Obama's Tyranny: Petty or Something More Sinister?
By Matt Holtzmann
AmericanThinker.com
Last week, headlines informed us that, because of the Sequester, the FAA will be reducing the number of Air Traffic Controllers and closing 149 control towers completely. Earlier, the Department of Homeland Security released hundreds of illegal aliens awaiting deportation because they could not afford to hold them because of cuts mandated by the Sequester, they said.
Head Start is to face cuts due to Sequestration. Native American children are being sacrificed to Sequestration according to Slate Magazine. The Marine Corps faces massive reductions in manpower reports the Wall Street Journal. The U.S.S. Harry Truman and its escorts are sitting idle in Norfolk, VA because of the Sequester when they should be on their way to the other side of the world.
The TSA is threatening cuts that will push airport security lines out onto the street, while the government had been threatening to cut meat inspections until Congress pushed back.
In other words the Administration is holding a gun to the head of almost every single American in its quest to inflict the maximum pain possible on each of us to achieve its political objectives.
When has this occurred in our country's history? When has a president orchestrated such a symphony of hardship for party politics? When has a president gone to such lengths for such a small amount of money?
The Sequester represents $85 Billion out of a budget of $3.5 Trillion, or just a 2.42% reduction in federal spending. On year on year basis, spending is still increasing by over 2% over last year. The math used by the Administration to generate this pain is simply crazy.
But this is the same Administration that decided at the outset to assault conventional energy in order to raise prices so that green energy could compete. I was in some of the meetings where the Green Lobby advocated this, and was stunned at their audacity. So now gasoline is at all time high levels; natural gas is being stymied; coal is in the Most Wanted list and nuclear has been sidelined.
We have a Department of Homeland Security that has become one of the largest bureaucracies in the history of our government in the space of 11 years. There is very little accountability and DHS has extraordinary powers to infringe the constitutional rights of our citizenry. Drones, computer monitoring, and wiretaps are all allowed under the Obama Administration's overwhelming control of the mechanisms of state. Just the other day, DHS announced plans to scan even more private e mail traffic.
There is a simple word for all of this; tyranny.
Tyranny is defined as the arbitrary or unrestrained exercise of power or a despotic abuse of authority.
The Obama Administration, through its concentration of power in the White House and its staff; through its extensive use of czars, executive orders, bureaucratic fiat and now simple oppression seems to have stepped over the line with the American People.
Congress has proven to be largely impotent in checking this steamroller strategy by the executive branch. The other day another 800 pages of gobbledygook regarding health care regulations was released by the Department of Health and Health & Human Services and Henry Chao, the bureaucrat charged with tying the system together electronically stated about Obamacare, "Let's just make sure that this is not a 3rd World experience."
If you recall, the Affordable Care Act was never seen before it was voted upon. It was passed in the dead of night on Christmas Eve and passed only because of the greatest political bribery and blackmail campaign ever seen in a city that has seen it all. Tyranny, anyone?
In Robert Woodward's book, "The Price of Politics" the president is described as arrogant and aloof. On the president's decision not to deploy the Truman, Woodward, the ultimate Washington insider, said it exhibited "a kind of madness I haven't seen in a long time." Presidents do not hold military and foreign policy to ransom. Tyrants do.
But in Washington for the ruling elite nothing changes. Vice President Biden, on his way back from the installation of Pope Francis, whose hallmark to date has been his empathy for the poor, stopped in Paris for a night and then in London and racked up hotel bills of $585,000 and $485,000 respectively. As an ostensible Catholic, Mr. Biden might have perhaps followed the Pope's example of austerity.
After being widely criticized for the cost of his golf outing in Florida recently the President has been lying low, but he was able to shut down tours of the White House as a part of, you guessed it, the Sequester. One might almost think this suited the President just fine. None of those damned plebes running around the place.
This crosses traditional political boundaries. It involves the separation of powers; executive privilege, and the rights of the People under the Constitution. It is poor management and is thuggish. It is wrong on every level.
This President has done his best to oppress the American People with his sometimes petty, sometimes quite substantive and always arbitrary application of the Sequester. The media has proven their credentials once again by refusing to challenge the Administration. Of course, even if they did they would be mocked by Jay Carney, and one simply cannot afford that if one is to be invited to the right parties.
Think about how the Sequester has been applied. Think about how the Department of Homeland Security has become a largely unaccountable national police force and has regularly violated the law of the land. And think about a President whose preferred policy is to use intimidation and the intentional infliction of pain and suffering to achieve his goals. When does petty tyranny become real and oppressive? And how do we as citizens respond?