Don's Tuesday column

THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson Red Bluff Daily News 2/11/14

Obama taking action for “kids” and “folks”

A politically weakened President Obama (polls show the lowest approval of his term; 63 percent have no confidence he would make the right decision—on anything) says, “We’re not just going to be waiting for legislation in order to make sure that we’re providing Americans the kind of help they need. I’ve got a pen and I’ve got a phone.” Apparently, his prior position, “I am not a dictator,” has morphed far beyond President Bush’s signing statements, hysterical castigations over a “unitary executive” (Bush, again) or simply allotting limited resources to policy priorities.

The new, emboldened Obama has no regrets over dismissing the Constitution’s absolute legislative power in Congress, or the Presidential duty to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” He could say “I’ve got a pen and I’ve got a sword,” since Obama’s “dictates” now have federal regulatory sovereignty, thanks to a century of executive overreach, and S.W.A.T.-team-endowed, liberal-judge-approved federal supremacy.

The brilliant writer, professor and farmer Victor Davis Hanson, wrote “Governing by Pen and Phone.” It’s a devastating and troubling take on the despotic evolution of Obama’s desperate efforts to accomplish that which the electorate fails to provide legislative authority for: sweeping “transformation” of America’s free market, capitalist economy. In the past, patriotism was “the last refuge of a scoundrel.” The “kids” and the “folks” now justify nearly limitless executive initiatives and orders (get it? “orders”) by someone who is far worse than a scoundrel: a populist demagogue with no compunctions against using federal agencies and departments to punish and intimidate his political opponents.

Obama: “And I can use that pen to sign executive orders and take executive action and administrative actions that move the ball forward …” The cynical but accurate observation would be that the federal government has, for decades, inserted its grubby taxing and regulatory hands into the affairs of businesses, industries and the people’s governments of the 50 states, diminishing and degrading all it touches. Having wrought its destructive will, the liberal monolith, in the person of Barack Obama and his Democrat sycophants, foolishly, arrogantly propose—no, mandate—that illusive solutions and fixes reside in yet another bit of tinkering. When tinkering fails, wholesale restructuring (Obamacare, Dodd-Frank), i.e. “transforming,” is called for, not by the aforementioned businesses, industries and people’s governments but rather by the ideologues, fanatics and devotees of centralized planning and power.

VDH: “There are lots of creepy things about such dictatorial statements of moving morally backward in order to go politically ‘forward.’” Obama had a Democratic Congress ready to pass his pet agenda—climate change, gun control, de facto amnesty and massive borrowing to jump-start the anemic, jobless recovery.

Instead, his Democrat colleagues gave him massive borrowing and deficits, results-deficient stimulus spending galore, and Obamacare. “In the case of the latter, the bill passed only through the sort of pork-barrel kickbacks and exemptions to woo fence-sitting Democratic legislators that we hadn’t seen in the U.S, since the 1930s. And for what? Obamacare (be careful what you wish for) is proving to be the greatest boondoggle in American political history since Prohibition.” I find that case easily made through the voluminous disclosures of epic failure, corruption, manipulation and disappointment over broken promises.

When it comes to the “kids,” how’s that working out? Talk’s cheap but results shout. Older Americans will die off long before Obama’s $9 trillion added debt must be paid off. Anyone care to guess how much income a young person will “contribute” in taxes, rather than spend as they wish, to repay the debt? Making it an even tougher burden, Obama-crat policies “socializing the economy” have the combined effect of near-record youth and minority unemployment, together with diminished prospects as employers shed full-time workers and shift health insurance costs to those now-underemployed workers. The Obamacare “premiums,” taxes effectively, are far greater for the “poorer youth who will not use much health care to pay for the more affluent baby boomers who will.” Induced by easy federal student loans, young students have provided the monetary incentive for mostly liberal universities to jack up tuition at well above the rate of inflation, creating a $1 trillion debt bubble.

“We are reentering Nixonian times, or perhaps worse, given that a free press at least went after Nixon’s misdeeds and misadventures.” Currently, we hear barely peeps from the media crowd that fears harming “a once-in-a-lifetime chance for a fellow progressive’s makeover of America.” A CNN moderator injected fallacious talking points into a debate to support Obama’s position. A New Yorker writer penned a fawning 17,000 word interview after tagging along on a jet tour from “one mansion of the crony capitalists to the next—as Obama preaches to the head-nodders about inequality and fairness in order to ensure that the bundled checks pour in.”

So-called “bridge-gate” garnered more breathless coverage in one day than the IRS targeting of Tea Party conservatives did in 6 months. The media is even less interested in the hypocrisy that the IRS has sought to expand its suppression of the same groups for the 2014 elections. Neither are they interested in conservative filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza (he made the critical documentary, “Obama’s America”) being indicted, effectively persecuted, for raising a relative pittance of campaign cash for a college friend. No Obama critic or opponent is assured of being left alone. Tyranny springs forth just so.