Crimes Against Liberty (22 page)

Gibbs’s gangster imagery was no mere rhetorical flourish, as BP executives discovered when they were summoned to the White House. Flanked by Attorney General Eric Holder, who has threatened criminal action against BP, Obama shook down BP into forking over a $20 billion installment to defer the government’s further wrath. Although the company’s liability was legally capped at $75 million, its managers had little choice but to submit to Obama’s diktat—the U.S. president was relentlessly denouncing them in every public forum, and they had a criminal investigation hanging over their head. While it’s difficult to feel sorry for BP, claims against the company are supposed to be handled through the judicial process, not by a grandstanding president extorting cash through threats and bullying.

Even Obama’s supporters recognized he was resorting to sheer intimidation. As Democratic strategist James Carville noted, “It looks as if President Obama applied a little old-school Chicago persuasion to the oil executives.” But American presidents, of course, are not supposed to resort to this kind of outright thuggery to get their way. As Conn Carroll remarked on the Heritage Foundation’s blog, “Making ‘offers you can’t refuse’ may be a great way to run the mob, but it is no way to run a country.”
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BP was not Obama’s only scapegoat as he desperately sought to deflect the public outcry over his manifestly incompetent response to the oil spill. He also denounced the Minerals Management Service, the federal agency that oversees oil and gas drilling in the Gulf. “For too long, for a decade or more,” said Obama, “there has been a cozy relationship between the oil companies and the federal agency that permits them to drill.” He then suggested that the agency just gave out permits like candy, at the simple request of the oil companies with nothing more than their assurances of safety. He also angrily condemned oil industry officials for pointing fingers of blame at each other, imperiously declaring, “I will not tolerate more finger pointing or irresponsibility.”
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Amidst all the furious accusations and blame shifting, it was clear BP is but another prop Obama has chosen to advance another plank of his statist agenda—this time his plan to shut down our conventional energy industry in favor of new, quixotic alternative energy methods that will succeed only in propelling this nation even faster toward third world status.

IT’S BUSH’S FAULT

No list of Obama’s targets would be complete without an accounting of his perpetual thrashing of George W. Bush. Out of a sense of decorum, most presidents refrain from directly criticizing their predecessor. For example, President George W. Bush jealously safeguarded the dignity of his office and rarely censured Bill Clinton. And even out of office Bush studiously refrains from criticizing Obama, saying he “deserves my silence.”
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The one time Bush made an exception and criticized Obama for his economic policies and his decision to close Gitmo, Gibbs snarkily responded that many of those policies were debated during last year’s election. “We kept score last November, and we won.”
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As Obama began his term in office, one might have assumed his continued hammering of President Bush was just a short-term holdover from a contentious campaign, where Obama and the Democrats ran against Bush perhaps more than they did against Republican nominee John McCain. (A
New Yorker
profile of Bush observed, “There was an almost obsessive singularity in the way that Obama and his chief strategists—Axelrod and David Plouffe, the campaign’s manager—saw the contest. In their tactical view, all that was wrong with the United States could be summarized in one word: Bush.”
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) But as his presidency wore on, Obama kept sniping at Bush at the same feverish pace. As columnist Charles Krauthammer asked, “Is there anything he hasn’t blamed George W. Bush for? The economy, global warming, the credit crisis, Middle East stalemate, the deficit, anti-Americanism abroad—everything but swine flu. It’s as if Obama’s presidency hasn’t really started.”
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Consider some examples:

• In March 2009, Obama announced he would be sending 21,000 additional troops to Afghanistan. But in October he authorized and dispatched an additional 13,000 troops there, bringing the total increase he had approved to 34,000. When asked about the additional troops, which brought the total number of U.S. troops deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan even above their peak levels during the Iraq “surge,” Gibbs said that Bush, not Obama, had authorized the additional 13,000 troops. But Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whit-man contradicted Gibbs, saying, “The 21,000 are only combat forces, and when the combat forces go in, there are a certain amount of additional forces that are required.” Another defense official confirmed this, saying, “Obama authorized the whole thing.”
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• Also in March 2009, Obama took a shot at the previous administration on a
60 Minutes
interview, attacking former vice president Dick Cheney, who had been criticizing him for jettisoning major components of the Bush administration’s approach to the war on terror. “How many terrorists have actually been brought to justice under the philosophy that is being promoted by Vice President Cheney?” asked Obama. Then he implied the Bush administration had endangered the country, insisting Cheney’s approach to terrorism “hasn’t made us safer. What it has been is a great advertisement for anti-American sentiment.”
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• On May 11, 2009, White House budget director Peter Orszag wrote in a blog post that increases in the estimated federal budget deficit of $89 billion for 2009 and $87 billion for 2010 were due to “the economic crisis inherited by this administration.”
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• The Obama administration even blamed Bush for its own bailout of General Motors. Obama’s senior economic adviser Austan Goolsbee said Obama’s options were sharply limited by Bush’s handling of the auto industry because Bush “ran out the clock.” This was despite the fact that when the Bush administration allocated $17.4 billion of TARP funds to GM and Chrysler the previous December, Obama praised the move as “a necessary step.” Even the
Hill
acknowledged Obama’s culpability, saying, “The Obama administration has steered the two troubled companies into bankruptcy.”
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• In July 2009, when the unemployment rate hit a 26-year high, Obama denied any responsibility, saying, “It took us years to get us into this mess, and it will take more than a few months to get us out.” As
National Review Online
’s Jim Geraghty noted, “This ignores the fact that after the stimulus passed, [he] has not ‘gotten us out of the mess,’ but the mess has gotten worse.”
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• In a July 2009 press conference, Obama referred to the Bush years nine times, three of which were direct complaints that he inherited a $1.3 trillion debt that had hampered his progress in restoring economic growth. The
Washington Times’
Joseph Curl commented on Obama’s Bush-bashing habit in light of his promise to usher in a “new era of responsibility” that would transcend partisan politics, quoting former Bush deputy press secretary Tony Fratto as saying, “For a guy who campaigned on taking responsibility and looking forward, he spends an awful lot of time pointing fingers and looking backward.”
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• In a townhall meeting in Shaker Heights, Ohio, Obama said, “Folks have a lot of nerve who have helped us get into this fiscal hole and then start going around trying to talk about fiscal responsibility. I’m always a little surprised that people don’t have a little more shame about having created a mess and then trying to point fingers.”
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• At a DNC fundraiser in San Francisco in October 2009, responding to the spate of criticism he’d been receiving over the economy and the sky-rocketing national debt, Obama accused his critics of having “a selective memory” about the fact that he didn’t create the current economic crisis, which was “unlike any that we’ve seen in our times. We were losing 700,000 jobs a month. Our financial system was on the brink of collapse. Economists of every political stripe were saying we might be slipping into the next Great Depression.... Another way of putting it is when, you know, I’m busy and Nancy is busy with our mop cleaning up somebody else’s mess—we don’t want somebody sitting back saying, ‘You’re not holding the mop the right way.’ Why don’t
you
grab a mop, why don’t you help clean up.”
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• At his West Point speech in December 2009, Obama said, “The decision to go into Iraq caused substantial rifts between America and much of the world.... Today, after extraordinary costs we are bringing the Iraq war to a responsible end.” Did he mean the costs were not worth the result? That it was less important to spend money in Iraq against an evil regime than it was to waste it on quixotic “stimulus” fantasies at home? That even if we were justified in invading Iraq we shouldn’t have done it if it resulted in “rifts” with other nations—implying that opposition to the right thing means not doing the right thing?

Obama declared, “I opposed the war in Iraq precisely because I believe that we must exercise restraint in the use of military force, and always consider the long-term consequences of our actions. We have been at war for eight years, at enormous cost in lives and resources. Years of debate over Iraq and terrorism have left our unity on national security issues in tatters, and created a highly polarized and partisan backdrop for this effort.” He then turned to his favorite subject, the “worst economic crisis since the Great Depression,” which he made clear he “inherited” and personally remedied.
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• On NBC’s
Meet the Press
, Vice President Joe Biden said the Iraq war wasn’t worth the “horrible price, not only in loss of life, the way the war was mishandled from the outset, but we took our eye off the ball, putting us in a much different and more dangerous position in Afghanistan. We lost support around the world.”
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• FOX News reported on January 25, 2010, that Obama and his top advisors had “been pinning the blame on the prior administration, directly or obliquely, ever since Obama’s inauguration a full year ago.” What’s more, they did so “at least seven times since last Tuesday’s stunning upset in the Massachusetts Senate election.” Obama referred to the “economic downturn we inherited,” “the year of failing to pay for new policies,” and “the trillion dollars in deficits” Bush created. Gibbs claimed “the hole we inherit and the hole that we have to fill is very, very deep.”

Aide David Axelrod said, “When the president walked in the door, he was handed the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, a financial crisis that held out the prospect of the collapse of the financial system and a fiscal crisis.” With unmatched chutzpah, adviser David Plouffe declaimed that Democrats should not “accept any lectures on spending” from Republicans. “Republicans’ fiscal irresponsibility,” said Plouffe, “has never been matched in our country’s history.”
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• In his first State of the Union address, Obama issued a bitterly strident and partisan harangue, blaming Bush for coming into office with a $200 billion budget surplus and leaving office with a $1.3 trillion deficit, which Obama blamed on “paying for two wars, two tax cuts, and an expensive prescription drug program.” “All this,” he claimed, “was before I walked in the door.”

Sadly, the mainstream media enabled Obama’s unbecoming behavior just as it had indulged his messianic mystique. Carrying on in its tradition of demonizing President Bush and deifying President Obama, the MSM reinforced the “it’s Bush’s fault” theme at every turn. In November 2009,
Time’s
cover story was “The End of the 2000s: Goodbye (at Last) to the Decade From Hell.” Andy Serwer, who wrote the cover story, expounded on it on MSNBC’s
Morning Joe
, “Overall, it was a decade where Americans really suffered. There was, you know, a deferral of responsibility, neglect, and these things all sort of came home to roost this decade....If you lived in China or Brazil, not a bad decade. But here in the United States, it was kind of tough.”
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Reality doesn’t quite match Serwer’s rhetoric, considering that the George W. Bush years saw mostly robust economic growth. But so did the Reagan years, which liberals denounced as the “Decade of Greed.” Though both periods were prosperous, liberals couldn’t abide the tax cuts that strongly contributed to their prosperity.
Time
editor Rick Stengel, appearing with Serwer on
Morning Joe
, predicted the next decade was “going to turn out to be a lot better than we think, in part because we have a lot of these excesses [read: tax cuts] behind us.”
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