Crimes Against Liberty (18 page)

Obama exudes a sense of entitlement about his agenda, expecting legislators to vote as he commands, as opposed to, say, their consciences or the wishes of their constituents.
Salon’s
Glenn Greenwald wrote, “This has become an emerging theme among both the White House and House leadership: that progressive members of Congress have an obligation to carry out ‘the wishes of the President’ even when they disagree.” Greenwald lamented the “subservient mentality” of Congress and the “bullying tactics” of the president. “The duty of Congress,” he noted, “is not to obey the wishes of the President.”
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For Obama, it’s more than just a matter of political power. There’s also his egotistical sense that he is absolutely right about everything, that everyone else is wrong, and that if given enough time, he can persuade the rest of the rubes of the superiority of his positions. We’ve seen how he attributed the public’s repudiation of his agenda via the Massachusetts Senate election to his failure to sufficiently explain his healthcare position—though he had talked ad nauseam on the issue. But it was true of other issues as well—even strong moral issues for which there would never be a consensus, as with his attempt to confront pro-life forces at Notre Dame.

He took the same tack with the issue of homosexuality. At a White House celebration of Gay Pride Month—a controversial act in itself—Obama said he aspired to persuade all Americans to accept homosexuality—as if the issue were simply about “accepting homosexuals,” and that anyone opposing special legal classifications for homosexuality was prejudiced, discriminatory, and as Obama claimed, possessed of “worn arguments and old attitudes.” He added, “There are good and decent people in this country who don’t yet fully embrace their gay brothers and sisters—not yet. That’s why I’ve spoken about these issues—not just in front of you—but in front of unlikely audiences, in front of African-American church members.”
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CONSERVATIVES

In a celebratory speech following passage of ObamaCare, the president proved he is also an ungracious winner. “I heard one of the Republican leaders say this was gonna be Armageddon! Well, two months from now, six months from now, you can check it out, we’ll look around. And we’ll see. You don’t have to take my word for it.”
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Believe me, we won’t. But Obama must have quickly forgotten that he acknowledged it would take some time to assess the critics’ predictions. Just a week later he implied that if Republicans were correct, then Armageddon should have already arrived. In a speech at a healthcare rally in Portland, Maine, on April 1, he complained about the “misinformation,” “fear-mongering,” and “overheated rhetoric” about ObamaCare. He said that if you turned on the news you’d hear people “shouting about how the world will end because we passed this bill.”

He wasn’t exaggerating, he assured his audience. “Leaders of the Republican Party have actually been calling the passage of this bill ‘Armageddon.’ They say it’s the end of freedom as we know it.” So, he taunted, “after I signed the bill, I looked up to see if there were any asteroids headed our way. I checked to see if any cracks had opened up in the ground. But you know what? It turned out to be a pretty nice day. Birds were chirping. Folks were strolling down the street. Nobody lost their doctor, or was forced into some government plan.”

It’s inconceivable Obama was unaware that the provisions of his bill have yet to go into effect, rendering his entire rant irrelevant. In fact, he revealed that very thing in his next statement, when he attacked his critics. “Every day since I signed the reform into law, there’s another poll or headline that says ‘Nation still divided on health reform. No great surge in public support.’ Well, yea, it’s only been a week! Before we find out if people like health care reform maybe we should wait until it actually happens. Just a thought.”
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Yes, and where was that thought in his previous, incoherent sentence?

At a fundraiser for Senator Barbara Boxer in April 2010, Obama, on the warpath to bullying the nation into passing yet another transformative package of regulations—his financial overhaul legislation—unleashed his venom on Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell. He told the group that McConnell “paid a visit to Wall Street a week or two ago and met with some of the movers and shakers up there. I don’t know exactly what was discussed. All I can tell you is when he came back, he promptly announced he would oppose the financial regulatory reform.”

In his Alinskyite outburst, Obama once again accused anyone who stood in his way of dishonesty. He said McConnell’s objections to the bill were “just plain false” and “cynical.” Taken together, he was clearly suggesting McConnell was lying about the financial bill because he had been bought off by Wall Street. That’s Obama, the paragon of civility and partisanship.
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“DOMESTIC TERRORISTS”

Obama’s intolerance of criticism filters down through the bureaucracy, finding expression in unexpected, disturbing places. For example, a Department of Defense manual identified “protests” as a form of low-level terrorism.
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Likewise, Obama’s Department of Homeland Security released a report to the nation’s law enforcement officials titled, “Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment.” According to the
Washington Times
, the report warned the “economic recession, the election of America’s first black president, and the return of a few disgruntled war veterans could swell the ranks of white-power militias.”
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The characterization of war vets as potential racist terrorists was bad enough, but the report cast suspicion on other conservative-leaning groups as well. In a footnote, the department defined “rightwing extremism in the United States” as including not just racist or hate groups, but also advocates of states’ rights, and possibly “groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single-issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration.” Americans for Limited Government (ALG) filed a FOIA request demanding to know how DHS had arrived at that conclusion. In the administration’s response, officials admitted they had relied mostly on websites and didn’t do any statistical analysis or interview any of those it defined as terrorists. As ALG noted, they “did not conduct even the most rudimentary research or investigation.” They just “cruised the Internet” and cherry-picked information from “disreputable sites” to stage their “attack” on “rightwing targets.”
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The administration’s report vilifying veterans and ordinary Americans outraged the American Legion. “I think it is important for all of us to remember that Americans are not the enemy. The terrorists are,” said David K. Rehbein, the Legion’s national commander.
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Due to the public outcry, the report was recalled within hours from state and local law enforcement officials.
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On the heels of that controversial report, the Obama administration compiled a terrorism dictionary that tied “antiabortion extremists” to racism. It defined them as “a movement of groups or individuals who are virulently antiabortion and advocate violence against providers of abortion-related services, their employees, and their facilities. Some cite various racist and anti-Semitic beliefs to justify their criminal activities.” Republican congressman Peter King, the ranking member on the House Homeland Security Committee, was infuriated by the dictionary, which he said “causes further concern that Congress needs to get to the bottom of exactly how DHS determines what intelligence products to distribute to law enforcement officials around the country.”
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The administration denied any political motivation behind the DHS documents, protesting that they had drafted reports on the dangers of leftwing extremism as well. But that’s not quite accurate. Michelle Malkin pointed out that past DHS reports had “always been very specific in identifying exact groups, causes, and targets of domestic terrorists.” By contrast, wrote Malkin, the DHS report on rightwing extremism constituted “a sweeping indictment of conservatives.” The “intent,” she said, “is clear. . . . It is no coincidence that this report echoes Tea Party-bashing left-wing blogs . . . and demonizes the very Americans who will be protesting in the thousands on Wednesday for the nationwide Tax Day Tea Party.”
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Perhaps even more damning, however, was that it was Obama’s own political action group, “Organizing for America,” that dubbed opponents of ObamaCare “Right Wing Domestic Terrorists.”
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The administration and its leftist enablers sought to distance themselves from this sordid event, but they are the ones who for years have been trying to connect conservative speech—especially talk radio—with violence, in order to lay the groundwork for chilling and censoring such speech. Former president Bill Clinton’s attack on conservative talkers and so-called hate speech at his 1995 commencement speech at Michigan State University, his speech at the Center for American Progress in April 2009, and his April 2010 interview with the
New York Times
, in which he connected tea party-type anti-government rhetoric with violence like the Oklahoma City bombing, were not mere spontaneous utterances.

Indeed, from its very inception, the tea party movement was a prime target of team Obama’s demonization campaign, with its members accused of being lawless extremists. In a private pep talk to Democratic congressmen, Obama, according to Congressman Earl Blumenauer, posed this question: “Does anybody think that the teabag, anti-government people are going to support them if they bring down health care? All it will do is confuse and dispirit” Democratic voters, “and it will encourage the extremists.”
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(For the uninitiated, the term “teabag” or “teabagger,” used by liberals to slander the peaceful protestors of Obama’s radical agenda, is a vulgar epithet involving a sexual act.) On another occasion White House press secretary Robert Gibbs demeaned tea party protestors as an irrelevant fringe group, telling
CBS News’
s Harry Smith, “I gotta tell you, Harry, I think most of what you’re seeing on TV, no offense, is good TV and that’s about it.”
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Senator Chuck Schumer joined the White House’s campaign against dissenters, calling then-Massachusetts Senate candidate Scott Brown a “far-right tea bagger” in an e-mail.
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Obama himself couldn’t resist taking unpresidential jabs at Brown, repeatedly ridiculing his pickup truck (which, as it turns out, was a GM). “Anybody can own a truck,” Obama snidely remarked. Brown shot back, “Mr. President, unfortunately in this economy, not everybody can buy a truck. My goal is to change that by cutting spending, lowering taxes and letting people keep more of their money.”
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Aside from deriding tea partiers as unruly rabble, the administration constantly portrayed them as vaguely threatening. Addressing the movement on CBS’s
Face the Nation
, presidential adviser David Axelrod said, “I think any time you have severe economic conditions, there is always an element of disaffection that can mutate into something that’s unhealthy.” Demonstrating the administration’s obliviousness to the public’s concern about its explosive acceleration of our national debt, Axelrod expressed bewilderment that protestors would even be concerned by such issues, since “this president just cut taxes for 95 percent of the American people. So I think the tea bags should be directed elsewhere because he certainly understands the burden that people face.”
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On his 100
^th
day in office, Obama personally ridiculed the tea party protestors, admonishing, “Let’s not play games” and pretend out of control federal spending is just a matter of “the Recovery Act, because that’s just a fraction of the overall problem we got.”
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Tea party rallies only intensified the following year, with protestors meeting nationwide to denounce the administration’s runaway spending, excessive taxation, expansion of government control, and other irresponsible policies. Obama continued to show both his aloofness (characterizing the protests as only about taxes) and his thin-skinned arrogance. He mocked tea partiers at a Democratic Party fundraiser, saying he was “amused over the last couple of days where people have been having these rallies about taxes. You would think they would be saying ‘thank you’” because “in all, we passed 25 different tax cuts last year. And one thing we haven’t done is raise income taxes on families making less than $250,000 a year—another promise that we kept.” His original promise, as previously noted, was that he wouldn’t raise
any form
of taxes for that income group, on which he has now increased or imposed at least fourteen separate taxes.
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THE WAR ON FOX

It’s hard to remember a president being treated so deferentially by the media, but the press can never be loyal enough for Obama. If you aren’t with him 100 percent of the time, you are against him.
Time
political analyst Mark Halperin admitted to television host Charlie Rose that Obama was the first president to avoid media scrutiny, saying he had a “charmed” Senate race and a “charmed” presidential campaign. And yet, Halperin said, Obama is nevertheless “thin-skinned” about the press and “increasingly says that ‘the press is against me.’”
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