All Venezuela’s dictator Hugo Chávez ever wanted for America was a dictator just like him running the show. And now we have one.
It isn’t just the Fast & Furious cover-up, although that IS a very big deal. Invoking executive privilege to keep documents under wraps is a big deal. What leaves me completely baffled is, if the White House knew nothing about the monkey poop fight at the zoo known as Fast And Furious, then what possible authority allows the assertion of that privilege? Either Obama and Holder knew that gun dealers in Arizona were told by the BATF to sell guns to straw buyers, or they didn’t. Either they knew that 1,000 of those guns had gone missing, or they didn’t.
Richard Nixon taught us that the chief executive cannot invoke executive privilege to cover up screwing the pooch. Or rather, the Supreme Court taught us that, when they slapped Tricky Dick around and made him cough up his tapes. (Somehow, eavesdropping on your opponent seems quite mild compared to losing track of 1,000 firearms and having a few of them turn up in investigations of murdered law enforcement agents. Your mileage may vary.) That this allegedly brilliant Constitutional scholar doesn’t know he can’t use the privilege in that way makes him look like a clown in charge of a very warped circus.
Why O’Bozo The Clown doesn’t just throw his Attorney Jester under the bus and be done with it is a mystery to me. There are two possibilities. One is some sort of racial solidarity thing. The other is that Eric Holder knows where all the bodies are buried, so to speak. Fire him and let him take the blame, and he turns around and buries Barry. Dollars to donuts everyone else gets buried with him, including Elena “Not Involved In ObamaCare” Kagan. That would not be the fairytale ending Obama had in mind.
Instead of sacrificing Holder, our new dictator is letting us know that he doesn’t answer to Congress, and he doesn’t answer to the people. Who DOES he answer to? His reflection in the mirror?
The Clown in Chief also claims the right to assassinate U.S. citizens without due process. Yeah yeah, I know. They’re filthy stinkin’ terrorists. Let us all shout “Team America, f*** yeah!” in unison, and not worry about this exceptional new dictatorial… er, I mean, executive power.
Except, I AM worried. I’m not worried for me, because I’m just a nerd who writes as a hobby. I worry about the folks with a bigger voice, because I worry that Dear Leader will manipulate the definition of terrorist like a wad of Silly Putty until he can call anyone who doesn’t dig him or his policies a terrorist. That “If you see something, say something” campaign didn’t feature anyone that looked even remotely like any of the individuals who have been detained or arrested on charges related to terrorism since the beginning of the War On Terrorism. Those folks were all male, and they all looked like dudes who, when they weren’t blowing stuff up, were either goat herders or falafel fryers.
I am not only worried about the big guys, truth be told. Obama hates Arizona. He proves it every time his administration sues us, every time he launches an investigation into our doings, and every time he ignores our Governor when she is only trying to be heard. So say four dudes are sitting in a bar in Heber-Overgaard, AZ, listening to Mogollon [6]. (That’s pronounced mug-ee-on. Best bar band in the southwest.) And say these four dudes make the same observations I did: We are hated by the current administration, and the guy in charge has shown us his wrath, with no relief in sight. So say one of these dudes opines that Arizona should just secede from the union. He says it jokingly, like, if they despise us that much, we could leave and put them out of their misery. Don’t want to be a bad dinner guest and all.
Is the man who mentioned secession a terrorist? That Silly Putty could be stretched by Janet Napolitano to say so without too much effort. Next, she determines that he’s a gun owner, making arresting him too risky. They send in the drones to execute him, in the interest of national security.
Can’t happen here, right? Are you sure? This new breed of dictator has the people’s “Keep us safe at any cost!” seal of approval tattooed on his ass.
Dear Leader also decided to intervene in Libya without consulting Congress. You can say what you want about his predecessor, but Bush never sent anyone into war without getting the go-ahead from the legislative branch. I don’t care at all about Libya, but I care very much that someone thought it was okay to bypass the process and do whatever the hell he wanted.
President Dick Tater then concluded he would give work permits to illegal aliens who are, by law, not eligible for them. If THAT isn’t giving the giant middle finger to Congress and the people, I don’t know what is.
There is also endless government largess for all of Obama’s buddies. It isn’t just Solyndra, and related “green energy” boondoggles, or the myriad other examples of “rewarding our friends and punishing our enemies.” (His words, not mine.) It is more about the General Motors debacle. Does the federal government truly have the interests of most American at heart when they gift unto several thousand union members, and screw the daylights out of GM’s shareholders? Sure, a certain group of people got to keep their jobs… for now. The piper will be paid down the road. A substantial number of those jobs will STILL go away, and the shareholders that took it in the shorts will never recover that money.
Remind me again why the government should be in the car business? And by what authority do they enter into that business? Because the dictator said it had to be done, at an enormous cost to the taxpayers. (Amazingly, investors pay taxes too. It just ain’t right to use their tax dollars to give them the shaft.) Also, when the government gets in the car business, you get the Yugo or the Trabant. That might actually be a step up from the Amazing Exploding Chevy Volt, and the New & Improved!!! Immolating Chevy Cruze. That recall [7] just happened today, and involves all 400,000+ of the little buggers they’ve sold over the last two years. This experiment will not end well, because with the government pulling your bacon out of the fire, you have no incentive to run your business correctly and produce a quality product.
Then there’s those pesky illegal non-recess appointments to the NLRB and that Consumer Confusion Cabal or whatever the hell it’s called. I really cannot fathom how our new dictator can blatantly ignore a procedural tool that his own party flogged until it cried out for mommy when HE is the one doing the appointing. You ‘splain, please.
I could go on and on, about BarryCare being rammed through using budget reconciliation and being grossly unconstitutional, about the efforts to backdoor us into cap & tax, about Obama wanting an internet “kill switch” just in case, about his disrespect for and attempted intimidation of the Supreme Court, and so on and so on. These are not the desires and actions of the leader of a free country. They are the actions of a dictator.
Alas, there is nothing to be done about our newly minted dictator. His dyed in the wool Kool-Aid drinkers aren’t even having the same conversation as the rest of us.
When you say the emperor has no clothes, they ask you why you hate naked black men. When you mention that those 1,000 missing guns are killing people, you get “Bush lied, people died.” Never mind that you are a whole hell of a lot less safe in Mexico than you are in Iraq. Hell, you’re less safe in DETROIT than you are in Iraq.
If you point out that Congress makes the rules regarding immigration, per Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution, they will tell you that Obama did what he did because the republicans were blocking ALL his efforts. They’ll toss that one out for the illegal appointments as well. When you say that’s tough cookies, and just the way government works in an ideologically divided country, they will shout that at least he got something DONE! They plainly don’t care how it got done, and if they are even on speaking terms with the phrase “separation of powers,” they don’t get what it means or why it’s important.
Oh, and do not DARE point out that Obama had a majority in the House, and a super-majority in the Senate until Scott Brown showed up. His impotent first two years are all Bush’s fault or something. Matter of fact, any salient point you make will be rebutted with “Where are the JOBS?!?!” Government doesn’t create jobs. The most they can do is create a prosperity-friendly climate. This dictator hasn’t even created any make-work government sector jobs for the truly hapless, let alone fostered growth in the private sector.
Don’t even bother saying it. Obama’s acolytes can’t hear you, now or ever.
Finally, when they have exhausted all of their ignorance and apathy, they will call you a racist. It is not possible that you disagree with pretty much everything our new dictator has done, and everything he stands for. You obviously hate him because he’s black.
The rest of the road to totalitarian rule is paved with republicans. Why isn’t anyone putting a stop to these shenanigans? Is it lack of political will, or something more malevolent? Are they as crooked and power-hungry as Obama is, and unwilling to upset the apple cart?
Hugo Chávez will be shuffling off this mortal coil sooner rather than later. He giggles, because the joke is on us. Chávez became a dictator by boldly seizing power. Our dictator is much more subtle. At the end of the day, though, the results are the same. Obama does not behave like a leader of a free republic. He acts like the dictator of a banana republic.
Welcome to the new America. Check your freedoms and your conscience at the door. My bookie is taking action on the fall of the republic. The over-under is five months.
