Finally we are told Obama is failing because the presidency has now become unworkable in the 21st century. The economy is supposedly inherently and permanently stuck at 1-2% GDP growth. Congress is dysfunctional in a structural sense. The people are forever polarized. The Internet and social media have all made it impossible for anyone to govern. Obama is a new victim of existential forces that require us to rethink the presidency itself. In lieu of chronicling Obama’s disasters, we are instead lectured to radically change the system: why not one six-year presidential term? Or the end of the Electoral College? Or let us ensure that IDs are never required to vote — anything to free Obama from institutional chains that make it impossible for a president to be free to govern anymore. That whine, too, is a fraud. Compared to what Lincoln faced in 1861, or Roosevelt in late 1941, or Truman in 1950, or, yes, Bush in 2001, Obama’s challenges are relatively modest. Government is not working because Obama subverted entire cabinet agencies and federal bureaucracies — from Homeland Security to NASA to Justice — to make them tools of larger efforts to advance the Obama multicultural therapeutic message rather than to honor and keep faith with their traditional agendas. When the president uses emphatics like “really” or “actually” or “make no mistake about it, “let me be clear,” “in point of fact” or “this is unacceptable,” we know that what follows will be untrue and others will be blamed for the president’s own self-induced blunders. Like Jonathan Gruber, and his surreal statements on amnesty, Obama believes that Americans are too stupid to retrieve videos and transcripts that prove that Obama makes things up and contradicts himself serially. Or the fact that Obama believes that Americans know that he does not tell the truth and yet also sighs that there are no consequences to such presidential distortions somehow makes him think that he is all the more powerful. Blame-gaming, “scape-gloating,” and lying is one thing, but quite another is doing all that with the full knowledge that voters accept that Obama lies — and that there can be absolutely no consequences. We have reached a point in the presidency where with each news conference Obama is saying to the American people something like “I just lied to you. No one cares that I did. And because no one cares, I am going to lie to you all the more as I feel like it given your own gullibility.” We have had storytellers and fabulists in the White House before, but rarely a president who is energized to distort the truth by the very contempt that he holds the people in.
Posted on: Tue, 25 Nov 2014 02:15:39 +0000
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