With new revelations of scandal surfacing almost daily, there are apt comparisons to Watergate, of course. But say this for Richard Nixon: at his worst, the man’s political ambitions never went much beyond stealing an election and settling an old score with the press. The political career of Barack Obama, on the other hand, has been animated by an overweening vision that seeks nothing less than the further enlargement of Big Government so that even the most ardent disciples of the New Deal might someday stand in awe of His achievement. But would they? FDR at least had a Keynesian excuse for ramping up fiscal stimulus and expanding Washington’s reach, since the U.S. had been wallowing in depression for more than a decade. We’ll concede that Obama was dealt a pretty bad
economic hand himself, but his response has made FDR look like a piker. For in fact, the gargantuan deficits he has piled up to push housing and share prices higher have put the U.S. on an inexorable path toward bankruptcy. Moreover, the suspicion grows that this has been his intention all along, since the helpful illusion that Government alone can save us from a repeat of the 1930s will always be strongest when economic misery is at its worst. And although Obama would surely put FDR and Keynes in his pantheon of political heroes, both men would be appalled at what he has wrought in their name.
And now he has become a lame-duck president just five months into his second term. Under his watch, the IRS went on a witch-hunt targeting his political adversaries; the FBI spied on Associated Press reporters; and four Americans were murdered in Benghazi, Libya, because the State Department and White House were negligent, possibly criminally, in failing to protect them. As serious as these matters are, Americans are about to be richly entertained by a full accounting of lies, misdeeds and coverups that could eventually implicate the IRS, the FBI and a president with the unmitigated arrogance to deny that any of it was his fault. This won’t wash with the American people, and we should therefore expect the stench of the Obama presidency to grow even more foul until the day he leaves office.
Scandal Too Juicy to Ignore
Even his most ardent defenders on the far left have turned against him, including a chiding David Letterman and MSNBC’s Chris Matthews. We await a hostile declaration from Sean Penn, since that would surely seal Obama’s fate. In the meantime, this hat-trick of scandals is too juicy for even a left-tilting press to contrive to ignore. They managed to tune out Bill Ayers, Reverend Wright and Obama’s unsavory background as a political rabble rouser and favored son of Chicago’s corrupt political machine. This time, however, the scandal is just too juicy for his erstwhile defenders to ignore. Assuming the malignant Obamacare goes down with the presidency, the Republic will rally to survive. For now, though, Americans – especially conservatives – can sit back and enjoy the show.
