Don's Tuesday column

   THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson Red Bluff Daily News   1/21/2014

   A year of presidential governing dangerously

Before the events, stories and outrages of 2013 fade from memory—news organizations having generally resumed transmitting spin as stenographers for the Obama-crat left—some attention to political catastrophes and Constitutional scandals is due. Truly state-controlled news media would probably have ignored the fiasco that was the Obamacare rollout; they would have sent stories about massive insurance cancellations due to the law and its regulations into the “memory hole.” California’s major media, even local outlets, have mostly ignored and buried unpleasantness related to Covered California but skeptical, even cynical, eyes can find it in the numbers.

There are a number of “Top 10” lists floating around that have informed my impressions and memories, including (search by title) “President Obama’s top 10 constitutional violations of 2013” by Ilya Shapiro of Cato Institute, and “Ten Broken Obamacare Promises” by Alyene Senger of Heritage Foundation. When examined, they catalogue a breathtaking indictment.

I think John Podhoretz, however, may have come closest to the core of the matter with “Why Obama can’t wave away this scandal; the media shielded the president from every criticism—until he betrayed a liberal cause.” He begins: “People are puzzled: Why would Barack Obama have lied about how wonderfully everything was going to go with ObamaCare when officials in his administration knew perfectly well that disaster was going to strike?” Part of it was the obsession, just before October 1, with not “giving the enemy the satisfaction of agreeing” to a perfectly reasonable (in hindsight) proposal to delay the rollout. Moreover, any sort of admission that the system wasn’t ready would have been ammunition for those same “enemies.”

“But there’s a deeper reason he and his people lied: They did it because nearly five years in the White House had given Obama and his team confidence they would not face the music and they could finesse the problems until they got fixed. Consider the events that would have been unprecedented scandals in a Republican administration—with teams of reporters digging and scratching daily at every nook and cranny in every bureaucratic corridor—that have instead been covered … with relatively little passion and almost no follow-up. Why? Because it would have hurt Obama, that’s why.”

Just consider the media feeding frenzy over the manipulation of bridge traffic by underlings of N.J. Governor Chris Christie, with no hint that the scheme ever involved Christie himself. Compare that to the low-key approach many of those same smug news hounds used as Obama’s IRS unconstitutionally abused conservative citizens, for the shameful motive of reelecting Obama by suppressing their votes in 2012.

When conservatives try to shore up the integrity and legitimacy of elections by insisting that dead people be purged from voter rolls and living people provide identification not unlike that required to use a credit or debit card—liberal hysteria erupts over phony claims of disenfranchisement of minorities. However, genuine admitted targeting and harassment by the IRS of groups with anti-liberal agendas, that has produced “shamed retirements, hasty changes at the top of the agency and officials pleading the Fifth Amendment,” gets a ho-hum. “Move along; nothing to see here.”

It strains credulity to think that a Republican Attorney General would have gotten the “kid glove” treatment accorded Eric Holder over the “Fast and Furious” gunrunning policy. It resulted in US Border Patrol agents, as well as hundreds of Mexican citizens, being murdered by Mexican drug-cartel members—with weapons provided by Holder’s Justice Department. “He approved the secret surveillance of Fox News Channel reporter James Rosen … and similar tactics against reporters at the Associated Press.” From the media: virtual crickets.

There have been no lasting consequences over the dereliction of duty and non-accountability for Obama’s and Clinton’s actions (or non-actions) surrounding the terrorist attacks and murders of four Americans—including the first ambassador in over 30 years—in Benghazi. Not only were the American people deliberately and consciously misled with a made-up story about an anti-Islam video, but “Obama felt free to select the chief liar, Susan Rice, as his national security adviser without experiencing a moment’s fear about how her appointment might become a scandal.”

Rather than accept results of elections giving control of the House of Representatives, a co-equal branch of Congress, the power to fund or not fund the president’s policies, Obama said he would use his executive authority to “get things done.” The Constitution was intentionally designed to “get things done” slowly, if at all, and certainly not by one man. Even left-leaning legal scholar Jeffery Toobin suggested that restraining unilateral, apparently power-mad leaders like Obama is the very reason our Framers designed that document.

The factors inducing the blindness and arrogance of the Obama White House to the rage, disappointment and disgusted wonderment over the fiasco of Obamacare: 1) his liberal base loves him unreservedly, 2) Senate Democrats have lifted not a finger to trouble him, and 3) he has always had the protection of the mainstream media. However, by “mishandling and discrediting the great liberal desideratum of our time—a national health-care system” Obama may have gone too far. We’ll see.