What the (Bleep) Just Happened? (9 page)

Every crusader needs protectors, and the left-wing media became Obama’s Knights Templar.

While many Americans took leave of their senses and unplugged their brains, Obama continued his march.

On August 28, 2008, Obama strode onstage in Denver at the Democratic National Convention to accept his party’s nomination for president. All around him were towering, fake Greek columns. Eighty-four thousand swooning fans hung on his every word. And once again, he dropped obvious clues about his intentions: “It’s time for us to
change America
,” he said. And “America, now is not the time for small plans.” And in his inaugural address on January 20, 2009, the day when the kooks finally seized the brass ring, Obama again stated his objective: “Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of
remaking
America.”

The inaugural extravaganza, during which Obama sat by the Lincoln Memorial as Beyoncé and Bono crooned to him and awaited his Caesarian thumbs-up or thumbs-down, was the moment the Obama Hypnosis finally jumped the shark. In another moment that perfectly encapsulated the height of the Obama hysteria, college student Julio Osegueda attended an Obama town hall in Fort Myers, Florida, just weeks after Obama was sworn in, and he had a breathless freak-out: “Oh, it is such a blessing to see you, Mr. President! Thank you for taking time out of your day! OH, GRACIOUS GOD, THANK YOU SO MUCH!!!!!” Julio needed to get shot with a tranquilizer dart and buy a new set of undies after Obama was done with him.

Once he was sworn in as president, however, the American people took a backseat to Obama’s redistributionist agenda. After all, the people weren’t critical to his plans. In fact, we were an impediment to them, something to be massaged, finessed, lied to, and manipulated. As Jon Stewart aptly noted in
Rolling Stone
in the fall of 2011, “I think he was already kind of over us by the time he got into office.”

To Obama, any public disapproval of his plans needed to be removed or crushed. Campaigning as a unifying transcendent figure and governing as a redistributionist involved two different skill sets. Once he became president, the unifying, amber-lit guy disappeared and was replaced by Big Daddy.

Every president assumes a somewhat paternalistic role as he leads the nation. He’s the guy in charge, shaping the country, leading us in war, making or keeping the peace, herding Congress, and presiding over 300 million citizens who look to him for protection, reassurance, and guidance. Obama, however, has taken the daddy role and super-sized it. Let’s face it. Obama is the worst national daddy EVER. He’s like Alec Baldwin, Michael Lohan, and David Hasselhoff, rolled up into one giant dysfunctional, un-paternal narcissistic nightmare.

In his inaugural address, Obama returned to a phrase that he had used before as he admonished us to “put away childish things.” In framing it that way, he subliminally put each listener—each American—in the position of
being
a child. And of course, the nanny state he is building makes children out of
all
of us as the government—with him sitting at the top—strips your freedom and makes you a dependent. But don’t worry—Big Daddy will ensure that you have the care you need. Everyone gets a bib, a high chair, and a sippy cup with a smiling Barry on the front.

By virtue of his super-paternalistic role, Obama elevated himself over Congress as well as the American people. Two days after he was sworn in as president, Obama invited top congressional leaders to the White House to discuss plans for economic “stimulus.” When Republican senator Jon Kyl challenged him over the package’s massive spending and tax “cut” to people who do not pay income taxes, Obama shot back: “I won.”

Two months later, the House Democratic Caucus met with Obama to discuss his budget proposal. When the president spotted Democratic representative Peter DeFazio, who had voted against the “stimulus,” Obama leaned in to him and said, “Don’t think we’re not keeping score, brother.”

This was the presidency, done Sopranos-style. But it was also designed to remind Congress of who was Boss. Big Daddy was now on the scene, and that coequal branch of government thing? Forget it. In fact, Obama took to routinely lecturing Congress about this or that policy, repeatedly summoning congressional leaders to the White House on whims, convening numerous joint sessions to make them show up and applaud his latest kook proposal for health care or jobs. During the 2011 debt debate, Obama even instructed members of Congress to “eat their peas” and get a deal in front of him. “Hey, you kids! Stop fighting and play nice!” This was Big Daddy on steroids, presiding over his rapidly growing welfare state in which all of us are infantilized and, like dutiful children, silenced.

The United States has had forty-four presidents. Some of them have been brilliant; some of them have been less swift. Some have been effective chief executives; others couldn’t manage their way out of a paper bag. Some got it on with interns; others farmed peanuts and hated Israel. Some have been intellectuals; others have been populists. Some left in disgrace; others
should
have left in disgrace. Some have only earned one term; others ran their wives in an effort to co-opt a third term. Some were visionary; others couldn’t see past tomorrow. Some were great, articulate communicators; others needed the English edition of
Rosetta Stone
.

We’ve had all kinds in the presidency, but Obama represents a first. All previous presidents had guiding political philosophies, which they all bent—to some degree or another—when it became too difficult politically to stick to them or when the American people resoundingly rejected what they were doing. Some of them pressed on anyway, but all of them at least acknowledged the American people and registered their discontent. All previous presidents had at least some degree of responsiveness to the people they led. Not Obama. This president is driven by such a devout and fervent ideology that nothing—not big majorities of the American people, not the Constitution—can stop him. We’ve seen other transformative presidents—Lincoln, FDR, Reagan—but none of them attempted to transform the nation into something wholly unrecognizable as America—until this one.

Over the decades, the redistributionists had realized that whenever they went full frontal with their ideas and policies, the American people rejected them out of hand as anti-American and destructive. If, however, they painted those same ideas with a brush of emotionalism, the ideas would become more palatable. After all, who among us doesn’t want children to be educated? Who doesn’t want clean drinking water? Who wants to see the poor go without health care or the elderly to have to subsist on cat food? Of course, no rational, caring person wants to see any of those things, particularly in the wealthiest country on earth. Social safety nets were created to ensure that no one in America went without the basic necessities of food, shelter, and medical care. But that wasn’t enough for the kooks. Once they took over, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs was expanded to include free DirecTV, Ferragamo dress shoes, and contraception. A bit of a stretch from food and shelter.

This was the essence of Obama’s Declaration of Dependence. Instead of treating them as temporary helping hands to only those in need, the redistributionists saw the programs as gleaming opportunities for the massive expansion of government power as well as leverage to build a permanent Democratic majority. If they could maneuver the programs into ever-growing entities that covered ever-growing numbers of people, those same people would become ever dependent on government and, therefore, ever grateful to the party and ideology that made that assistance available to them.

The leftists were also ingenious at casting those who opposed their plan to metastasize government as cold jerks who wanted to throw Grandma in the snow and the homeless back into the street. Their emotional extortion allowed them great leeway to build the redistributionist state they sought with limited resistance, even from many conservatives. The kooks had managed to make kookdom desirable, even expected.

The redistributionists use spending blowouts not as mere vehicles to “take care of people” or to secure their own reelection. They use big spending for a much more sinister purpose. Health care “reform” is not about health care. Environmental “protection” is not about the environment. Medicare is not about medical services for the elderly. Medicaid is not about medical services for the poor. Social Security is not about protecting senior citizens. None of these programs is about their superficial purpose. Their real purpose is to take wealth and assets from one group and redistribute it to another in order to build an increasingly redistributionist system, one that tightened its vise grip on you before you knew it.

Obama took the ball and not only ran with it but broke world land-race records. Team Obama has executed a near-perfect application of Alinsky’s
Rules for Radicals
. Any other American president would have been flipping his lid over stubbornly high unemployment, perhaps the most politically toxic element in any bad economy. Obama never broke a sweat. He would roll out the occasional “jobs plan” and propose ever more government spending, but he never seemed all that disturbed by 9 to 10 percent unemployment, zero job creation, or anemic economic growth. He has never been ashamed of his spending binge. He has never run from it or defensively defended it. To the contrary, he has been proud of his massive spending, calling it “necessary” and constantly proposing
more
spending.

The question is: For
what
is his unprecedented spending “necessary”? The reason Obama has never broken a sweat over the bankrupting spending and the collapsing economy is that it is all
intentional
. The reason Obama has always proposed more government spending and never got serious about deficit and debt reduction is that
he does not think we have a spending and debt problem
. In his view, there is
never
enough money because the government should
always
be doing more.

Obama’s Declaration of Dependence rests on economic upheaval because it serves the greater goal. The objective all along was to use and prolong the economic chaos to expand government as well as the number of people dependent on it. And ever-greater numbers of people dependent on government means ever-greater
need
for ever-bigger government. That, in turn, would ultimately result in a permanent Democratic voting majority. Indeed, in 2011 the Obama administration, through the U.S. Department of Agriculture, launched a multimillion-dollar initiative to recruit more food stamp recipients even though the food stamp rolls had already reached record levels. In September 2011, Oregon bragged that it had received a $5 million “performance bonus” for ensuring that people eligible for food assistance receive it and for “its swift processing of applications.” That bonus was in addition to a separate $1.5 million award from Team Obama for making “accurate payments of food stamp benefits to clients.” Note their use of the word “clients” to describe welfare recipients.

The redistributionists have always kept their eyes on the prize. They have played the long game. And they have carefully cloaked another truth: since the balance between government power and liberty is zero-sum, the more power the government amasses, the less liberty there is for the individual. Their massive spending is deliberate: it is a coldly calculated move to destroy the fiscal health of the country in order to justify a constantly metastasizing state. It’s like the classic 1958 horror/sci-fi flick
The Blob
. The Blob starts out as a tiny jellylike substance. But it quickly grows and grows, until its mass is enormous and completely uncontrollable, consuming everything in its path of destruction.

In a real sense, Barack Obama sees himself as a modern-day Robin Hood. But the concept of “taking from the rich and giving to the poor” is an oversimplification of the Robin Hood story, and a false analogy to boot. Robin Hood, in fact, would never have existed without an authoritarian regime levying higher taxes, confiscating wealth and property, and suppressing liberty. Robin Hood was a leader of a rebellion, standing up for the rights of the individual versus the burden of the state. He was a champion for people from whom things had
already
been
taken
, … not a champion for those who started out with nothing. Obama wants a world in which wealth is stolen from the wealthy and given to those who never earned it and never will. Barack Obama is no Robin Hood. He’s Prince John.

As we all learn by age three when we drop our ice-cream cone and Mom and Dad say no to another, life isn’t fair. That basic rule of life’s road has never been accepted by the delusional Left, which continues to believe that with massive government activism, life in America can be a nonstop Woodstock: blissful communal living in which everything is shared and no one has an advantage over another. Just imagine a White House lawn that’s been transformed into a giant muddy mess, where Joe Biden, Valerie Jarrett, and Jay Carney play Typhoon Lagoon in the filth while Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young and Santana serenade them for Three Days of Peace, Love, and Liberal Garbage. This is the kooks’ dream. All American resources are to be freed up in service of it.

For the leftists, ideology trumps everything. It trumps politics, retaining congressional majorities, even reelection. The kind of clear shot to “remake America” that Obama and the kooks got after the 2008 election was rare. The shot would probably not happen again for a long time, if ever.

So the mission needed to be executed with dispatch. Obama didn’t even wait to be sworn in before he began installing his powerful shadow cabinet. The
Washington Post
reported that Obama transition director John Podesta said that “Obama
deliberately
was building a strong, centralized White House organization.” (Emphasis added.) It would be made up of a vast number of unaccountable “czars” who reported only to Obama. These czars were like something out of a wiseguy movie. They could operate with impunity, do all of President Obama’s dirty work, and, at the end of a typical workday, White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel would hand each of them a sweaty wad of untraceable bills.