For Marco Rubio being right on Barack Obama was a Pyrrhic victory

Marco Rubio’s campaign seems to have crashed on the rocks because of his… shall we say somewhat repetitive use of the phrase “Obama knows what he’s doing”, but the truth is, he was 100% right. The reason that so many people scoff at the notion that Obama knows what he’s doing is because the very notion of an American leader who seeks to destroy that which he leads is anathema to most rational Americans. And the truth is, Barack Obama doesn’t seek to destroy the nation he leads, he seeks to “fundamentally transform” it. Splitting hairs you might say, but there is a big difference between the two.

For Barack Obama the American glass is half empty. Sure, there’s water in the glass, but only what’s left after two centuries of whites stealing from blacks, Indians, Hispanics, after men taking from women and the rich taking from the poor. As such, it’s his goal in life to fill that glass up by redistributing that which has been stolen back to its rightful owners. At his very core Barack Obama is a divider – by race, by income by nationality among others – he is an anti-capitalist, anti western populist with fascist tendencies and no love for Christianity.

It’s only with that understanding that Rubio’s assertion makes sense. The nation that Barack Obama leads is not the same one most Americans live in. They inhabit the same geography, but they are not the same nation. It’s like the movie The Martian. Anyone watching it will recognize that it’s a serious movie that has a bit of levity scattered throughout. But somehow it was nominated for “Best Motion Picture: Musical or Comedy” at the Golden Globes. Most people would recognize that regardless of the category the Globes’ voters put it in, The Martian is no comedy. Similarly, the United States most conservatives inhabit is an imperfect one, but one full of opportunity, fueled by freedom and largely a force for good. For Barack Obama those same 57 states represent a nation defined by racism, inequality and oppression.

That is the nation that Barack Obama thinks he is leading and the one which he is seeking to fundamentally transform. And it’s easy to see that Rubio is right… he knows exactly what he’s doing. From Obamacare to the kneecapping of Chrysler shareholders to the using the IRS to muzzle Tea Party groups, it makes sense in the nation Barack Obama leads. This has been going on for seven years and most of the examples never find their way into the news. Here are three that recently did.

1. The Internet. The Internet may be the most egalitarian invention in the history of man. It has connected more people and given more opportunity to more people than any tool in all of human history. It was created by the United States and has been largely free from censorship and government controls since its inception. Barack Obama sees the Internet as a tool of American domination and therefore is moving to remove American control of it and give it to an international body that will leave the Internet’s freedom subject to veto and manipulation by such freedom loving nations as China, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela.


2. Economic freedom. American economic freedom is the engine that drove most of the world’s prosperity for a large part of the last century. The resilience and freedom of America’s markets and her entrepreneurs have led the world in almost every major economic development since 1900. American free enterprise has been the greatest driver of prosperity ever in human history, but under Barack Obama the United States has tumbled in economic freedom, to number 11 in the world (from number 6 when he took office.) And what causes such slippage? One thing: Regulation. Barack Obama sees America’s success as one of imperialism and outright theft, and he has used government regulation to stifle economic freedom at every turn, and the results have been devastating, resulting in the slowest economic recovery since the Great Depression.


3. Government intimidation. Barack Obama is using the police power of government to achieve his ends. The Tea Party are not the only targets either. Barack Obama’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was recently outed for coercing Ally bank to agree to pay almost $1 billion in fines for racial discrimination, despite the fact that that internal documents stated they had no complaints nor any evidence of actual discrimination. Barack Obama sees America through race colored glasses and feels it’s his role to use the power of government to readjust settings. From the NLRB to the FCC to HUD, Barack Obama seeks to use the government to control more and more of Americans’ lives, winnowing down the spheres of freedom within which the outcomes can be decided by hard work and the choices people make.

At the end of the day, Barack Obama does indeed know exactly what he is doing. He is laser focused on one objective: Diminish America. Reduce her influence on the world stage and suffocate freedom and free markets at home. If you’ve been paying attention for the last seven you’ve seen him doing that and much more, and doing it very effectively. It’s simply not possible to rack up that level of success – as Obama defines it – without knowing exactly what you’re doing and being very good at it. Sadly for Marco Rubio, being right was a Pyrrhic victory.

Net Neutrality exposes Barack Obama's not so well hidden inner Vladimir Putin

On Thursday the FCC moved to regulate the Internet via what’s commonly called Net Neutrality – although like Obamacare before it was passed, we don’t know everything that’s included in it! Net Neutrality is beyond a doubt the single most despicable thing Barack Obama has done as president. (The FCC is ostensibly an independent agency, but under Obama it’s been anything but.) The big push for Net Neutrality came from Silicon Valley content companies who were whining that ISPs such as Comcast, Time Warner and AT&T were slowing or threatening to slow content that sucked up massive amounts of bandwidth. They are after all the ones who have to invest to expand that bandwidth. These ISPs were at the same time telling companies like Netflix and Google that they could ensure timely delivery of their content if they paid for the extra bandwidth that was being used. The Silicon Valley companies squealed to Barack Obama and he started leaning on the FCC.

Now this should not be viewed as a defense of Comcast or Time Warner. Both are horrible companies when it comes to service and customer service. Terrible! And you might ask how can they survive if they piss off so many customers? Government, of course. In most places they reign as the result monopolies… imposed by government.

This might sound like it’s just about whether you can have House of Cards running simultaneously in three rooms in your house or in every home in your neighborhood. It’s not. It’s about the government seeking to control the Internet, the single most powerful vehicle for the advancement of the human condition in history. That might sound like hyperbole, but it’s not. Today, because of the Internet more people have access to more information, more quickly than at any point since… well, ever. Not only that, they also have access to more products and services, usually at lower cost than any generation ever enjoyed. And perhaps most importantly, they have a vehicle through which they can express their thoughts and share their ideas and highlight oppression & injustice more freely and to more people more quickly than has ever been possible in human history.

A decade from now much of that will be a mere distant memory. Not that the Internet won’t exist, it will. But it will be a government controlled utility rather than the Wild West platform for the free exchange of ideas that it is today. Don’t believe it? Don’t forget, a year ago this same FCC proposed sending “researchers to grill reporters, editors and station owners about how they decide which stories to run.” Six months before that Democrat Senators Dianne Feinstein and Richard Durbin were debating whether bloggers deserved 1st Amendment protections. And of course this is the administration that used IRS commissioners to stifle the free speech of opponents and the Justice Department to go after reporter James Rosen who just happened to be critical of it.

So now, we have Barack Obama’s FCC telling the country that the government gets to be the arbitrators of what can be said or done on the Internet. Imagine if the government decided that WiFi was a bridge too far when we were all hooked up to the Internet by those static filled phone lines. Imagine if the government put the kibosh on online music sharing when record companies complained about declining CD sales. Imagine if the government supported the status quo when Yahoo was the dominant search provider or MySpace was the dominant social networking site. In what universe would have any of that have been a good thing?

As bad as stifling innovation is, that’s not the worst of it. The worst? The death of free speech. Imagine if Richard Nixon had at his disposal the kind of control the FCC says it has now during Watergate. Ronald Reagan during Iran-Contra. Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinski affair. George Bush in reference to GTMO or Abu Ghraib.

Barack Obama no doubt wishes he had that kind of power during Fast and Furious, the IRS Tea Party Scandal, Benghazi and countless other times. Now he pretty much will have it through his puppets on the FCC. Unfortunately the spineless obsequious leadership in the GOP will likely do nothing to stop this abuse of power. The result will be something slightly less onerous than being perpetrated by Barack Obama’s hero, Vladimir Putin, in Moscow. Putin can simply kill his opponents with little worry of consequence. Here in the United States, thankfully, that’s unlikely to go over as smoothly, however with the FCC’s unconstitutional overreach such measures wouldn’t be necessary. Why kill someone and make a martyr out of them when it’s much easier to simply muzzle them, or if that doesn’t work, label them a criminal and jail them with arbitrary regulations that you’ve set up specifically to target opponents? When government gets to decide who can be its critics or what its critics can say, it’s not a long march to a dictatorship.

Alas, our freedoms aren’t being taken from us by some foreign power with a gun pointed at our collective heads. No, staggeringly, American freedoms are being taken away by the very government a majority of brain-dead voters somehow sent to Washington. What’s worse, the opposition in Congress seems more than willing to capitulate and let the president get away with whatever he does, regardless of what’s in the Constitution, so long as they can stay in power in their little fiefdoms. With Obamacare and what the WSJ dubs the Obamanet, Barack Obama has succeeded in gutting both economic freedom and the freedom of speech in less than six years. Things that largely survived for 220 years... down the drain in six years! The consequences of the mistake that is Barack Obama in the White House will haunt Americans for decades to come, including those who were smart enough not to hand the keys of the greatest kingdom in human history to a petulant man more than willing to lie to get what he wants and a disdain for the very Constitution he swore to uphold.

Obama shreds the Constitution... again

Last week President Obama was overheard telling a room full of Democrats that during the most recent budget negotiations the GOP had sought to defund some of his priorities. He checked them into the boards with “Do you think we’re stupid”?

While the GOP members certainly don’t think the President is stupid, he definitely thinks the voters are. (Perhaps with good reason… If you haven’t seen the video “How Obama Got Elected” now as we roll towards 2012 it might be a good time to watch it. If you have, now is a good time to revisit it. The level of ignorance of some of people who exercise their right to vote is nothing short of extraordinary. Rather than giving out voter cards at the DMV like lollypops at a pediatrician’s office we might want to require prospective voters to pass the same citizenship test wannabe citizens must pass…)

Not that it should be a surprise to anyone that the President thinks Americans are stupid. It’s one thing to hoodwink people during the campaign as everyone expects politicians to stretch the bounds of credulity. This was perfectly demonstrated when candidate Obama suggested that he sat in Jeremiah Wright’s church for 20 years yet somehow never heard a single one of his racist anti-American diatribes. It’s another thing all together to expect citizens to believe their President is openly seeking to mislead them. Such was the case early on in the Obama presidency and that arrogance was never as clear when the administration introduced what is possibly the most absurd policy gauge ever uttered by any politician, the infamous: “Jobs created or saved.” How is it even remotely possible that the president thought that anyone with a functioning brain would consider “Jobs created or saved” as a legitimate measure for any policy anywhere? No idea, but they did… and did so with a straight face.

Now we jump ahead two years and we finding the President once again demonstrating low opinion he has of average American’s intelligence. Not only does he think that Americans will somehow forget his plethora of flip-flops, (which Victor Davis Hanson lays out brilliantly here) what’s worse, he thinks that no one else in the country is bright enough to understand the Constitution.

One example - In December, despite a federal court ruling that the FCC lacked authority to regulate Internet service providers, Chairman Julius Genachowski and two fellow Democrats on the five-member decided to do just that and rammed through Net Neutrality regulations – which limit how ISPs can use and charge for their networks. Earlier this year the House passed a bill explicitly stripping the Commission of that power and the Senate is likely to kill it. This usurpation of power by Obama portends very bad things… If the default now becomes that the Executive branch gets to decide what it can and can’t regulate, with explicit exclusionary language from Congress being the only yoke on its power, the nation cannot survive as rapacious nanny state government bureaucrats seeking to feed their insatiable appetite for power will always be able to act more swiftly than a legislature of 535 representatives with tens of thousands of different priorities.

In another example, just last week, in signing the budget compromise, President Obama added a signing statement which essentially says he's going to ignore part of the legislation. The bill included Section 2262, which essentially defunds the President’s czars overseeing the auto industry, health care, climate change and urban affairs. Strangely, rather than simply abiding by the legislation’s covenants, which actually applied to positions that were already vacant, the President felt the need to explicitly say that Congress did not have the constitutional authority to limit his spending. Back in 2008, then candidate Obama said that unlike George Bush, he “would not use signing statements as a way to do an end run around Congress.” Essentially what the President is doing is practicing a line item veto; something I and many others support, but thanks to Rudy Giuliani, the Supreme Court has ruled unconstitutional. Barack Obama doesn’t care about that and thinks American voters are too stupid to notice. As if to prove the point, now he’s not even using a proxy like the FCC to shred the Constitution, he’s going out of his way to do it himself.

These are but two examples where President Obama, the self described Constitutional expert “I taught the Constitution for 10 years” is demonstrating his disdain for said Constitution. At the same time however the issues are relatively esoteric. It is up to the Tea Parties and the GOP (if the leadership can remember that the word leadership actually suggests leading) to clearly articulate to American voters that while Barack Obama may be a Constitutional scholar, he does not feel the document applies to him or his administration. If they can do so in a coherent and compelling way, even the voters in John Ziegler’s video might be bright enough to vote against another four years of “Change we can believe in”.