Muddling Toward Maturity Blog

CARTOON

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON - OBAMA FOLLOWING THE FRENCH REVOLUTION MODEL MORE THAN THE AMERICAN

VDH, an esteemed historian whose work I have cited numerous times on this blog,  offers a clear analysis of the type of revolution taking place under Obama's guiding hand.  He subtitles his piece, "America’s current revolutionary inspiration seems to derive more from Robespierre than Madison. "  Hanson writes:

At the end of the 18th century, there were two great Western revolutions — the American and the French. Americans opted for the freedom of the individual, and divinely endowed absolute rights and values.

A quite different French version sought equality of result. French firebrands saw laws less as absolute, but instead as useful to the degree that they contributed to supposed social justice and coerced redistribution. They ended up not with a Bill of Rights and separation of powers, but instead with mass executions and Napoleonic tyranny.

Unfortunately, the Obama administration is following more the French model than the American.  [more . . .]

SEN. CRUZ QUESTIONS IRS ABOUT DECISION TO AUDIT BREITBART NEWS

This government is becoming bolder and bolder in its attack on entities that disagree with its policies.   This tyranny must stop.   Breitbart news is a conservative news outlet.  The Obama administration, not embarrassed or intimidated by congressional investigations into its one-sided attack on conservative organizations, is at it again, which prompted Sen. Ted Cruz to send the following letter to the IRS:

Dear Commissioner Koskinen:

I write to express deep concern over the recent announcement by Breitbart News that the Internal Revenue Service recently notified the Breitbart News Network, LLC that it would be subject to a far-reaching, burdensome, and open-ended audit.

As you know, the Breitbart News Network LLC is a conservative-leaning press outlet. It has editors and reporters who cover daily political news and regularly breaks stories that are critical of the Obama Administration's policies. To conduct this audit, Breitbart News Network, LLC was asked to provide the IRS with all of its organizational documents, financial records, W-2s, W-4s, 1099s, and K-1s filed, personal income tax returns for each member of the company, payroll tax forms, information regarding properties and assets acquired by the company, bank statements, and array of other records documenting revenues, expenses, and depreciation costs.

This media audit, coupled with the recent proposal of 49 Senate Democrats to amend the Constitution to give Congress plenary power to regulate political speech, paints a disturbing picture of a coordinated assault on the First Amendment.

 

MEGYN KELLY INTERVIEWS DR. BEN CARSON WHO PULLS NO PUNCHES ABOUT OBAMA'S RADICALISM 10/9/13

This interview is definitely worth watching.  In this interview Carson talks of the Saul Alinsky tactics Obama is using and of Communist Vladimir Lenin's statement that "socialized medicine is the keystone to the arch of the socialist state."  Carson:  "The fundamental relationship between the government and the people is shifting."

I'm wondering if Dr. Carson will be the burr in Obama's saddle going forward?  He's the most accomplished black person in the United States, well-spoken, and outspoken!  He has just become a Fox contributor.

 

THE CREEPING AUTHORITARIANISM OF BARACK OBAMA

Dennis Henninger of the Wall Street Journal hits the nail on the head with his piece, subtitled, "Imposed law replaces checks and balances."  Anyone paying attention to Obama's demagogery, lawlessness, and tactical manipulations will find Henninger's piece a well-written presentatiom of what many already recognize and abhor.  Here's what Henninger writes: [my bolding]

If we learned anything about Barack Obama in his first term it is that when he starts repeating the same idea over and over, what's on his mind is something else.

The first term's over-and-over subject was "the wealthiest 1%." Past some point, people wondered why he kept beating these half-dead horses. After the election, we knew. It was to propagandize the targeted voting base that would provide his 4% popular-vote margin of victory—very young voters and minorities. They believed. He won.

The second-term over-and-over, elevated in his summer speech tour, is the shafting of the middle class. But the real purpose here isn't the speeches' parboiled proposals. It is what he says the shafting of the middle class is forcing him to do. It is forcing him to "act"—to undertake an unprecedented exercise of presidential power in domestic policy-making. ObamaCare was legislated. In the second term, new law will come from him.

Please don't complain later that you didn't see it coming. As always, Mr. Obama states publicly what his intentions are. He is doing that now. Toward the end of his speech last week in Jacksonville, Fla., he said: "So where I can act on my own, I'm going to act on my own. I won't wait for Congress." (Applause.)

The July 24 speech at Knox College in Galesburg, Ill., has at least four references to his intent to act on his own authority, as he interprets it: "That means whatever executive authority I have to help the middle class, I'll use it." (Applause.) And: "We're going to do everything we can, wherever we can, with or without Congress."

RUSH LIMBAUGH - AMERICA IN THE MIDST OF A COUP D'ETAT

I listened to the first part of Rush Limbaugh's radio program today.  He articulated my own thoughts when he said, 

. . .what's taking place in the United States right now is a coup, not a violent coup, and not a million artistic coup, but nevertheless a takeover of a government, and it's being done by the Obama administration. . . .  there is clearly -- somewhere, somehow, in some form or another -- a coup taking place, and there is an assault on privacy, and there are assaults on people because of their politics and their ideology. It is taking place; it's undeniable. Yet many of the people we would hope would be pushing back against this and doing their best to join us and warning everybody say, "Nothing to see here! Don't get all crazy about this. We must be level headed."

RUSH: There was a time when the United States government earned the trust of its people. There was a time when most people believed that the United States government was protecting them. There was a time when most people believed that the United States government was spying on the bad guys, that the United States government was in fact earning the trust of the people. But this current data collection, scanning, whatever you want to call it, unfortunately has to be judged in context: the IRS leaks, the now unquestionable, undeniable, admitted-to-it IRS tactic of suppressing the vote of Tea Party conservatives, denying them their First Amendment rights.

The regime and its tricks with the Associated Press and Fox reporter James Rosen, the Benghazi cover-ups, the Fast and Furious operation, suing the state of Arizona for simply endorsing essentially federal immigration law. You can't just try to be the smartest guy in the room and say, "Well, we must be levelheaded about this and understand that this is just metadata." We cannot take the motives and intelligence guided by experience watching this administration over the last four-and-a-half, five years, and what their express purpose is. . . 

So if the Constitution exists as it is, the country was founded as it was, and an administration comes along and doesn't like that and is doing everything it can to overturn that Constitution without a convention, doing everything it can to change direction of this country, and what's the word, transform it, what's wrong with calling this a coup?

Me:  He's absolutely right.

HOBBY LOBBY STANDS ON THE FIRST AMENDMENT, REFUSING TO COMPARTMENTALIZE RELIGION

And Hobby Lobby is absolutely right!   The Obama administration refuses to see the point, in effect delimiting  "freedom of religion" to mean only "freedom of worship."  There's a huge difference between "freedom of religion and "freedom of worship."  Businesses that want to run on biblical principles, reflecting a Christian ethos, should not be forced to give out "morning after" pills if it goes against their conscience. Kathryn Lopez writes:

“It’s more than just work,” Mart Green, treasurer of Hobby Lobby and CEO of Mardel, a Christian bookstore chain, says in a video explaining why his family simply cannot and will not comply with the Department of Health and Human Services mandate insisting they provide abortion drugs to their employees. As of yesterday, Hobby Lobby, the arts and crafts chain, is in violation of federal law. Barack Obama’s Department of Justice has been arguing that religious liberty doesn’t have the role in the life of a business. But the Green family knows that their business lives cannot be cut off from their lives as Christians. And so the business makes decisions seeking to strengthen family, seeking to lives integrated lives, as Mart Green explains:

 

The Green family provides a real lesson to a culture that has become all too content compartmentalizing religion. And now by government mandate …

The Family Research Council has commented on the Holly Lobby dispute with the coercive Obama administration.   Pull quote:

The HHS Mandate is a gross violation of the religious beliefs of the Green family. The issue before the courts here is whether the Greens religious-liberty rights include running their secular, for-profit business consistent with their religious beliefs. In other words, is religious liberty just what you do in church on a Sunday morning, or does it include what you do during the week at your job?  [more....]

RUSH LIMBAUGH: WHAT OBAMA'S DOING IS A DICTATORS WET DREAM (VIDEO)

I posted Krauthammer's comments on Obama's "Naked Lawlessness" and my comment on Obama assuming dictatorial powers earlier, but Rush's observations add pungency and clarity to the dire situation we face under this President. 

 

From the Rush Limbaugh website via Jim Loft's Gateway Pundit:  (emphasis in the original)

RUSH: So, once again we see which side Obama comes down on in the question of whether this is a country of the rule of law or the rule of man. With Obama, it’s not the rule of law. He is implementing law that the Congress defeated, as in the legalization of the amnesty for 800,000 young illegals. Congress defeated that, the DREAM Act. He said, to hell with it, I’m gonna make it the law, just gonna do it. Obama wants the enforcement of every federal law to hinge upon whether he agrees with it or not. And if he doesn’t agree with the federal law, he’s not gonna enforce it, like the Defense of Marriage Act. It’s the law of the land. The regime announced within the past year that they were no longer going to enforce it. It’s a dictator’s wet dream to do what Obama is doing. If he doesn’t agree with the law, voila, it’s no longer enforced. It may as well not even exist. That’s who he is, folks…

…Yeah, there’s no way Obama would ever not enforce immigration law. There’s no way Obama would ignore the Constitution and just write a health care law that basically pees all over it. No way, Obama wouldn’t do any of that, Democrat Party, no, they respect the rule, they wouldn’t do anything like that. No, of course they wouldn’t. Why should civil rights laws be enforced? Once you start cherry-picking these things and once the laws you enforce or don’t enforce strictly because whether you like ‘em or not, what if we started obeying laws on that basis or not? If the president of the United States can choose to enforce or not enforce law because he likes them or doesn’t like them, what about us?

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER ON OBAMA's AMNESTY-BY-FIAT: "NAKED LAWLESSNESS"

Krauthammer's astute observations can be found here.   

My question:  How can Congress and the courts allow Obama's actions to stand?  The Constitution protects us against Dictatorship.  If the Chief Executive is allowed to promulgate and execute laws on his own -- laws which Congress has refused to pass -- then this Republic has turned into a Dictatorship.  Obama's action must be challenged.   As Krauthammer explains:

Imagine: A Republican president submits to Congress a bill abolishing the capital gains tax. Congress rejects it. The president then orders the IRS to stop collecting capital gains taxes and declares that anyone refusing to pay them will suffer no fine, no penalty, no sanction whatsoever. . . .  It would be a scandal, a constitutional crisis, a cause for impeachment. . .  Capital gains is straightforward tax law. Just as Obama’s bombshell amnesty-by-fiat is a subversion of straightforward immigration law.

Sure it's smart politics.  But smart politics does not justify assuming Dictatorial powers over the People.  I agree with Krauthammer's further point:

The case for compassion and fairness is hardly as clear-cut as advertised. What about those who languish for years in godforsaken countries awaiting legal admission to America? Their scrupulousness about the law could easily cost their children the American future that illegal immigrants will have secured for theirs.

What about them indeed?  Krauthammer again:

But whatever our honest and honorable disagreements about the policy, what holds us together is a shared allegiance to our constitutional order. That’s the fundamental issue here. As Obama himself argued in rejecting the executive action he has now undertaken, “America is a nation of laws, which means I, as the president, am obligated to enforce the law. I don’t have a choice about that.”

Except, apparently, when violating that solemn obligation serves his reelection needs.

CATHOLICS TAKE OUT AN AD TO MOBILIZE THE FAITHFUL AGAINST GOVERNMENT COERCION

A Catholic lay group, The Catholic Association, has a new television ad:

Ed Morrissey writes:

The US Conference of Catholic Bishops launched their two-week Fortnight for Freedom program today, their latest salvo in the battle between the Catholic Church and the Obama administration over the HHS contraception mandate. . .

The bishops are hoping that a massive protest now will force the Obama administration to reverse the mandate (or expand the religious exemption to all religious organizations) before civil disobedience becomes necessary.

To that end, the USCCB has begun sending letters out to parishioners in the Mass bulletins to get them involved in protests:

The most imminent threat to religious liberty—but not the only one—that the Catholic bishops have been protesting and seeking to draw public attention to is a regulation that Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius issued under President Barack Obama’s health care law. The regulation will require virtually all health-care plans in the United States to cover, without any fees or co-pay, sterilizations, artificial contraceptives and abortion-inducing drugs.

This month, the Catholic bishops are distributing an insert in church bulletins around the country pointing to the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s leadership of the Civil Rights Movement, and his defense of civil disobedience, noting that King, a Baptist minister, used the arguments of the Catholic Saints Augustine and Thomas Aquinas to justify peaceful resistance to unjust laws. In the bulletin insert, the bishops made clear that civil disobedience may be necessary when freedom of conscience is attacked.

“Some unjust laws impose such injustices on individuals and organizations that disobeying the laws may be justified,” says the bulletin insert.

“Every effort must be made to repeal them. When fundamental human goods, such as the right of conscience, are at stake, we may need to witness to the truth by resisting the law and incurring its penalties.”

Me: I say good for them!

MICHAEL GERSON - "THE WAR ON RELIGION IS NOW FORMALLY DECLARED"

Michael Gerson, former speechwriter for President Bush and a Washington Post columnist, penned a column back on January 30th that I missed -- "Obama plays his Catholic allies for fools."  It's clear Gerson understood immediately the implications of Obama's "in your face" executive order putting a fist in the face of religious conscience.  Gerson in my mind has always been a restrained person, something of a "moderate" Republican, and a self-identified Protestant.  Yet he wrote:

Both radicalism and maliciousness are at work in Obama’s decision — an edict delivered with a sneer. It is the most transparently anti-Catholic maneuver by the federal government since the Blaine Amendment was proposed in 1875 — a measure designed to diminish public tolerance of Romanism, then regarded as foreign, authoritarian and illiberal. Modern liberalism has progressed to the point of adopting the attitudes and methods of 19th-century Republican nativists. . . .

And,

Obama is claiming the executive authority to determine which missions of believers are religious and which are not — and then to aggressively regulate institutions the government declares to be secular. It is a view of religious liberty so narrow and privatized that it barely covers the space between a believer’s ears.

Obama’s decision also reflects a certain view of liberalism. Classical liberalism was concerned with the freedom to hold and practice beliefs at odds with a public consensus. Modern liberalism uses the power of the state to impose liberal values on institutions it regards as backward. It is the difference between pluralism and anti-­clericalism.

The administration’s ultimate motivation is uncertain. Has it adopted a radical secularism out of conviction, or is it cynically appealing to radical secularists? In either case, the war on religion is now formally declared.  [emphases mine]

Me:  We are confronted with a serious and dangerous threat from our own President and his supporters.  Freedom in the United States is now under seige from a militant executive branch and its Democrat congressional allies intent on "reforming" (read: "deforming and obliterating") basic freedoms we have taken for granted all our lives.  These are serious developments indeed.