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Happy In Dependence?
Sometimes, you have to admit you’re wrong.
And, we were wrong.
We said that things couldn’t get much worse after the sub par presidency of George W. Bush.
But, President Barack Obama’s administration has us yearning for the good ol’ days when we were at least winning battles in Iraq.
To which we can add a hearty “Welcome Aboard!” to the masters of the obvious on the editorial page of the Billings Gazette. Even belated help is appreciated, though it really ought not take six years to discover what many of us knew intuitively before Election Day 2008, namely, that turning over the keys to the last and best bastion of freedom on the planet to an ideologue whose starry-eyed gaze remains fixed on the utopian postulates of Alinsky rather than the enlightened experience of the Founders is an exercise in national suicide.
With the mideast in flames and America once again wearing a large “Kick Me” sign on its back, with stagnate economic growth and trillions in increased debt, with bureaucratic ineptitude destroying the healthcare, jobs and lives of American citizens while illegal immigrants pour across an unprotected border overloading small towns and introducing illnesses long ago eradicated from our shores, if you ever wondered what Jimmy Carter’s second term might have looked like, this would be a good time to take notes.
As ever, much of the American public appears to be a few steps ahead of their reputed betters in the punditocracy. The latest Qunnipiac University Poll has Americans ranking Barack Obama as the absolute worst US president since World War II. As it happens, Ronald Reagan was ranked as the best, further underscoring President Obama’s singular achievement of coming in dead last in both the wallets and hearts of his countrymen.
Another poll, which I found even more telling, was released by Gallup on July 1st and it found that Americans are rather conspicuously, “less satisfied with the freedom to choose what they want to do with their lives.” In fact, the public’s assessment has dropped from 91 percent who were satisfied with their level of freedom in 2006 down to 79 percent. We now are in 36th place, behind Rwanda, Paraguay, and something called Nagarno-Karabakh, which up until today I thought was a body part.
It is instructive that, 238 years after free men pledged their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to advance the proposition that, “…all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” we are told today that those unalienable rights include the right to another person’s earnings, the right to silence divergent opinions, the right to free false teeth, condoms and birth control pills, and the sacred right to dismember an innocent child in the womb while someone else picks up the tab. The sound you hear is that of Washington, Madison, Hamilton, Jefferson, et al, spinning at about 4,500 rpm in their graves.
The Founders wrote that, “…to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,” and yet just this week an American president, fresh from repeated rebukes by the Supreme Court for his usurpations of power, announced that since the people’s representatives (in response to the will of the people themselves) decline to enact his prescriptions, he will bypass Congress and act unilaterally, essentially becoming a law unto himself and ruling against the consent of the governed.
The Constitution he took an oath to uphold grants Barack Obama no such power. “So sue me,” this petulant little man taunted, at which point the Founders stop spinning and remind us that there are Constitutional remedies to wholesale lawlessness of this order, remedies that were employed 40 years ago for a simple burglary, and remedies yet untapped by state legislatures.
The citizens of Murrieta, California might find common ground with the indictment of George III in the Declaration of Independence that, “He has refused is Assent to laws, the most Wholesome and Necessary for the public good,” having personally taken to the streets of their town to prevent the federal government from discarding illegal aliens on their doorstep, illegals who would not be here had Barack Obama enforced existing immigration laws in the first instance.
Governors of states along America’s southern border, unable to convince King Barack the Petulant to help them secure the border so as to prevent the awful crisis now overrunning their resources, might commiserate with Thomas Jefferson’s lament in the Declaration that, “He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.”
By the slimmest of majorities, the Supreme Court has reprimanded His Awesomeness over his penchant for unilaterally declaring the Senate in recess for the purposes of installing those officials sympathetic to union thuggery, or as Jefferson wrote, “He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.”
We read of George III that, “He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures,” and then we learn that administrative agencies from the Department of Education, to NOAA (they predict the weather), to the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Environmental Protection Agency all employ SWAT teams, and that the Department of Homeland Security has billions of rounds of ammunition in reserve. A president who hollows out the nation’s armed forces while arming his administrative agencies to the teeth betrays his intuition that his most dangerous enemies are to be found amongst his own citizens, rather than amongst the fanatics who fly planes into buildings.
And of course, anyone who has the temerity to exercise their right of free speech and criticize this administration knows full well that they run the risk of a fresh assault from George III’s modern heir, King Barack and his IRS, EPA, etc. Or, as the Declaration catalogued, “He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.” Just try the Lois Lerner defense on these agents and see how far you get.
The Washington Times‘ Judson Phillips describes the present state of affairs thus:
Barack Obama is acting against the American people. The Democrats are cheering him on, and the Republicans are sitting in the corner like cattle that have just been castrated, trying to figure out what they lost and why it was important.
One minor quibble with Phillips’ diagnosis: Republicans aren’t just sitting there. On the contrary, they are exhausting the Democrat party’s own playbook in an effort to defeat the few conservatives who aggressively fight the schemes of the statist.
And what of the rest of us? News reports of Americans standing against their own government, which manifestly cares not one whit about securing the unalienable rights of its citizens, are simultaneously heartening and concerning. It is heartening to see the American DNA spring into action, and one takes solace from a spine stiffened in righteous rebellion against injustice. The American spirit is not happy in a state of dependence.
There is obvious cause for concern when a president and his administration wage war against the citizenry, indeed, against the very precept of liberty upon which the nation was founded, but in the end, it is the statist and his minions who have most cause to be concerned. We’ve seen his type throughout history, those whose insatiable appetite for power and control led to their own downfall. We’ve seen them on many a shore, and defeated them. On Independence Day, it would serve today’s starry-eyed utopian disciples well to ask themselves what will happen if Americans follow the President’s example, and start paying as little respect to rules and regulations as Barack Obama pays to the laws he swore to uphold?
Published in General
This essay should be on the front page of every newspaper in America today.
Thank you for pointing this out so clearly.
What both songwriter and Julia said. and Dave LIKE, like, like. Posting it to my FB, sending it to the Editor of The Daily InterLake, and my entire email list.
Ah, thank you, Dave! Now I can start my day with renewed focus and purpose. Happy 4th!
The Constitution he took an oath to uphold grants Barack Obama no such power. “So sue me,” this petulant little man taunted,
Gee, Dave. Don’t sugar-coat it. Tell us what you really think.
Sadly, it’s not just the administration- it’s the whole damned lot of ’em- the administration and the Republican “opposition.” Every time I hear/read the news, I get this sickening sensation that I suspect would be familiar to those (former) skydivers who discovered that their parachute didn’t deploy correctly. How can we expect to make it through another 2.5 years without a(nother) foreign crisis that leaves Americans dead, or an epidemic of crime and/or disease at our undefended border (the Mexicans appear to be the only ones who care about incoming threats), or a(nother) terrorist attack here at home, by enemies the government refuses to recognize?
Enacting change, through elections (or what we really need- an Article 5 convention) is a slow process. Is it already to late? Or can our so-called leaders be convinced to hear the people’s anger and frustration before the people start calling “to arms”? (Seriously- some of those folks at the Bundy ranch had guns, and knew how to use ’em…)
Brilliant, Mr. Carter!
After reading your verbal ‘caricature’ of President Obama as George III, the similarities come into sharp focus upon reading the Declaration of Independence; it’s as if the original was penned with him in mind!
well, maybe not exactly Obama, but at least the likes of Obama were in mind during the birth of our nation.
I’m afraid that history is littered with glib ideologues. They are a dime a dozen, so the Founders saw a Barack Obama coming long ago.
Our nation’s golden child is revealing himself as a spoiled brat. When told no, he reacts with a tantrum because he suddenly can’t have his way. America is finally waking up to the realization that we are governed by a spoiled and willful child. How odd that it took so long to figure it out, but if character is destiny the end game is easy to predict. He’ll continue to govern by presidential tantrum until an adult in the room finally scoops him up and carries him screaming and kicking off to bed. The rest of the adults will look around at the destruction he wrought and wonder with deep embarrassment why they indulged in the first place.
…but, as in the world of real parenting, by that time the damage is done!
It was said somewhere (perhaps here in another thread) that one goes broke slowly for a long while, then at the end suddenly very quickly.
?Is that not true of this incompetent. We can say all manner of things about his petulance, ideologue behavior, but in the end, it is incompetence that rules over all.
?And isn’t ALL left-wing ideology incompetent at its core.
More than anything, it is ‘illogical’; it flies in the face of human nature. People, the world over, work harder and are more resourceful if they are able to keep the fruits of their labor.
But this president is a Marxist and so the ‘still unanswered question’ is whether all of this chaos and increasing threat to America (exacerbated by President Obama’s policies) is deliberate or simply “incompetence”.
Many are coming to reject the second possibility.
Obama is the guy who said he would rather be a good one-term president than a bad two-term president. “Good” in his estimation means “radical.” In that regard, he would rather be impeached doing what he thinks is right, than to run out his tenure playing it safe. After all, liberals reward results, not tradition or the law. If he were impeached, that might even enhance his legacy on the left. To quote Obi Wan Kenobi, “If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.”
But he won’t be impeached. Enough Republicans would be queasy about impeaching the “first black president.” Therefore, I am convinced that he is going to keep pushing the boundaries until someone stops him. He quite literally has nothing to lose.
The essence of being free is that the choice is mine to make. Right or wrong, the choice is mine to make.
Everything this Administration and bureaucracy does … tries to contradict that. They want the choice to be theirs. They want to save us from the possibility of our own folly, to protect us from doing what (in their assumed expertise) they know is wrong. If only we’d all follow their guidance, it’ll work out better for everyone. Just stop trying to make decisions yourselves, OK? Eat your vegetables, kids.
That was the complaint against George III, i.e., that he refused to allow us to govern ourselves. And here we sit, now, with an oppressive bureaucracy and one-sided national media and progressive political state, all of whom conspire to do what George III did … stop us from pursuing our own self-interest.
If freedom is the right to choose for ourselves, what do progressives think they’re saying when they say “freedom?” … because securing the right for individuals to pursue their own self-interest is clearly not how they act.
The childhood imagery of the story “Rumplestiltskin” just came to mind…adolescent pique, and apopleptic rage. By Obama and his minions when they are exposed.
Thinking on the parallel that Dave began of George III and Obama, ?might not we look upon the MSM as the press of England in 1776. They were all against the colonists’ stand, too.
The other concept to consider is that the nation is run by a “consensus” as Daniel Greenfield recently suggested in his blog, Sultan Knish. This “consensus” consists of all the elites, the graduates of the ivies, and they take up leadership places in academia, business, and government. They move about between these positions, often not clearly one or the other. Their view is that they are the smart ones so know what is right for the nation. Us proles only get in the way of their excellence.
Yes, it is ‘ideological nepotism’ of the highest order, complete with a ‘glass ceiling’ (just not the type that Hilary rages against!).
I expect your tax files are in order, Dave. Expect an audit. And I suspect your employer will receive extra scrutiny – the new regulation of the trucking industry is as inscrutable as it is potentially destructive, a fine palate for tyrannical harassment.
I think you are right; in time then likes of Barack Obama always meet with the harsh judgment of history. I expect he feels the immediate effect of this inevitable consequence; it is gaining momentum as the burdens of his vision and incompetence simultaneously erode liberty at every corner of our nation’s landscape. But he is in power and is unable to abide his failure of intellect and vision. He is running out of political air. His contempt for constitutional limits is simply the last gasp of a dying presidency. Rebukes pile up. Allies seek shelter elsewhere. After November, I suspect Obama will migrate completely to golfer in chief. Not only will this duck be lame, but its wings will be clipped. His power will be limited to impotent speechifying and a vindictive veto. So ends the presidency of Barack Obama.
It is sad but true that many on this thread, and elsewhere, suspect that by voicing their opinion and dissatisfaction, they will be the subject of a “review” by the IRS or other alphabet soup agencies in the employ of Mr Obama. That said, my tax status is solid, and I do fully expect to hear from them – and will report the details when it happens.
Imagine the “petulant one’s” petulance when the volume of speech requests post Presidency does not compare with that of the “Bill and Hill show”. He has nothing to offer the rent seekers for the future.
As to the question of planned destruction of the economy and social fabric vs incompetence, my vote is with the former.
Of one thing I am sure….Dave Carter is a national treasure.
In thinking about the meaning of Independence Day this year, I found my feelings recurring to a profound sense of betrayal. Dave has fleshed out a few of the legion sources of this sense of betrayal. Most all the Founders’ values, in fact, have been subverted through Constitutional “interpretations” and “constructions,” all of which have required the torture of language, reversal of logic, wholesale denial of natural rights and inversion of human nature. Constitutional values have all been betrayed and Obama is merely the apotheosis, an avatar of the historical statist, i.e. one whose most fervent belief requires top-down pervasive control of entire societies.
In anticipation of the holiday and planned attendance at Cato University later this month, I just finished reading “Restoring the Lost Constitution” by Randy Barnett. This superb book recounts the myriad legal details of the abrogation of our Constitution. Should you share my sense of betrayal, this book documents and in scholarly fashion catalogues the many bases of that feeling. The author also recommends sensible remedies, although they seem highly unlikely to be implemented failing societal collapse. From independence to dependency; from optimism to grief. Such is the state of our waning republic.
Thank you for highlighting Barnett’s book. I’ll picking that up very soon. And thank you kindly for your analysis.
Okay Dave, it’s time to put down the truck keys and take up the pen full time. Get yourself a syndicated column and a talk show.
Somewhere in DC, David Freddoso (he of The Case Against Barack Obama) is sitting in front of a computer, trying not to scream “I don’t want to say I told you so, but I did.” I took the time to re-read it recently, and it’s both appalling and frightening how accurate his assessment was. Anyone who claims ignorance at this stage of the game is trying very hard not to see what is staring back at him; a failed Presidency on a level that would make Jimmy Carter blush.
Arrogance, diffidence and incompetence (with a strong dose of ideology uber alles) make a very bad mix. Senator McCain wasn’t my idea of a favorite candidate, but at least his sense of duty, burned into him by his Admiral dad and proven beyond doubt in North Vietnam, would have forestalled a great deal of the nonsense we see today.
I forgot to mention that, at the time leading up to the revolution, HRH George III was referred to as “an arrogant and intrusive sovereign.” Does that epithet remind you of any governing entity today?
It’s fitting that Americans now believe Obama is the worst president since WW II [I’d say since ever] because Barack Obama has always thought Americans are the worst people on earth.
I am always appalled at American’s who want more government in their lives, especially the ones who want and expect the government to take care of them in every aspect of their lives.
I am thrilled to see Americans stand up and fight government intrusion and stupidity and pray more people wake up sooner than later.
Thanks, Dave for another great post.
I had thought there was a 40-50% chance that things would get nasty sometime between Nov 2016 and Jan 2017: emergency coup, disturbances in the slums, non-cooperation with the transition team, etc. Now I think the odds are 50-60%, and the Democrats might move if the Republicans take the Senate this Fall.
These people are Fascists and have been since Woodrow Wilson and subsequent Progressives began editing out the inconvenient (aka “unimportant”, “outdated”) parts of the Declaration and the Constitution. Oh, your neighbors with the Democrat yard signs and faded Obama 2008 bumperstickers won’t call for actions that abrogate civil processes, but they’ll buy the excuses and be relieved. Democrats are not Americans.