What the (Bleep) Just Happened? (10 page)

Other presidents had appointed individual czars to deal with specific issues, but none had built such a massive czar apparatus to bypass Congress and work behind the scenes in a coordinated, systematic way. To be fair, Barack didn’t come up with the idea to beef up the number of czars right away. It was only after he caught an airing of
Batman Begins
on basic cable while campaigning and was inspired by Liam Neeson’s character in the League of Shadows, a vigilante ninja crime syndicate that operates out of the confines of regular society. Obama created his
own
League of Shadows. Their mission was to get the leftist agenda done by implementing Obama’s executive orders and by bureaucratic fiat. After all, he couldn’t “remake America” by himself.

Obama’s initial group of czars was a delightful collection of communists, socialists, and other sundry radicals. In fact, he met them all at socialist summer camp, where together they would make arts and crafts projects like a hammer and sickle constructed out of boondoggle, pinecones, and Popsicle sticks. After a long day of nature hikes up the Ho Chi Minh Trail and skinny-dipping with Madeleine Albright, they would roast Marxist marshmallows and tell scary stories about capitalism around the campfire.

Among those he appointed were:

Carol Browner, energy and environment czar. As recently as December 2008, she was listed as a commissioner in Socialist International, a global organization of socialist and labor parties that chronically condemns U.S. policies. Browner was one of fourteen official leaders of the socialist group’s Commission for a Sustainable World Society. That’s a particularly shadowy group whose objective is to establish a world government to control the world’s wealthiest economies by using the pretext of global climate change.

Cass Sunstein, regulatory czar. In his book
The Second Bill of Rights: FDR’s Unfinished Revolution and Why We Need It More Than Ever
, Sunstein waxes rhapsodic about socialism and the need for ever-bigger government: “In brief, the second bill attempts to protect both opportunity and security, by creating rights to employment, adequate food and clothing, decent shelter, education, recreation, and medical care.” Socialized medicine and free Ho-Hos for everyone! No wonder there’s no Cass without “ass.”

In an op-ed for the
Chicago Tribune
, Sunstein argued more directly for a socialist revolution as he lectured us to celebrate paying taxes: “In what sense is the money in our pockets and bank accounts fully ‘ours’? … Without taxes, there would be no liberty. Without taxes there would be no property. Without taxes, few of us would have any assets worth defending.” And then came the killer kook concept: “There is no liberty without dependency.”

That’s the very essence of kookdom, right there, in Sunstein’s neat little phrase. For Obama, Sunstein’s efficient approach to redistributionism made him perfect to oversee all existing regulations and create new, more economy-killing ones.

Van Jones, green jobs czar. Born Anthony Kapel Jones, he decided to go by the nickname Van, probably to sound more interesting and hard-core. Let’s face it: Would
you
take anyone named Tony Jones seriously? How many Marxists named Tony Jones do you know? Without his “Van,” he’d merely be a bespectacled dork named Tony Jones.

In his early career as a radical activist, Van was a leading member of Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement (STORM), a San Francisco–area Marxist-Maoist group. He was arrested in 1993 during the Rodney King riots and again in 1999 during the Seattle protests against the World Trade Organization. By that time, Jones was a fully committed Marxist-Leninist-Maoist who hated capitalism for its alleged exploitation of minorities worldwide. He made it his mission to undercut and ultimately destroy the global capitalist system by mobilizing leftist mobs and by seeking to remake entire sectors of the economy, primarily the energy industry, by leveraging the phony concept of green jobs. As he said, “This movement is deeper than solar panels! … We’re gonna change the whole system! … We want a new system!” In the fall of 2009, after just a few months on the job, Jones was forced to resign his czar post after Glenn Beck first reported on his communist ties. Jones moved into the George Soros–supported Center for American Progress, the leftist receptacle for radicals needing to move further below the radar. You’ve got to give it to Van: he doesn’t even bother to disguise the fact that he’s a raving communist maniac.

Ron Bloom, car czar. He was responsible for the forced closure of thousands of Chrysler and GM dealerships around the country that resulted in the loss of up to two hundred thousand jobs. His only experience with automobiles involved sitting on his couch watching
The Dukes of Hazzard
. His leftist kookdom was revealed in all of its glory in a February 2008 speech, in which he said, “Generally speaking, we get the joke. We know that the free market is nonsense.... We know this is largely about power, that it’s an adults-only no-limit game. We kind of agree with Mao that political power comes largely from the barrel of a gun.” Memo to Obama’s first communications director, Anita Dunn: you weren’t the only Mao-lover in the White House.

Vivek Kundra, information czar. Also known as: Who the Heck Is Vivek? Obama appointed him the nation’s chief technology officer, in charge of a $71 billion budget, even though Kundra pleaded guilty to shoplifting $134 worth of stuff from JC Penney in 1997. Just days after his appointment, Kundra was placed on administrative leave after his former office was raided by the FBI. He would have been Obama’s point man in reading your e-mails. “Hi Vivek! OMG. LOL.
”

John Holdren, science czar, who looks like he probably auditioned for the lead role in
The Shaggy Dog
, but don’t let the cuddly look fool you. Holdren is a particularly nasty piece of leftist work. He has called America “the meanest of wealthy countries” and has endorsed one-world government in a “surrender of sovereignty” to “a comprehensive planetary regime” that would control and dispense all global resources, redistribute the confiscated wealth, draft a world army, direct a “de-development” of the West, and limit the growth of the world’s population through compulsory abortion. Babies, schmabies! Who needs ’em?

Nancy-Ann DeParle, health care czar. A strong proponent of health care rationing. While we’re aborting babies, let’s kill Grandma too!

Ed Montgomery, car recovery czar. A former ACORN board member who serves on the academic advisory committee for the Soros-funded Center for American Progress.

Alan Bersin, border czar. An advocate of open borders, because after all, sovereignty is overrated.

Obama, with the assistance of the radical czars and his wingmen in Congress, got the leftist rampage rolling. In the first hundred days alone, Obama pushed through the nearly $1 trillion “stimulus”; got a half-trillion-dollar omnibus spending bill; offered up a measly $100 million in “cuts” in a nearly $4 trillion initial proposed budget, all while claiming he wanted “fiscal responsibility”; nationalized much of the U.S. auto industry; screwed General Motors’ bondholders; pledged transparency while stonewalling disclosure of where the TARP (Trouble Asset Relief Program) money went; nominated five tax cheats to his cabinet; began to launch Adventures in Socialized Medicine; oversaw a Department of Homeland Security report that called our returning veterans “security risks”; politicized the 2010 Census by moving it into the White House; announced the closure of Guantánamo Bay without a plan to actually do so; released top-secret Central Intelligence Agency interrogation memos; opened the door to prosecutions of CIA officials who had engaged in enhanced interrogations of terrorist suspects; failed to respond to a North Korean nuclear missile test launch; was all smiles for longtime U.S. enemies Hugo Chávez, Fidel Castro, and Daniel Ortega; bowed to Saudi king Abdullah; began his Apology Tour to offer his regret for past American injustice; and insulted our closest ally, Great Britain, not once but twice, first by returning a bust of Winston Churchill that had been a special gift, and second, by giving Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II an iPod loaded with his speeches (because, after all, Obama speeches are like Lay’s Potato Chips: you can’t have just one).

The kooks knew that their redistributionist omelet could not be made without breaking a few eggs and that they might lose a few bodies along the way. Indeed, as time passed, the Obama Hypnosis began to wear off and the redistributionists’ agenda ripened. Pretty soon, “stimulus,” omnibus spending, bailouts, ObamaCare, Dodd-Frank financial regulation, and suffocating Environmental Protection Agency and National Labor Relations Board regulations were no longer the dynamic new policies of the hip new president but the destructive policies of a president bent on deconstructing America. Despite his assurances that his policies would produce glowing economic results, they instead wreaked a tornadic path of economic terror.

Within a few months of their takeover, the Democratic casualties began to pile up. There were more dead carcasses on the ground than in the final scene of
Reservoir Dogs
. In November 2009, voters in deep blue New Jersey and purple Virginia elected Republican governors, Chris Christie and Robert McDonnell, respectively. In January 2010, voters in deep blue Massachusetts elected a Republican senator, Scott Brown, to replace Edward Kennedy. In November 2010, voters across the country swept Republicans into control of the House and closer control of the Senate, while the GOP took eleven governorships from Democrats in states such as Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Iowa, as well as one governorship previously held by an independent in Florida. In September 2011, two Republicans won special congressional elections in Nevada and in a New York district that had been represented by such left-wing icons as Geraldine Ferraro, Chuck Schumer, and Anthony Weiner. There were a few Democratic wins during this time in special elections in upstate New York and California, but the overall trend was overwhelmingly Republican. Being a Democrat was like being a leper, as they watched their precious limbs rot away and fall off, one after another.

And yet Obama shrugged off these losses as transactional costs in the “fundamental transformation of America.” In perhaps the most telling example of Obama’s Alinskyite view that the radical ends justified even steep political losses, one of the last remaining Democratic moderates in the Senate, Arkansas senator Blanche Lincoln, begged Obama to abandon kookdom. Increasingly nervous about how Obama’s radicalism would affect her reelection chances in 2010, Lincoln tried to get Obama to repudiate “extreme” liberals such as then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and move toward the center. During a February 3, 2010, meeting Obama held with Senate Democrats about Obama-Care, Lincoln pleaded with him to moderate his far-left agenda because, she said, it was sowing job-destroying “uncertainty” in the business community. She asked him point-blank: “Are we willing as Democrats to push back on our own party?”

Obama’s reply? Sorry, Blanche: you’re crud out of luck.

“If the price of certainty,” he shot back, “is essentially for us to adopt the exact same proposals that were in place for eight years leading up to the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression—we don’t tinker with health care, let the insurance companies do what they want, we don’t put in place any insurance reforms, we don’t mess with the banks, let them keep on doing what they’re doing now because we don’t want to stir up Wall Street—the result is going to be the same.” Obama’s words made clear that he had no intention of “moderating” his agenda or “triangulating” Bill Clinton–style. His own personal political survival—as well as the political careers of his fellow Democrats—placed a distant second to the implementation of the kook agenda. In fact, Obama occasionally indicated that his fate may be a single term as president. In January 2010, he told ABC News that he would “rather be a really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president.” And in June 2011, he told NBC News, “I’m sure there are days where I say one term is enough.”

To Obama, if he could slam the entire redistributionist agenda into one term, he’d gladly check out after four years, even if that meant a reelection loss. “My work here is done, America. Socialism 4-ever! Peace out!”

There was, however, another critical element to the kooks’ strategy, one that was even more important than the cult of personality opiate they kept mainlining to the masses. America had been hit with heroin, morphine, codeine, and finally Baracksycontin. And still, things were about to get worse. When it came time to discuss major policies, from the “stimulus” to ObamaCare to the budget and spending to the debt ceiling, the redistributionists made the Republicans and everyone else believe that they were engaged on the same playing field when, in reality, the kooks were on a different one entirely.