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Well that was a close one. We really dodged an authoritarian bullet by having people spend the day carrying signs that said, “No Crown, No Clown,” “Reject Royalty,” “86 45,” “Remember Only You Can Prevent Fascism,” “No Kings, No Nazis,” and (my personal favorite) “Trump Wears a Thong.” Were it not for those brave souls, we’d have been marched off to the firing squads by now. A great many of the crowds looked a last fling for the Woodstock generation, leading PJ Media’s Eric Florack to observe that, “grayer heads prevailed.”
Then again, if we were under the heartless rule of a King, those protests would have been illegal. But let it go. There are, after all, serious transgressions against “Our Democracy,” thanks to Donald Trump. Remember when the Trump DOJ sued a state for simply enforcing federal law? Or the time the Trump DOJ dropped all charges against a group of white dudes in paramilitary garb who were intimidating citizens at a voting precinct on election day? And then there was the time that Trump decided to unilaterally enact immigration legislation that Congress itself had declined to enact. And who exactly gave Donald Trump the right to add 159 new government agencies?
Preeminent among Trump’s many infringements has been his Department of Justice’s seizure of personal and cell phone records of AP reporters and editors, including phones that AP reporters used in the press quarters of the House of Representatives. Things got so bad that a group of 50 press organizations, including CNN, ABC, the New York Times and Washington Post, all submitted a letter of protest to the Attorney General. The answer was to double down by conducting electronic surveillance of yet another reporter and to label that reporter as an “unindicted co-conspirator.” Then, as if to add insult to injury, the President completely ignored a Federal District Judge’s order, prompting the judge to write, “Such dismissive conduct, viewed in tandem with the re-imposition of a second blanket and substantively identical moratorium, and in light of the national importance of this case, provide this court with clear and convincing evidence of the government’s contempt.”
There is, however, one important point. While the above transgressions are unmistakably true and very well documented, they were not committed by Donald Trump. That batch of pseudo king-like infringements on the separation of powers and liberty itself was the handiwork of President Barack Obama, who sued Arizona for enforcing federal immigration law (if you’re keeping score at home, today it honorable to refuse enforcement of federal immigration law), and who declined to press charges against members of the Black Panthers who gathered at a voting precinct in Philadelphia and intimidated voters during the 2008 election. It was Barack Obama who unilaterally enacted immigration law that he previously claimed to lack the Constitutional authority to enact, and it was he who gave us another 159 government agencies. As for spying on and attacking members of the press, you can read that story here. Oh yes, and about flouting a federal district court judge? Here ya go.
How many of Saturday’s No Kings protestors so much as picked up a single sign and walked in circles to protest the infringements of President Obama? On the contrary, many on the left were quite impatient with the pace and magnitude of Obama’s disregard for Constitutional order, as CNN’s Dean Obeidallah observed in 2012:
“What’s clear is that the liberals speaking out don’t want a president, they want a king. Albeit a liberal king – but still a king, who would be unrestrained by Congress as well as the checks and balances enshrined in our Constitution.”
Therein lies part of the problem. If you didn’t bother to haul out those placards to protest Barack Obama’s infringements or Joe (The Autopen) Biden’s wholesale disregard of existing immigration and civil rights laws, or protest the fact that the Biden administration was one in which (to use Mark Steyn’s formulation) “everything is policed except crime,” or the fact that his entire administration and the legacy media repeatedly lied to you about the magnitude of his mental incapacitation, your current protests are, to say the least, suspect.
Oscar Wilde is reported to have said that, “Irony is wasted on the stupid,” which, come to think of it, might be a harsh diagnosis. I prefer author Andrew Boyd’s remark that “Irony is the only way I can take myself seriously.” We all have our inconsistencies, after all. But it takes a stunning lack of irony to label as a would-be king someone who is saving American lives on a daily basis by A) literally stopping the daily influx of 10,000 unvetted illegal immigrants into our country, B) removing violent foreign predatory gangs, human traffickers, cartel members, rapists and murderers from our country, C) freeing American cities and American citizens from the carnage and mayhem that too many city and state politicians are too comfortable with, D) reducing the size and scope of the federal bureaucracy, E) ending eight wars around the world in only 9 months, and F) happily spending more time answering questions from the press in an average week than his predecessor did during his entire term in office.
Donald Trump is not a wanna-be king (see Barack Obama’s record), nor is he a wandering roomba with liver spots who pauses to shake hands with thin air while his administration allows American citizens to be victimized by foreign and domestic predators. He is the most energetic President in modern American history, who campaigned on a very specific series of promises on the theme that government’s primary obligation is to keep its citizens alive and free. He won a majority of the popular vote and the electoral vote despite the previous administration’s weaponization of government to impoverish and incarcerate him, to remove him from state ballots, and to generate such mass hysteria by comparing him to Adolph Hitler and labeling him a fascist that he was literally shot in the head during the first of two assassination attempts.
He was elected to keep his promises and to the eternal astonishment and white hot anger of the political class, he’s really doing it. To make matters worse, he’s doing it without getting bogged down in the sand-trap of slow motion, plodding, buffoonish follies that conventional wisdom holds as the only way to “get things done.” The pampered career politicians will never forgive him for that.
If you can’t tell the difference between a president who enforces immigration laws and one who floods the country with unvetted migrants to prey on the innocent, or the difference between a president who enforces civil rights laws against discrimination on the basis of race or sex, and one who oversees the construction of elaborate rules that judge people precisely based on race and sex, you’ve no business telling us who is a would-be king and who is not. And if you can’t discern between a leader who employs federal resources to safeguard the lives of federal law enforcement officers and American citizens in cities where local officials are too incompetent or too ideologically neutered to do so, and one who sits and slumbers while American cities descend into lawless hell holes and openly announce their defiance of federal law, you have no standing to lecture the rest of us on matters of civic rectitude or the moral imperative of leadership.
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Discussion (13)
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Brilliant. Thank you.
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That was fun. Thanks!
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Completely spontaneous.No astroturfing at all.
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That would be over $100,000 for each of the 2,500 planned demonstrations. Either the amount is overstated or some middleman "organizers" and "consultants" are getting wealthy. Elderly hippies will protest on a weekend for free so other than social media posts, what else does the money do?
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Spending more time than both of his predecessors did across three terms in office.
Combined.
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