By Victor Davis Hanson
Tuesday, March 31, 2015
Senator Robert Menendez (D., N.J.) was a vocal critic
both of President Obama’s executive-action opening to Cuba and his nuclear
non-proliferation talks with Iran. In the midst of his loud opposition, he
found himself suddenly the target of renewed federal charges that had aired
much earlier without consequence. I think the message was not that the
administration was worried over appearances, but rather that it wished to
remind all of Washington that it actually welcomed the appearance of not being
worried over the idea of federal prosecutorial power being used for tit-for-tat
vendettas. Malice is a valuable political tool for Barack Obama.
Benjamin Netanyahu apparently bothered President Obama.
What could that possibly entail, given the historic alliance between Israel and
the United States? From the petty malice of Obama-administration aides leaking
slurs that Netanyahu was a coward and chickens–t to the fundamental malevolence
of community-organizing Netanyahu’s opponents in an effort to defeat him at the
polls to leaking previously classified information about Israel’s nuclear
deterrent, the message is again Chicagoan. Obama in adolescent fashion put it
best in the 2008 campaign when he urged his flock, “I want you to argue with
them and get in their face,” and when he later lifted a Chicago line from
screenwriter David Mamet’s dialogue in The Untouchables to say to his base, “If
they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun.” No wonder Obama — despite
having once been on the receiving end of a racial slur from Senator Harry Reid
— recently praised the outgoing Senate majority leader, whose style and modus
operandi were akin to Obama’s own.
During the seven years when Obama faced election,
reelection, and two midterm elections, he warned on over 20 occasions that it
would be neither legal nor ethical to grant executive amnesties to illegal
aliens. What was stunning about his refrain was the high-minded manner in which
he disarmed his base by warning them that he could not act unconstitutionally.
But once he faced no more referenda on his power, he cared little about polls
that showed widespread disapproval of amnesty, and simply began issuing the
sort of presidential fiats that he had correctly said he didn’t have the power
to issue.
The Right was shocked by the brazen hypocrisy of Obama,
who once warned the country of just the sort of renegade president that he
proved to be. But that again misses the point. Obama was not embarrassed, but
emboldened, by the disconnect, as if to say, “I not only bypassed Congress to
issue amnesties, but also refuted my own warnings that to do so would be
illegal. And so what are you going about it?” If the speeder goes through a red
light with impunity right in front of a parked patrolman, what then do we think
of the patrolman, the speeder — and the sanctity of traffic lights?
We see the Chicago way with Iran as well. In the midst of
negotiations, Iran’s supreme leader chants the tired mantra “Death to America.”
The Iranian military builds a mockup of a U.S. carrier to practice attacks on
it. The Obama position proves more lenient than that of either the U.N. or our
European partners, which is not an easy thing to do. Yet Obama doubles down and
continues full bore to squeeze out any kind of agreement he can — even if that
means it might be merely oral, not written, and a bastardized treaty somehow
designed to avoid Senate scrutiny. The point is not that all this is
outrageous, but rather that it is deliberately outrageous, again begging the
question, “So what are you going to do about it?” Obama’s Chicago sense appeals
to the lowest common denominator: The more brazenly he is making a point, the
more he thinks he will earn a certain admiration from his base, a sense of some
sort that he is capable of anything and that progressive morality trumps
antiquated laws. The full Obama reminds me of a high-school incident when a
teacher corralled an aggressor accused of serially bullying another student;
when he asked the perpetrator to apologize to his target, the aggressor instead
slugged his victim in front of the teacher, and shouted, “What are you going to
do about it?”
Some thought Obama’s serial untruths about Obamacare
would doom the ill-fated program: Millions really did lose their plans; they
lost their doctors as well; Obamacare proved not to lower but to raise costs;
it did not shrink the deficit but caused more federal expense. When Obama
picked and chose which parts of the federal law he would enforce, others
objected that it was patently illegal for an executive not to faithfully
execute laws on the books. But again, that is exactly the point: If a president
can lie about a program to secure its passage and, when it proves flawed,
select elements to discard or delay, then he can do almost anything — and we
should appreciate that he can do almost anything.
If the president believes that, after all the shenanigans
of Lois Lerner, there is still not even a “smidgen” of corruption in the IRS,
then the shot across the bow is not that the IRS is now politicized, but that
it is hopelessly politicized. Again,what are we going to do about it?
In the old Clinton–Gingrich formula of budget
give-and-take, when the national debt was about a third of the present $18
trillion, Republicans agreed to defense cuts and tax increases, and Democrats
conceded budget freezes, and eventually for a time there was a balanced budget,
gimmicks and all. Under Obama, Republicans are to agree to defense cuts and tax
hikes — while Obama increases social spending, runs $600 billion annual deficits,
laments frugality and austerity, and lets others worry about the crushing debt
incurred on his watch, the diminution of national security, and the stifling
effect of tax hikes. What is the next president going to do — raise taxes
higher, cut popular entitlements, disband the Marine Corps, and scrounge to pay
down the debt?
Obama has chosen to skip various widely attended
anniversaries, including the liberation of Auschwitz and the Battle of
Gettysburg. He passed on the commemorative march of world leaders who condemned
the terrorist killings in Paris. Critics pounced. How does the president have
time to meet with GloZell, do his March Madness NCAA-tournament basketball
picks, or banter with Internet bloggers if he cannot meet with the current
chief of NATO? Why does he jet out to California to do Jimmy Kimmel, but refuse
to fly to Paris to show solidarity against Islamic violence? Why would Obama
fly all the way to Denmark to lobby for a Chicago Olympics, but not attend the
anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall? Again, those are the wrong
questions.
Whether Obama avoided these events out of lassitude or by
intent matters little: The point is that it was his pleasure not to attend any
of them. The full Obama cares nothing about appearances. Indeed, he feels that
such disdain magnifies his godhead, as someone absolutely immune to tradition,
protocol, and criticism. Say that he golfs too much, and he will golf even
more. You object that he sermonizes on global warming while setting records for
use of Air Force One, often on a parallel track with his wife’s jumbo jet, or
lectures farmers on the California drought for a few minutes on his way to hit
the Palm Springs irrigated golf courses? All that is not the disconnect, but
the point.
It is distasteful for a president to weigh in on a local,
ongoing, and racially charged criminal case. Obama not only did just that with
the Trayvon Martin shooting, but in such a way that could only exacerbate
racial tensions — and in a reactionary fashion of expressing solidarity with
critics of George Zimmerman on the basis of his own shared skin color with the
deceased. If President Clinton had editorialized in mediis rebus about the O.J.
trial with something like “Nicole might have looked liked the second daughter I
never had,” then we would have assumed not just that he was a racist, but that
he wanted us to think he was a racist — and that we could not do much about
that fact.
Susan Rice on five televised occasions lied about
Benghazi when she serially insisted that the deaths of four Americans were due
to a spontaneous demonstration over a video — a deception she never later
corrected. More recently, she insisted that Bowe Bergdahl served with “honor
and distinction” when she knew that most of the evidence clearly pointed to his
being a deserter at best and a traitor at worse, and that the five Afghan
terrorists we freed in the exchange from Guantanamo were the worst of the worst
in captivity there. Just as Rice was promoted to national security adviser
after the Benghazi untruth, so too she knows there will be no fallout over her
flat-out distortions about Bergdahl. Obama’s point, again, is not that Rice has
a problem with the truth, but that the fact of a national security adviser’s
disingenuousness is of absolutely no consequence.
What then is the full Obama presidency? It is the quest
for extralegal power not just by ignoring the law, tradition, or custom, but by
doing so flagrantly and without concern, to the point of rendering critics
impotent — and thereby accruing even more power to enrage and embarrass them.
In similar circumstances, the Roman biographer Suetonius noted of the Twelve
Caesars that the offense itself was not so much the point, but rather the
demonstration of committing the offense with impunity and disdain.
Once that pen-and-phone threshold has been crossed,
anything is possible — and even the critics of Obama now belatedly accept that.
In brilliantly diabolical fashion, the president of the United States has all
but ruined the Democratic party in Congress and the state legislatures, but has
also confounded his Republican opponents by not caring a whit about his own
nihilism — as if he is supposed to worry about ending the congressional careers
of his supposed allies?
After all, if someone is going to ignore the law or what
tradition demands, then why does he need a legislative majority to do it? Obama
is more powerful in defeat than he ever was in victory. Like a seasoned Chicago
pol, he reminds his auditors and critics that not only does he not care about
the appearance of his actions, but also that no else does either. He all but
says, “Each time I issue an illegal executive order, my polls go up, and the
more my enemies howl and my friends cringe.” It becomes more hazardous — ask
Senator Menendez or an audited Tea Party group — to object to an Obama abuse
than for Obama to commit the abuse, which makes further abuse only more
certain.
Given media obsequiousness, Obama feels that little
scrutiny of his actions will follow. A move toward impeachment he might even
hope for, given his iconic status and the community-organizing chance to smear
anyone foolish enough to try it as a racist or bigot. If his conduct hurts the
future of Hillary Clinton, who cares? Or rather, perhaps there is a hint that
the damage was by intent. If Obama’s executive-order presidency weakens the
stature of the U.S. abroad, then maybe it needed to be weakened. In a country
where almost any law can be contravened by an executive order, where any
statute can die through selective non-enforcement, where the IRS can hound
opponents, where Israel is the enemy and Iran the friend, and even a senatorial
ally can face indictment, anything is now possible.
And was not that the point all along?
