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Kevin Williamson writes on the small man in the big office.
… In an elected official, patriotism means, among other things, elevating the interests of the country above the interests of party and career. President Obama has failed to do that, seems personally incapable of doing that, and in fact has done the opposite. He might be reminded, at the very least, that his presidential duty is to the citizens of the United States, not to citizens of other countries, regardless of where they happen to be located at any given moment. But the very idea of taking that seriously seems foreign to him.
We already knew that Barack Obama is a coward – a man who, to take one obvious example, pronounced himself opposed to gay marriage right up until the millisecond that political calculation demanded he do otherwise, and who now believes that it is mandated by the Constitution. His putting off his amnesty announcement until after the election – and his dishonest refusal to acknowledge that it is an amnesty – is another example. We already knew that he is a liar (“If you like your coverage . . . ”) and have some reason to suspect that he is a fool. But the fundamental problem is that he is a lawyer, one without the intellectual or moral equipment to be anything more than a litigator of the picayune. For President Obama and his enablers, the law is a species of magic: He is entitled to do whatever he pleases, even when it plainly violates both the national interest and our longstanding habits of government, if he can simply think of a way to say the right words in the right order as he acts. That isn’t governance – that’s alchemical hokum, transforming the dross of Democratic political ambition into pure gold.
There are many defects with that model of government, but the largest one is that the words “illegal” and “legal” no longer have any meaning. If a sufficiently powerful person or faction demands that the illegal should be the legal, then it is so. Never mind the law – and certainly never mind the lawmakers, who are increasingly irrelevant in our emerging Gaullist, strongman form of government. Charles de Gaulle and his supporters at least had the intellectual honesty to call that form of government what it is: rule by decree.
And he may yet get away with it. But a wiser and better man would not try to.
John Fund suggests the president will have as much trouble in the courts as he did at Saturday Night Live.
… Saturday Night Live ran a wicked parody of his moves, turning inside out the old 1970s Schoolhouse Rock skit on how a bill becomes a law. “There’s actually an even easier way to get things done around here, and it’s called an executive order,” Obama (played by Jay Pharoah) proclaims as he shoves cast member Kenan Thompson, who is dressed as a Bill, down the Capitol Steps. Actor Bobby Moynihan then shows up smoking a cigarette and dressed as an Executive Order. He sings, “I’m an executive order, and I pretty much just happen.” The “little boy” who is there to learn how government works then asks, “Wait a second, don’t you have to go through Congress at some point?” “Aw, that’s adorable, you still think that’s how government works,” Executive Order responds, as “President Obama” smirks nearby. The Bill (Thompson) climbs back up the stairs to warn: “Look at the midterm elections. People clearly don’t want this.” Obama kicks him down the stairs again. It’s Obama as a bully, unwilling to listen to others. …
… During the height of the Korean War, President Harry Truman acted to block a potential strike of America’s steel mills by ordering his secretary of Commerce to seize control of the mills. The Supreme Court ruled, in a 6–3 decision, that the president’s actions had violated the Constitution. The Court held that a president may use the limited powers granted him in the Constitution but that his “power to see that the laws are faithfully executed refutes the idea that he is to be a lawmaker.”
President Obama may indeed see himself as a modern-day Lincoln, acting boldly to address a national “emergency” of immigration — conveniently timed to fall just days after the midterm elections. But it is far more likely that the public and eventually the courts will see him as closer to the figure that Saturday Night Live portrayed: an overreaching bully whose own previous statements undermine his brand-new assertions.
Streetwise Professor posts on more slights of our allies.
The Marines have a saying: “No better friend. No worse enemy.” Obama is hell-bent on reversing that formulation.
One leg of his foreign policy could be dubbed FOF: F’ Our Friends. I’ve discussed one example of that recently: Obama’s inveterate opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline, and his fact free defense of his indefensible position. In adhering to this position, Obama is giving Canada the back of his hand.
The Australian reports of another example. Obama spurned the advice of the US ambassador to Australia, and delivered a truculent speech that directly attacked the Australian government’s climate change policies: …
… Maybe it’s something about the Anglosphere. Obama’s animus against the UK (which has also fought shoulder-to-shoulder with America in Afghanistan, Iraq, Kuwait and now against ISIS) is well-known.
And for what is Obama slagging our allies? A farcical war on CO2.
While the FOF campaign is in full swing, Obama continues his Ahab-like pursuit of a deal with a nation that has been assiduously killing Americans for 25 years.
That’s Obama’s America. No worse friend. No better enemy. Two years cannot pass quickly enough.
Back to GruberGate just so we can highlight this from Howie Carr.
… Do you realize that every last one of the many disasters that has befallen this nation in the last half-century can be traced right back here to the banks of the Charles River?
C’mon down, Jonathan Gruber, economics professor at MIT. He’s the moonbat who, after engineering the ongoing fiasco that is Obamacare, then took a nationwide victory lap in which he repeatedly described the American people as “too stupid” to realize the Democrats were destroying their health care.
Maybe he’s right about our stupidity. After all, he cashed in $392,000 worth of federal no-bid contracts to wreck the best health care system in the world, plus another $1.6 million or so in various state wrecking-ball contracts.
This goober, I mean Gruber, now says that when he sneered about how stupid Americans are, he made a mistake. Oddly, he made the same “mistake” five times (and counting). When you say something publicly five times, it’s part of your stump speech.
The Unaffordable Care Act — from the same Beautiful People who gave you Vietnam, the War on Poverty, the Immigration Reform Act of 1965, global warming, SSI, busing, gay marriage and gender reassignment. …
Matthew Continetti calls the far left Dems the “De Blasio Democrats.”
… The movement that launched a 50-state strategy has been reduced to a 50-enclaves strategy. Democrats are limited to the majority-minority districts, cities, and coastal bastions of the liberal coalition. This is a somewhat surprising outcome for a party that trumpets its populism and democratic heritage. What has surprised me most, however, is the brazenness with which the president and his allies declare their apathy toward public sentiment as expressed in elections that Democrats lose. Who cares about the Americans who bothered to vote on November 4, they say. They’re not our people.
“To the two-thirds of voters who chose not to participate in the process yesterday, I hear you, too,” Obama said at his post-election press conference. How can he hear these voters? Dental fillings? By what means does he divine their hopes, fears, and needs? A Ouija board?
I have a test to determine the lunacy of a Democratic talking point: If E.J. Dionne is the only reporter who parrots it, then it’s too crazy for most journalists. Sure enough, writes Dionne, by issuing his unconstitutional executive order, Obama “is paying close attention to the feelings of a very important group of voters—the tens of millions who supported him two years ago but were so dispirited that they stayed away from the polls on November 4.” It’s the silent majority—so silent it does not even vote.
This is too much for the press corps but not for liberal politicians. Asked during his trip to D.C. about a recent poll showing a stark racial divide in his approval rating, Bill de Blasio said, “I question whether they are getting the totality of the citizens of the city.” He must have forgotten that he too won an election with record low turnout. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the de Blasio Democrats: extremists who gratify special interests while disregarding public opinion. It is a vanishing breed. At this rate, soon only E.J. will be left.
The progressives are waging war on suburbia according to Joel Kotkin.
… You are a political party, and you want to secure the electoral majority. But what happens, as is occurring to the Democrats, when the damned electorate that just won’t live the way—in dense cities and apartments—that you have deemed is best for them?
This gap between party ideology and demographic reality has led to a disconnect that not only devastated the Democrats this year, but could hurt them in the decades to come. University of Washington demographer Richard Morrill notes that the vast majority of the 153 million Americans who live in metropolitan areas with populations of more than 500,000 live in the lower-density suburban places Democrats think they should not. Only 60 million live in core cities.
Despite these realities, the Democratic Party under Barack Obama has increasingly allied itself with its relatively small core urban base. Simply put, the party cannot win—certainly not in off-year elections—if it doesn’t score well with suburbanites. Indeed, Democrats, as they retreat to their coastal redoubts, have become ever more aggressively anti-suburban, particularly in deep blue states such as California. “To minimize sprawl” has become a bedrock catchphrase of the core political ideology.
As will become even more obvious in the lame duck years, the political obsessions of the Obama Democrats largely mirror those of the cities: climate change, gay marriage, feminism, amnesty for the undocumented, and racial redress. These may sometimes be worthy causes, but they don’t address basic issues that effect suburbanites, such as stagnant middle class wages, poor roads, high housing prices, or underperforming schools. None of these concerns elicit much passion among the party’s true believers.
The miscalculation is deep-rooted, and has already cost the Democrats numerous House and Senate seats and at least two governorships. Nationwide, in areas as disparate as east Texas and Maine or Colorado and Maryland, suburban voters deserted the Democrats in droves. …