to a vague prosperity that in no way matched nearby Singapore and Malaysia. (To give Suharto due credit, he did not allow dogs to eat off the china.)
This was the political culture in which Barack Obama came to consciousness. This is the way of life he was first exposed to, and obviously enough, the way he thinks things should be. A single all-powerful ruler, lazy and with few demands on his time, his dictates carried out by a loyal cabal, a terrified and obedient opposition, total corruption, show initiatives that are meant solely as theater with no concrete results expected, and levels of luxury unattainable even by the world's billionaires. This is the program he is attempting to carry out, the system he wishes to put in place. It is not communist, it is not socialist, it is not democratic, any more than Nasser, who probably used the word as often as Lenin, was a socialist. It is pure third-world authoritarianism. This is what half of the American electorate, largely consisting of Low Information Voter boobs assisted by mulish conservatives, put into office two times in a row in the sophisticated, technologically-advanced 21st century.
When he eventually turned his eyes toward politics, Obama gravitated to the single place in the United States that most resembles a third-world tyranny -- Chicago. Controlled for years by a single party, and for much of that period by a single family (the Daleys), Chicago embodies Indonesian corruption and authoritarianism (if not climate) to a point beyond the understanding of luckier Americans. (Among other techniques of control, when a Chicago precinct captain ascertains that a voter has cast his vote the wrong way, the miscreant's garbage cans -- owned by the city -- are confiscated, and he's left on his own to solve the problem of family waste disposal. Suharto never came up with anything more effective than this.)
So it's no surprise that Dinesh D'Souza should be facing heavy penalties for a "crime" that earns wrist-slaps for Democratic supporters, that the degradation of the IRS should be, not punished, but applauded and supported by the likes of Charles Schumer, that Bill DeBlasio should choose to punish his own voters -- that is, inhabitants of the Upper East Side who made the error of voting against him in the primaries before coming around in the general election --by withholding the plows during the recent blizzard (as pure a piece of Suhartoism as you will find in this country), that Andrew Cuomo, son of America's foremost Thomas Aquinas scholar, should call for the removal of nearly half his state's population for thought crimes. They are following the example of their party leader, a boy who was raised among the wolves, who spent six years in one of the most odious political cultures of the mid-20th century. And we expect him, all grown up, to act as a true heir of Washington and Lincoln?
All this raises two questions: the first, how a healthy polity could have elected such a creature. We will skip that for now, since I will shortly be laughing too hard to type.
The second, and more urgent is: how far can this go?
Many on the right insist that they know the answer to that: that it will go all the way, that the jackboots will begin stomping, the barbed wire will go up, the Constitution will vanish and the commonwealth, under the thumb of President-for-Life Obama the First, will subside into third-world lassitude, violence, and corruption.
All this is supposed to happen when Obama does two things: calls off any new elections and declares martial law. The kindest thing we can say about this thesis is that it was worked out in ignorance of the actual political and legal mechanics. (e.g., there is no provision for "calling off elections" or declaring martial law in federal statute. Obama would have to appeal to Congress for the first and the state governors for the second, in neither case with hopes of success.) We must not take counsel of our fears.
We need only ask ourselves how Obama's political mentor Mohammed Suharto would have ended up if he'd tried his game in the United States. Thirty years of absolute power would be unlikely; more like thirty years in Leavenworth. An uneducated medieval polity is the starting point for such a train of events, not the finishing point.
Which doesn't mean that we can rest easy; much unpleasantness can and will occur. Consider New York State. Andrew Cuomo governs downtown Albany and New York City. He pays attention to nothing else in the state -- the Mohawk Valley, the Finger Lakes, the Adirondacks, may as well not exist. He acts for two interfaced elites -- political in Albany and financial in NYC. The rest of the state is peasantry, without jobs, without hope, without a future, enabled to subsist by federal welfare programs.
Now, what in the world does this remind us of? What else is New York State but a temperate zone third-world country? (It even features the governorship handed off from father to son -- granted a brief interlude -- much as we see in such regimes.)
This is what the Democrats have in mind for the rest of the country. The prospect we're facing is not 1984, or Nazi Germany, or even Suharto's Indonesia. It is contemporary Argentina, controlled by elites, bouncing from one political extreme to the other, run by an ever more bizarre train of lunatics, with a government that relates to the people in much the same way that a parasite relates to its host.
Can this be stopped? Only if we begin acting like citizens of a republic, which may well be too much to ask.
All the same, I tend to view the world though the eyes of a novelist, in which seemingly unrelated events and activities -- the subplots -- inexorably intertwine over time to bring about a grand climax. Looking at the current political situation, I sense the approach of nemesis. Our antagonists have gone a little too far. They have said too much, have threatened too many people, and have done so in words that they can't back off from. How can Cuomo explain away his contempt for millions of citizens of his state? How can Schumer excuse his call for a government agency to act outside the law? How can Obama convince the country, in light of his trail of abuses and rhetoric, that he's just one more president like any other?
The simple answer is, they can't. They have been too defiant, have acted with too much arrogance, have been too blatant, too ugly, and have revealed too much. Now the balance must be restored, one way or another, with or without the cooperation of the political classes of this county -- and perhaps of any classes at all.
It will not be by revolution, or uprising, or a walkout by Congress, or a blazing speech by an opponent. It will come by way of something minor -- a curse overheard on the golf course, an insult thrown at a helpless citizen, a sick child denied treatment under ObamaCare. Then the collapse will come, like a sudden clash of cymbals. The Furies will be unleashed. In the same way that an avalanche is unleashed by a mere footstep, events will spin out of control, impossible to stop or direct. The forces have been building up for years. Eventually, they will burst forth. When that happens, there will be nothing human that can stop them. Study the fate of the Romanovs, the Hapsburgs, the Hashemites, and Soviets, the Ceaucescus, Qaddafi, Mubharak... and for that matter, Achmad Sukarno himself. The pattern is clear... the only question is how much time remains.
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