By Victor Davis Hanson
Tuesday, February 16, 2016
It has become an iffy idea to cross Barack Obama. After
seven years, the president has created a Hugo Chávez–like deterrent landscape,
intended to remind friends and enemies alike that he is perfectly willing to
use the federal government’s vast power to go after those he finds politically
inconvenient, while exempting those he understands to be sympathetic to his
agendas.
In Freudian fashion, Obama has long joked about using the
power of government in a personal way. As early as 2009, when he had been
invited to give the Arizona State University commencement address but had not
been granted an honorary degree, he warned of rogue IRS audits: “I learned
never again to pick another team over the Sun Devils in my NCAA brackets. . . .
President [Michael] Crowe and the Board of Regents will soon learn all about
being audited by the IRS.” Jesting about politically driven IRS audits is
always scary — scarier when life imitates art in the age of Lois Lerner.
Remember when Obama, on the Spanish-language Univision
network shortly before the 2010 midterm elections, urged Latino groups to join
him, in ancient tribal us/them fashion, in going after “enemy” Republicans.
Instead of sitting out the election, he told them in community-organizing
fashion, they should say: “We’re gonna punish our enemies, and we’re gonna
reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us.”
That threat recalled his 2008 campaign braggadocio about
urging his supporters to bring (of all things!) “a gun” (“If they bring a knife
to the fight, we bring a gun. Because from what I understand folks in Philly
like a good brawl”), and “to get in their face” (“I need you to go out and talk
to your friends and talk to your neighbors. I want you to talk to them whether
they are independent or whether they are Republican. I want you to argue with
them and get in their face”).
Obama had apparently envisioned the campaign against John
McCain as some sort of brawl in the waning days of the Roman Republic. Obama
also jested about drones incinerating their targets when he warned the pop-rock
group the Jonas Brothers to steer clear of his two daughters: “Sasha and Malia
are huge fans, but boys, don’t get any ideas. Two words for you: Predator
drones. You will never see it [sic] coming.” Joking about pushing a button to
incinerate a suspected terrorist and anyone in his general vicinity — let alone
a group of pop singers — is a most unliberal thing to do.
Obama also personalized, in Chávez fashion, his war on a
subset of the 1 percent (mostly the upper-middle-class entrepreneur rather than
the trust-fund grandee). Obama certainly has a visceral dislike not of the
wealthy per se (whose lifestyles he seems to idolize and uses government perks
to emulate), but of the “selfish” rich whom he deems obstructive of his own
worldview. He feels that an Economic Commander-in-Chief should adjudicate who
deserves what: “If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else
made that happen.” Or: “I mean, I do think at a certain point you’ve made
enough money.” Or: “There will be time for them to make profits, and there will
be time for them to get bonuses — now is not that time. And that’s a message
that I intend to send directly to them.”
To have a legitimate disagreement with the president is
to be caricatured as either a coward or a bully. On illegal immigration, Obama
complained that Republicans were “scared of widows and orphans coming into the
United States.” Earlier, he had claimed they wanted to round up kids having ice
cream: “But now, suddenly, if you don’t have your papers and you took your kid
out to get ice cream, you’re going to be harassed.”
But aside from the psychodramatic tics and the jokes in
poor taste, Obama has used government in a fashion contrary to the
Constitution. IRS official Lois Lerner directed the federal tax agency to dole
out tax-exempt status to groups on the basis of their ideology, and —
particularly during a campaign season — on whether they were perceived Obama
supporters. After staging a phony question-and-answer mea culpa, she pled the
Fifth Amendment before a congressional committee of inquiry and retired with
her full pension and apparent exemption from criminal prosecution.
President Obama by executive order has nullified U.S
Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s effort to enforce federal immigration
laws, apparently on the basis of perceived political advantage — and in a
manner contrary to his own earlier campaign warnings about the illegality of
just such executive-order overreach: “With respect to the notion that I can
just suspend deportations through executive order, that’s just not the case,
because there are laws on the books that Congress has passed. . . . We’ve got
three branches of government. Congress passes the law. The executive branch’s
job is to enforce and implement those laws. And then the judiciary has to
interpret the laws. There are enough laws on the books by Congress that are
very clear in terms of how we have to enforce our immigration system that for
me to simply through executive order ignore those congressional mandates would
not conform with my appropriate role as president.”
In similar fashion, the Environmental Protection Agency,
under the leadership of Lisa Jackson (who left her directorship abruptly and in
controversy over assuming a fraudulent e-mail persona in her official
communications, and who is currently on the Clinton Foundation Board), exceeded
federal law in targeting particular energy companies for their deemed
opposition to the president’s political agendas.
We’ve apparently long forgotten how the administration
and its ideological operatives, especially when in campaign mode, singled out
Boeing in South Carolina, went after Gibson Guitar, seemed eager to talk about
and mischaracterize the Romney tax returns, posted invective on Romney’s
campaign donors, and habitually harangued the NRA almost immediately after each
tragic mass shooting (“This is something we should politicize,” Obama remarked
of the Umpqua Community College shooting in Oregon). The Obama administration
has been a veritable continuation of Obama’s 2004 Senate race, when the sealed
divorce records of his two chief rivals — first in the primary election and
then in the general election — mysteriously were released, imploding both
campaigns.
The common thread in the scandals or incompetence at the
EPA, GSA, ICE, IRS, Justice Department, NASA, Secret Service, and VA has been
Obama’s desire to advance his own particular political agendas in a fashion
contrary to the supposed disinterested nature of these bureaucracies, if
necessary putting in place political incompetents who would unquestioningly do
his bidding. NASA, for example, has no business making its “foremost” aim
outreach to Muslims. In the Obama era, most Americans now just assume that
Black Panthers can intimidate voters at a polling place; and that illegal
aliens with criminal records do not face deportation in sanctuary cities; and
that failed green companies can extort federal dollars, while successful coal
companies and utilities are hounded; and that Cabinet secretaries facing
accusations of scandal, incompetence, or unethical behavior — Lisa Jackson, Eric
Shinseki at the VA, Kathleen Sebelius at HHS, Hilda Solis at the Department of
Labor — just seem to quietly resign and float away in a fashion most unlike
General Petraeus.
Finally, it can be a career-ending gamble for an
individual to publicly oppose the president in a manner that questions his
various narratives. Obama’s domestic critics can become regarded as greater
threats than our traditional foreign enemies — at least if the comparative
venom of the president’s invective is any indication. The sudden indictment of
Senator Robert Menendez (D., N.J.) on old charges came coincidentally right
after the senator opposed the president’s Iran deal, one of the few Democrats
to do so.
Obama critic and documentary filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza was
jailed for a minor campaign-contribution infraction of the sort that typically
earns a small fine. Was wrongly circumventing campaign-donation regulations a
more severe crime than diverting a federal Gulfstream jet to junket on the
public dime at the Belmont Stakes with one’s daughters and their boyfriends, in
Eric Holder fashion? Which offense is the greater conspiracy to commit fiscal
fraud?
Again, the point is always two-sided deterrence — to
remind Washington insiders to ask themselves whether they really wish to end up
like D’Souza and Menendez, or like Lerner and Holder.
Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, an obscure Internet
video-maker, suddenly was jailed on a minor parole violation and was damned
publicly — and falsely — as the catalyst for the 2012 Benghazi attacks, in
which four Americans were killed. No one now believes — as President Obama,
National Security Adviser Susan Rice, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
for so long insisted to the world — that Nakoula’s amateurish video prompted
spontaneous mobs to take to the streets of Benghazi (just by coincidence on
September 11) and to torch the American consulate and zero in their ad hoc
GPS-guided mortars on the consulate annex.
Nakoula’s jailing salvaged not just one but two of the
president’s reelection-campaign talking points: (a) that al-Qaeda, thanks to
Obama’s singular efforts, still “was on the run” and impotent, and (b) that the
president was still devoted to the Nobel-laureate work of opposing right-wing
bigots, like the easily caricatured Nakoula, who were attempting to subvert the
president’s ecumenicalism and disrupt the lives of innocent Americans by
inciting religious hatred.
CIA Director General David Petraeus was forced to resign
shortly after Obama’s successful
reelection campaign in 2012, under mysterious circumstances, reportedly because
he had improperly revealed classified information to a biographer, with whom he
was having an affair. But that fact had been revealed to, but was not disclosed
by, members of the Obama administration, months before the November 2012 election. The strange timing poses the
question of why such misconduct was considered a non-firing offense before, but
not after, the president’s reelection, when Petraeus, as CIA director, was
likely to be slated to testify again, and at greater length, to a closed
session of Congress on the Benghazi disaster.
The serial message goes out that it is unwise for a
federal official or a prominent individual to oppose President Obama and his
policies — while illegal or incompetent conduct, if undertaken in the
president’s perceived interest, is considered to have been for a good cause and
thus exempt from accountability.
In other words, there is no rule of law any more — an
ossified relic in our pen-and-phone era of social justice.
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