by Michael
Walsh in PJ Media
The men behind Obama took a
calculated gamble in 2008 that the nation was ready for the first post-American
president, a man with no meaningful cultural roots in the nation he would
profess to lead. They relied on the intrinsic good-heartedness of the electorate
to show their lack of prejudice in voting for a man with an exotic
Arabic/Muslim name only seven years after the atrocity of Sept. 11. They
counted on the innate good will of the American people, judged that the time
was right for a black president, and then went out and found the only
half-black candidate who had absolutely nothing to do with the black American
experience and ran him as an avatar of black America.
And they won, twice, both times
against half-hearted Republican candidates with no skin in the game, married to
interchangeable blonde wives — one a half-crazy former prisoner of
war/political accommodationist and the other a Mormon whose religious faith was
guaranteed to lose him some much-needed votes. If they had tried to throw both elections,
they could not have done a better job, both of them refusing to go after Obama
head-on, and neither of them apparently realizing the danger he posed to the
republic. Neither could fathom a new kind of Democrat candidate, one who
observed the surface appearances of a traditional candidacy, but who was
brimming with new, extra-Constitutional ideas about how to effect his political
program.
Shortly before his first election,
the president promised a “fundamental transformation” of the United States of
America, and it is instructive to note the tone in which he made that pledge.
Listen, please; it only takes a few seconds:
Note the finger-pointing. Check out
the saturnine look on his face. America was warned, early on, that beneath the
smiling facade of Barack Hussein Obama was a very angry man. The smile and the
shoeshine got him elected but since that day he has waged unremitting war on
the country as founded, pillorying the nation, putting it in the dock, and
making us all atone for its sins. Obama’s is a presidency-as-payback, and
the “transformation” is meant to ensure that it is permanently
hobbled. The animus positively radiates
from him.
“Why?” is a question best left to
shrinks and historians. But for those of us dealing with the consequences, what
matters most is, “What next?” Freed of the need to fool the public one more
time, and having buried what’s left of the Democratic Party in the rubble of
two off-year elections, Obama is hell-bent on, according to Politico — Operation Revenge.
Obama’s turnaround in recent weeks –
he’s seized the offensive with a series of controversial executive actions and
challenges to leaders in his own party on the budget — can be attributed to a
fundamental change in his political mindset, according to current and former
aides. He’s gone from thinking of himself as a sitting (lame) duck, they tell
me, to a president diving headlong into what amounts to a final campaign – this
one to preserve his legacy, add policy points to the scoreboard, and – last but
definitely not least – to inflict the same kind of punishment on his newly
empowered Republican enemies, who delighted in tormenting him when he was on
top.
The pivot isn’t necessarily about
embracing the Real Barack Obama (that’s always been a pretty elusive persona)
or even about aspiring to the Clintonian ideal of a second-term president
leveraging executive power into political muscle. It’s not a matter of
superficially emulating a campaign, as he’s done fecklessly in the past, by
hitting the road for another round of low-impact speeches or Steve Kroft
sit-downs. It’s a campaign between Obama’s ears — a competitor rediscovering
his love of competition, the refocusing of a sedentary, atrophied presidency
through the lens of a dynamic campaign – and winning.
To call this delusional is an
understatement. This is not about Obama suddenly grabbing ahold of himself and
remembering to dance with what brung him: this has been the end game of the
entire Obama presidency from the start. The re-election of 2012 was crucial,
for without it the entire scheme would have collapsed. They — campaign guru David
Axelrod and the others who foisted Obama on the body politic — had to get him
to this point in order for the plan of rule-by-fiat to be fully operational. As
I wrote in
the New York Post back in 2011:
Having lost the House of
Representatives in the last election, the Obama administration is now imposing
“fundamental change” via executive order, regulatory fiat and political
pressure. Talk about the unitary executive…
It all boils down to this: Are we to
be a constitutional government with three distinct branches, or a single
executive entity that makes policy, carries it out and decides for itself
whether it’s constitutional or not? That’s what the next presidential race
is really all about.
And indeed it was, except that
nobody told Willard “Mitt” Romney, a decent man who was perhaps the wrongest
possible GOP candidate at the wrongest possible time, ever. (If you don’t
understand why, ask Jonathan Gruber.)
Now we are past both the
presidential election and the ’14 midterms, and have arrived at the inflection
point. Change will come thick and fast now, in a flurry of “presidential
memoranda” and occasional executive orders, and no one in Congress or the
courts to stop him. Obama has a taste for it now and he realizes that there is
not a single person or entity inside or outside of government to frustrate him.
At this point, the only way he could be neutralized would be for everyone to
simply ignore his extra-Constitutional orders, as if he were the Emperor Norton.
But with the Congress in the hands
of the opposition party (really, the GOP wing of the Permanent Bipartisan Fusion
Party), Obama will simply ignore them when he’s not using them as a
collective whipping boy. Beholden to his hard-left supporters, the president is
likely to increase the racial divide, use the (Congressionally ordained)
agencies like the EPA and the IRS to further his punishing rule by bureaucracy,
and continue to employ the Justice Department as an instrument of his policy
preferences. Already we are reading (in Politico, the court
stenographers of the Obama administration) that Republicans are “warming”
to Loretta Lynch, Obama’s pick to replace Attorney General Eric Holder.
“I want to see what happens in the
hearings,” Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said. “But certainly I’m
supportive.” McCain and Sens. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) and Deb Fischer
(R-Neb.) all said in interviews they have met with Lynch privately and are
inclined to vote in favor of her nomination.
Gotta love that “certainly.”
So this is where the curve turns,
and it’s down we go, straight down, to realms never before charted in the
American experiment. It’s going to be a bumpy ride. And remember this; as I
like to say about the Left: they never stop, they never sleep, they never quit.
With six critically acclaimed novels as well as a hit TV movie, journalist, author and screenwriter Michael Walsh has achieved the writer’s trifecta: two New York Times best-sellers, a major literary award winner and the co-writer of the Disney Channel’s then-highest-rated show.
The 1998 publication of As Time Goes By — his long-awaited and controversial prequel/sequel to everybody‘s favorite movie, Casablanca — created a literary sensation; translated into more than twenty languages, including Portuguese, Chinese and Hebrew, the story of Rick and Ilsa landed on best-seller lists around the world.
His first novel, the dark thriller Exchange Alley, was published by Warner Books in July 1997. Hailed by critics for its moody depiction of a crumbling Soviet Union – which Walsh covered first-hand as a correspondent for Time Magazine – and a violent, dangerous New York City during the darkest days of the early 1990s, the novel was picked by the Book-of-the-Month Club as an alternate selection.
Walsh’s third novel, the gripping gangster saga, And All the Saints, was named a winner at the 2004 American Book Awards; even before publication, the movie rights to this fictionalized “autobiography” of the legendary Prohibition-era gangster Owney Madden were bought by MGM. Walsh’s latest novel, Shock Warning, is the third in a series of five thrillers about the National Security Agency published by Kensington Books.
In the spring of 2002, the Disney Channel premiered Walsh’s original movie (co-written with Gail Parent), Cadet Kelly, starring teen idol Hilary Duff of “Lizzie McGuire” fame. Until High School Music, the two-hour film reigned as the highest-rated original movie in Disney Channel history, as well as the Disney Channel’s highest-rated single program ever.
In addition to PJ Media, Walsh is a weekly op-ed columnist for the New York Post and a regular contributor to National Review Online, Walsh is also the author of Who’s Afraid of Classical Music (1989) and Who’s Afraid of Opera (1994) for Fireside Books, and Andrew Lloyd Webber: His Life and Works, a critical biography of the composer for Harry M. Abrams (U.S.) and Viking Penguin (U.K.), published in the fall of 1989; an updated and expanded edition appeared in 1997. With fellow Time Contributor Richard Schickel, he is the co-author of Carnegie Hall: The First One Hundred Years, a cultural history of the great American concert hall published by Abrams in November 1987. His most recent book about music is So When Does the Fat Lady Sing?, published by Amadeus Press.
He says he wanted to join PJ Media because, “the opportunity to join such friends and colleagues as Roger Simon, Victor Davis Hanson, Andy McCarthy, Roger Kimball, Andrew Klavan and the others was not something one says no to.” We’re excited to have Michael on board.
You can find Michael Walsh’s Unexamined Premises blog at http://pjmedia.com/michaelwalsh/.
The entire link with
images and one video can be found at: http://pjmedia.com/michaelwalsh/2014/12/26/with-two-years-left-the-inflection-point-of-the-obama-presidency/?singlepage=true
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