What Would Jesus Have Done in Kenosha Last Week... What Would You Have Done?

Imagine that Jesus was in Kenosha last week when Jacob Blake, a man with a warrant out on him for criminal trespassing, domestic abuse and sexual assault, began threatening the very person he had previously abused. In order to keep things from getting out of hand he might have given Mr. Blake a heart attack. He might have turned Mr. Blake into The Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. Or he might have had Mr. Blake pull a hamstring so that he ended up wreathing on the ground not being able to move. But none of those things happened and the truth is, I’ve no idea what the Lord would have done had he been responding to the 911 call.  But I know what the police did… They shot Mr. Blake.

There is of course a bit more to the story. They didn’t just show up and start shooting. No, apparently they tried talking to him, but that didn’t work. They tazed him, twice. That didn’t work. They tried to physically restrain him. That didn’t work… at one point apparently he even had one of the three police in a headlock! They eventually pulled their guns on him and told him to stop moving. Even that didn’t work. So when he reached inside his car after being told again to stop and didn’t, they shot him.

Just as I don’t know what Jesus would have done with the 911 call, I don’t have any idea what he would have done in reaction to the shooting… but I do know what the leftist BLM and Antifa mobs did… they rioted, of course.

While we can’t know what Jesus would have done had he responded to that 911 call, we can ask what exactly would most Americans, black or white do if they were in the shoes of the policeman? You have a known violent criminal who has been fighting with you, who was not fazed by a Taser, who was noncompliant in the face of police pointing guns at him commanding him to stop, who continues to defy them and reaches into his car… The police, observing this behavior, not knowing what Blake was reaching for, possibly a gun, had to decide in an instant. Had it been a gun Blake was going for, not only could he have shot one or more of the police, he might have accidentally shot one of his 3 small children sitting in the back seat or some innocent bystanders.  What would you have done?

Should the police have waited until Blake emerged from the car with a gun pointed at them or until he had already started firing? Is that the standard we expect for police now? Wait until a criminal points a gun at you and shoots before you fire? Maybe they should they have used less lethal force instead? Like what? They tried physically restraining him and by using a Taser on him, twice! Neither worked. Should they have tried a net like gladiators used to use? Blake was undaunted and violent… so expecting him to reach into his car and pull out a candy bar or some flowers wasn’t exactly rational. The police expected something violent and fired before someone other than the criminal got hurt. What is the right alternative in this circumstance that would have guaranteed no one else – or even Jacob Blake – was hurt?

“But they didn’t have to shoot him 7 times!” or “They didn’t know what he was reaching for at the time… it could have been his keys!” Because… yeah... It’s one thing to play the Monday morning quarterback and say what should have been done or not done after the fact, but in the heat of battle… and make no mistake, for those involved that’s exactly what this was, what was the right answer in that split second, at that moment when the lives of at least three police officers, three children, numerous civilians and the suspect were on the line? Sure, someone might say, hey that’s not fair to ask us, we’re not trained to know what to do in situations like that, but the police are. That’s true… but it was clear they tried all those things they were trained to do and nothing seemed to stop Blake… but that doesn’t seem to have mattered to the rioters.

So where does appear to leave America in 2020? Do facts not matter any longer? Do circumstances not matter? Is everything literally black and white as in black vs. white? How does this comport with Martin Luther King’s hope that people would be judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin? All anyone knew in the hours after the shooting was that a black man was shot by white cops… Full stop.  Period. Yet, chaos and violence ensued.

In today’s world of identity politics and the cult of victimization the facts no longer matter. Rational thought no longer matters. Objective reality no longer matters. The only thing that matters is the message of victimhood, the color of one’s skin or gender or whatever today's characteristic of choice, but only as it relates to traditional America and traditional American values. If a black criminal gets shot because he’s defied every non lethal attempt to subdue him, he’s a hero, regardless of the facts. If a white kid shoots three protesters in self defense he’s a white racist… regardless of the facts.

People like Nancy Pelosi, LaBron James, Mark Cuban and the entirety of the media, education and Democrat cabal have brought America to the brink of anarchy with their disregard for the truth, for objective reality and for the true and good nature of most Americans. They have embraced, manipulated and leveraged anecdotal evidence of human failings to tarnish the name of half the population and undermine the founding principles of the nation that has done more good for more people than any in human history. All in the name of Hope and Change… In reality, it is power they seek. It is obedience they seek. Fundamentally, it is fealty to their worldview they seek. Racism is no longer defined by actual racist behavior… it’s defined by whatever they say it is. Free speech no longer means actual freedom to speak your mind… no, it means you’re free to say only those things they agree with. Fair is no longer a term that can be debated based on the merits of an argument… no, alas, fair means outcomes that are aligned with the various identities of the people involved, regardless of effort or risk or ingenuity associated with the endeavor being undertaken.

Which brings us back to Kenosha. And Portland. And Seattle. And Baltimore. And Chicago. And New York. And Ferguson. America was never perfect and it never will be. But it has been the greatest nation on the planet for at least a century and has grown better decade after decade. But that’s not good enough for Pelosi, James, et al. They have a worldview of perfection as they define it and they demand it now. They are in the process of killing the goose that has laid golden eggs for 233 years. If they are allowed to win the argument today and the election in November the nation will come to resemble Kenosha far more than it does the rich enclaves that they inhabit… and the goals that they pretend they care about will end up in tatters on the floor.  More importantly, the people they profess to care about will end up as part of a system which will likely provide far fewer opportunities, far fewer freedoms, far less security and far less prosperity than the one they inhabit today. As I mentioned, I can’t speak for Jesus, but I can’t imagine that he or anyone with a functioning brain would be in favor of replacing imperfect freedom with leftist fascism… but that’s exactly where this cabal wants to take us.

Don't Look Now But The Democrats of 2020 are Eerily Similar to the Nazis of 1933...

One of the brilliant things about the United States’ founding fathers was their understanding of human nature. They understood that it is the nature of man to seek to accumulate power. It’s been that way throughout human history. The seemingly unquenchable thirst for the accumulation of power has created empires across the globe. In Africa you had the Egyptians, the Songhai and the Carthaginians. Asia had the Ming, the Han, the Mongols, and of course the Ottomans. Europe had the Greeks, Romans, and the Spanish. The Americas had the Mayans, the Aztecs and the Incas. The British eventually assembled an empire that literally circled the world.

The parts of the world that were not subsumed into giant empires were part of smaller civilizations of varying sizes that operated, in most cases, through the accumulation of power via conquest and slavery. It was usually the conflict or potential conflict with competing powers that dictated how large a nation or an empire would grow. Because, after all, it is largely a trait of men to seek to accumulate more power until prudence dictates not doing so – and even then in some cases prudence is not much of a deterrent. And that applies even more to competing powers within a state than to those between states.

Our founding fathers knew this and decided to craft a Constitution to yoke the darker nature of men. Thus we have the federal system, where states have some powers and the federal government has others. The federal government would handle most large national issues while states would handle those closer to the people.  We have a separation of federal power between three theoretically equal branches of government. Within the legislative branch – which at the time of writing was expected to be the first among equals – there is a separation between the houses, and within the houses different powerbases. The states appointed Senators and the citizens elected the Representatives. Add to all of this the staggering of terms of office and you have a vehicle that was designed to limit the powers of mobs and keep any single group from being able to play on the emotions of men and take power.

And finally of course, for the single most powerful limit on the accumulation of government power, you had the Bill of Rights which clearly articulated the rights of the people, both individual and collective, that could not be tread on by the government. Free speech, a free press, free practice of religion, the freedom of assembly, a right to be secure in their persons and homes, and most important of all, because it protects all the others, the right to bear arms.

Our Constitution, like its authors, was and is not perfect, but over the years it’s evolved to ban slavery, grant equal application of laws and to expand suffrage. What is perhaps most interesting about the American Constitution is the fact that it’s guided the country for 233 years without a standing army of enforcers. Yes, there is an army of course, but it’s not used to keep citizens in line, because there is no line to be kept in. America was, for most of its history, a nation defined by freedom. Citizens could largely go about and do and say what they wanted. They could buy land where they wanted. They could start just about any kind of business they wanted. They could worship as they wanted. They could say anything that came to their minds… although whether or not that was prudent is another matter. Americans could move from place to place without permission of the government. They could, at the end of the day exercise their freedom, and that came from the Constitution. Barack Obama accurately stated “Generally, the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties, says what the states can't do to you. Says what the federal government can't do to you. But it doesn't say what the state or federal government must do on your behalf.” Obama meant that as a criticism of the document, but the fact is, that is exactly why our nation has endured and our freedom has endured so long and allowed us to change the face of the world along the way.

Which brings us to America circa 2020… Virtually all of those key elements that have kept our nation and her citizens free are today under direct assault… largely by the Democrat party and their partners in the media, academia, BLM and Antifa.

The left is today using the blueprint of the Nazi party to bring America as we know it to an end. Although the Nazi party came to power legally, constitutionally in Germany in 1933, prior to that the Storm Troopers (Sturmabteilung - SA) had spent a decade using violence and intimidation to cow some Germans into submission while simultaneously emboldening others to take up their cause. Once the Nazis were in power it was game over for a free Germany. The model of using the freedoms / rights afforded citizens of a nation to take control of that nation and then eviscerating those very laws and rights that allowed them to come to power in the first place can have staggering results. The Nazis took a dysfunctional post WWI Germany and turned it into an extraordinarily efficient killing machine, both of its own citizens and millions of others as it set the world on a course of war. That model of gaining power followed by death and destruction has proved highly effective in modern times from Robert Mugabe to Hugo Chavez to Vladimir Putin to Xi Jinping.

And today the left is seeking to use that very model to destroy America. Not sure? Just listen to them. They want to pack the Supreme Court. They want to eliminate the Electoral College. They want to eliminate free speech. They want to take away your guns. They have no compunction about using the IRS to stifle opposition. They have no problem using the FBI to overturn a fair election. They want to defund the police. They want to expropriate your property. They seek to rewrite American history. They want to implement laws based on race. They want to decide what communities look like. They want to keep schools and churches closed. They want to obliterate science. They want to decide what art you see. And of course they want to control the means of production to save the planet from the fiction of global warming.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg. Make no mistake, Democrats do not decry the violence in the streets, they seek to harness it. Make no mistake, Democrats hold no love for the Constitution other than how it can be used to bring them more power. Make no mistake, the Democrats don’t care one iota about your freedom or your liberty and they will take them in a heartbeat, if you let them. And this is not a bug in their system, it’s a feature. The Democrat party in 2020 no longer has a vested interest in freedom. Their only goal is power and subjugation. “Think what we believe or you’ll be cancelled.” “Say anything we don’t like and you’ll be cancelled.” “Support our opposition and you’ll be cancelled.” Today mostly what they do is get you fired, kicked out of school and shamed on social media, but with amorphous “hate crime” legislation advancing on every front, soon there will be literally no place to hide, because words no longer mean anything so the woke can literally characterize anything as “hate”. Taken individually some may argue these are nothing like Hitler’s fascist state. Perhaps, but collectively they are as clear a portent to the future as was Mein Kampf.

The most telling thing about this situation is that it’s not actually the Democrats per se leading it. It’s the Twitter and Facebook mobs. It’s the fascists at BLM and Antifa. It’s academia and the media. The Democrats (who nonetheless agree with all of it) are too spineless to actually believe in anything other than power. They are not leading, but rather playing catch-up, trying to run to get out in front of a parade that’s already in progress and pretend they're leading it to keep the money flowing in. Once in power – i.e. having the White House and both houses of congress – they will enact every over the top progressive policy BLM and George Soros can come up with because they understand that if they are not on the bleeding edge of wokeness, the mobs will simply replace them with people who are even more hardcore.

One wonders what the reaction to all of this will be from Americans who still value liberty and freedom… will they go quietly into that not so good night or will they “cling to guns or religion” and decide to push back against the new fascism?

2020: The Year Democrats Put America on a Path to Collapse

It’s possible that 100 years from now people on this planet will look back at 2020 as the year the world began its descent into hell. Hell is what life was for most of the people who lived on earth before the United States was founded. In what might come as a surprise to many progressives, the United States did not create slavery. Slavery has existed since the beginning of mankind and was a common element of societies on every continent, including Africa. For most of human history the common experience of most people was one of poverty, subjugation, war and early death, whether they were slaves, slave owners or anyone else. This held true whether someone lived in Pharaonic Egypt, the Roman Empire, China’s Han Dynasty or even Elizabethan England, or virtually anywhere else on the planet. The average life expectancy around the world for most of human history was somewhere between 25 and 35 years old and infant mortality could be as high as 30%. Families would usually have many children because so many children never survived to adulthood.

It was into this world that the United States was born in 1776. The world did not measurably change on July 4th of 1776. On the contrary, the world stayed very much the same for many years to come. But what the establishment of the United States did, along with the ratification of the Constitution in 1788, was bring to the world the first nation in history to have at its core the principle of God given individual rights, individual freedoms and a government explicitly limited in its power. What this American experiment did was give unprecedented life to the yearning of humans to worship as they liked, to say what they felt, the freedom to life the lives they wanted to live and protect them from tyranny. (Obviously none of that applied to slaves in the new country, but at the time slavery was a common practice around the world including both Africa and Europe.) The result of this unprecedented freedom was the creation of the fertilizer that would in time become the garden from which many of the greatest advances in the history of mankind would emerge.

The year America was born 85% of the world’s population - 50% in the developed Europe - worked either directly or indirectly in farming , one of the most dangerous jobs in the world and an industry that had not significantly changed in 1,000 years. Today that number is lower virtually everywhere in the world and in the US and much of the west that number is below 5%, freeing up 80% of the population to do everything from becoming doctors, scientists, astronauts, teachers, actors, journalists, entrepreneurs and even bloggers! It was a Virginian, Cyrus McCormick, who made that possible with his invention of the mechanical reaper in 1831.

Later, far from the farm, in what is possibly the most extraordinary sequence of scientific advances in all of history, in a mere 66 years Americans went from inventing the airplane to sending men to the moon and returning them safely to earth. A mere sixty six years!

And the list of advances directly or indirectly due to the incredible opportunities in the United States is simply extraordinary. From the assembly line for cars to plastic to elevators to air conditioning to personal computers, the Internet and the smartphone, the United States has been the fertilizer from which unprecedented inventions and advances have together brought more prosperity to more people around the world than at any point in human history.  Not only are more people living more prosperous lives, but they are living longer, with the average life expectancy in the world going from 29 in 1800 to 46 in 1950 to 71 today. And just to be clear, all of the advances of the last two centuries did not originate in the United States. They did not, but American success and spirit of entrepreneurship helped inspire others around the world to make further contributions as well.

Americans have been able to make those stunning advances and many many more because of the freedoms enshrined in the Constitution and our capitalist system. Today we find those two pillars that helped power the world's march to prosperity under siege. From the Communist Black Lives Movement to the Antifa fascists to their media enablers, the nation finds itself at an unprecedented precipice. In one direction sits a future empowered by opportunity and prosperity, albeit an imperfect one, where things will not be perfect, things won’t always be fair and there will be winners and losers. But progress will continue as American capitalism and entrepreneurship push forward economic advances while free discourse allows for the exchange of ideas to push forward cultural advances.

In the other direction sits an abyss of mob rule and fascism where Americans will be forced to speak with one voice or be silenced and where, in the name of fairness and equality businesses will eventually come under the control of the mob and the government, which will have morphed into one. The Constitution will be discarded like yesterday’s newspaper, and the rights and freedoms that spurred the creation of the nation in the first place will become distant memories. Religious freedom will be gone. Freedom of speech and the press will apply only to those who toe the leftist party line. The 2nd Amendment will be history and confiscation will be the order of the day. Private property will cease to exist. And while the fascist regime will not succeed in producing prosperity, it will produce an equality of sorts, but one of poverty for everyone, except of course for those who wield the reins of power. Crime, corruption and extortion will become rampant and the United States will come to resemble a third world banana republic where the common man is subject to the whims of government apparatchiks, those with money & access, and anyone with a gun.

If this sounds a little like Dante’s Inferno, it should, but one doesn’t need to go back 500 years to understand what our future looks like. We just have to look at the recent history of places like Venezuela, Cuba, the Soviet Union, Cambodia, China, Zimbabwe, Nicaragua, etc. Communism and its fascist twin always produce the same thing… dictatorships, failed economics and widespread death and poverty. That is the history that will be written about the United States if we allow the BLM / Antifa / mainstream media triumvirate (via their Democrat puppets) to take power in November. Barack Obama used the IRS to silence opponents prior to the 2012 election and the FBI to try and overturn Donald Trump’s victory in 2016. For Democrats like Obama and Biden, the Constitution is more a collection of suggestions than the articulation of a set of functioning rules by which they have to operate. Imagine what a Democrat empowered by the radicals burning down America’s cities and rewriting her history would be willing to do…

America as we know it won’t end on January 20th 2021 if Joe Biden wins, but it will be a far darker place and the future of failure will be imminent.  One need only look at the disastrous outcomes in places like New York, Chicago, Baltimore, LA, Detroit, Minneapolis and the dozens of other cities run into the ground by Democrats to understand what would lay ahead for the country, and frankly, much of a world without America's leadership. The only question is, will it take Democrats more or less time to destroy the United States than it took Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses Grant to save it.

Having Survived Barack Obama, Back to Where the Tire Hits the Road...

I started writing this blog in 2009 after having written various random pieces over the years following 9/11. I started some months after Barack Obama was sworn in as President. I thought he was a clearly a socialist, perhaps a Communist, but most certainly un-American. One of the first signs there was a problem came prior to the election when an interview he had done years prior surfaced when he bemoaned that the Constitution was a “Charter of negative liberties. It says what the states can't do to you. Says what the federal government can't do to you but doesn't say what the federal government or state government must do on your behalf." Building on that he promised to “fundamentally transform the United States”. Finally, the promise of a black president didn’t quite play itself out the way some had expected. Some Americans felt that if we finally elected a black man to the presidency it would fundamentally demonstrate the United States was not the racist country so many had accused it of being. Not so much.

On the contrary. Many people started looking at that document Barack Obama saw as defective and started suggesting the entire country was built on a racist foundation. They began using 21st century mores to disparage the Founding Fathers and the Constitution they gave us over two centuries before. For them, an America that is not perfect is therefore evil and racist. Hence the name of this blog “Imperfect America”… drawing on the quote from Voltaire: “Perfect is the enemy of the good”. My first post was titled: “Racism: America’s Original Sin” essentially pointing out that the 3/5 Compromise did not at all mean what activists suggested it meant, and that in fact, had it not been for that compromise the Constitution might never have been ratified, blacks in the South might have been stuck in a country where slavery was fully accepted and a war the war that ended slavery might never have occurred. No, slaves would have been stuck in a nation that was not balanced by vociferous anti-slave voices as there were in the eventual United States. That was the start of this blog, but the areas of concern were many…

Over this past eight years I’ve pilloried Barack Obama, teacher’s unions, the BLM snake oil salesmen, Social Security Disability, Democrats, the media, big government, regulation, spineless Republicans and even Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. The list of enemies of freedom are legion, and most of them – but not all – live in the DC metro area and control the country like an unchecked borg "assimilating" everything in its path. Government rarely passes on an opportunity to get involved and make matters worse, regardless of the area or the Constitutionality of its actions. The lust for power from bureaucrats and politicians seems to know no bounds… and that won’t necessarily change with Donald Trump in office.

But what I think will change is the danger that the country is in. For eight years I’ve lamented the fact that Barack Obama and the progressive left were seeking to turn the nation into a third world socialist paradise such as Venezuela or Greece or Cuba. In some respects they’ve succeed, but thankfully in some they have been stymied. They will no doubt continue to mobilize their comrades in the media and academia to advocate for their march for progressive fascism, but given that there are fewer elected Democrats today than there have been in almost a century, they may have a somewhat difficult road ahead. Indeed Barack Obama’s legacy just may end up being the decimation of the Democrat party… which would be a fitting "fundamental transformation".

Donald Trump may be many things, but one thing he is not is Barack Obama. He may be something of a big government liberal, but he’s not anti-American. He may be too tied to big business to appreciate the challenges of small businesses, but he’s not an absolute enemy of free markets. Put another way, after eight years of worrying that the United States is about to careen off the path of freedom and die on the march to a socialist / fascist progressive nirvana, today I look forward to a future where freedom, liberty and limited government have an opportunity to retake their place in the pantheon of ideas on which the country thrives. That doesn’t mean that there are no threats left or that Donald Trump will be the savior we need. Trump will, no doubt do many things that cause conservatives such as myself to bang our heads against a wall, but at the end of the day, for the first time in eight years we at least know that our president’s starting point is not that America is always wrong, that America is racist, that government is good and the private sector is evil. America may not be perfect, but with someone other than a progressive Democrat in the White House we at least have an opportunity to address real issues of consequence and perhaps set the stage for a revival of prosperity.

As such, while I will continue to write pieces for this blog from time to time, it is now time for me to focus on a few other things a bit closer to home where I might be able to have a more direct impact.

Thank you for reading…

A dab of Communism and a dash of Fascism, Barack Obama's economic philosophy in practice

The primary reason Communism doesn’t work is that it goes against the very nature of man. In Communism there is simply no motivation for anyone to work hard. When there is a zero correlation between the amount or quality of work you do and the compensation you receive, your motivation to work hard, or maybe work at all, simply evaporates. This is particularly true given that the compensation for the slacker at the next desk is equally without correlation as he continues to get the same salary regardless of whether he actually gets anything done or not. And while Communism as we know it has only been around since 1848, the ideas behind it have been around for much longer… and not surprisingly it was a failed ideology long before Marx and Engels gave it a brand name.

I’m not going to suggest that Barack Obama is exactly a Communist… even if he was, apparently he’s smart enough to lie about it if he knew it would harm his image… I do however think he’s a fan of one of the basic mantras of Communism: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need,” with him deciding who needs what. At the same time he’s very much a fan of the Fascist economic model where private property exists but government mandates much if not all of its activity. For him everything else is to simply be manipulated in order to achieve those two tenets of his philosophy.

For six years Barack Obama has been doing everything in his considerable power to bring that philosophy into effect in the United States. In all fairness, many of the things he has pursued had their genesis in previous administrations, but under Barack Obama they found an unabashed champion who was willing to turbo charge them as he sought to “fundamentally transformed America”.

The scorecard of Obama’s accomplishments is breathtaking:

• The percentage of Americans working to support the nation is at a record low. 44% 
• The number of Americans on food stamps has exceeded 46 million for an unprecedented 3 years. 
•  The number and percentage of Americans on "disability" are at record highs: 8.9 million & 6.4% 
• The federal income tax is at its most progressive point in modern times with the top 20% paying 94% of all income taxes while the bottom 40% actually get money from the government. 
• With Obamacare the government has taken direct control of almost 20% of the American economy, while the EPA has a death grip on a vast expanse of industries from autos to energy to dry cleaning. Regulations are accumulating at an unprecedented rate and their scope seems boundless. 
•  And finally, as a result of all of this, more businesses are failing than are starting and the country is experiencing the slowest economic recovery in over half a century. 

If the words Communist or Fascist are too strong for delicate sensibilities, let me paint the picture in a slightly different way. Imagine the United States is a wagon with a combination of passengers and people pulling it. Where the wagon goes to find food and sustenance and to build prosperity is determined by the people pulling it. As long as there are enough people on the ground pulling the wagon, and those people are willing and able to put forth the effort to figure out where they should go and how best to get there, everything works out fine. Over time however if enough people stop pulling and jump into the wagon such that the ratio of passengers to pullers becomes too great, the wagon will eventually stop, as will the pursuit of sustenance, prosperity and everything else and stagnation and collapse will begin. But wait! It gets worse! Not only are there too many passengers in the wagon, but they have put chains on the ankles of those pulling it, have decided they know better how to pull the wagon – despite the fact that they are not pulling anything – and they have decreed that they get to decide how everything is distributed. Welcome to Barack Obama’s world. To put things in explicit terms, in Barack Obama’s America 140 million people are working to support a population of 320 million, which includes a record 100 million adults not working. That is the lowest rate in history.

So, while the Communist Party USA may not be celebrating their party’s ascendance into the White House, they are no doubt cheered by the fact that the country is being “transformed” in their direction. That does not bode well for anybody associated with the American wagon, whether pulling it or passenger…

Barack Obama, 2016 and the Burning of the Reichstag

Let’s face it, most Americans expect our politicians to lie. At least about the little things. Typically politicians try to keep things opaque so that they can easily massage the historical record once things don’t work out or the winds change. “I’ll put America back to work”. “I’ll bring home jobs.” “I support a fair tax system.” “I support education & women’s rights.” The less precise that a politician’s statements, the fewer people they will alienate, and in an American political universe of negative campaigns, that often seems to be the road most traveled. We expect them to lie about little things, but be aboveboard about the big, important things.

Then there is Barack Obama. News came out this week that provided confirmation that the Obama administration lied to the American people about Benghazi. On September 16, 2012 Susan Rice made the rounds of five talk shows telling the nation the attack on Benghazi that took the lives of 4 Americans was the result of spontaneous protests in response to an anti Islamic YouTube video. To many people that seemed absurd, but some were unsure and were willing to give the administration the benefit of the doubt. When it became clear that that narrative was simply false, the administration claimed that the talking points were directed by the State Department and the CIA. On Tuesday that was proved a lie as an email from the White House addresses Benghazi specifically in terms of blaming the video and not terrorism or policy failures.

This fits a pattern for this White House. And what makes it so perfidious is that it’s not to protect the country, but rather to save Barack Obama’s political skin. Again and again they have lied to the American people about big things, important things. And it’s gotten worse over time. At first it was passing of Obamacare, something sufficiently incomprehensible that Nancy Pelosi said “We have to pass it so we can find out what’s in it.” Barack Obama promised If you like your doctor you can keep your doctor and If you like your insurance, you can keep it despite the fact that the administration knew that to be specifically false.

Then it was using the police power of the government, embodied by the IRS, to seek to shut down the voice of their opponents. Certainly Americans would not be surprised that political opponents of a president sometimes find themselves being audited. But this was much more than auditing. This was the government seeking to use its power to muzzle opponents by limiting their ability to raise funding. And of course Barack Obama assured the American people that there was nothing political going on. In a free nation is there any more pernicious act than a government using its police power to repress its opposition? No. In America where we spend about as much on political campaigns as we do on chewing gum annually, even a modest limitation on the spending of your opponents can pay handsome rewards.

And now the most treacherous if not traitorous thing of all is the abject manipulation of the truth about the death of a US Ambassador in order to sway an election. We now have proof that six weeks before the 2012 election the White House manipulated the media and the message related to Benghazi for the specific purpose of supporting the illusion of Barack Obama’s foreign policy competence and his claim that al Qaeda was on the run and had been “decimated”.

So the question is, now that the election is over, what’s next? We already know from his own message to Putin that he believes he has greater flexibility now. Since there is no pending election through which the American people might put him in the unemployment line, what limits exist? He has pushed the envelope from taking away liberties to oppressing opponents to lying about his administration’s responsibility for the loss of life of a US Ambassador and three others. It’s not likely that he can get a repeal of the 22nd Amendment through, but one has to wonder, could he or would he manufacture some crisis that would cause the election of 2016 to be postponed? Perhaps indefinitely? Is it possible that the DHS might use events like the one down in Nevada with Cliven Bundy and his supporters to implement some sort of unprecedented nationwide emergency powers to battle people the DHS already considers potential terrorists… You know, like veterans or anti-abortion activists or border enforcement types? Is it possible that he could fall back on his community organizing skills to inflame his supporters to occupy government buildings around the country and demand changes as the students did at Columbia in 1968?

Sure, this might sound farfetched, but we’ve covered a lot of ground towards fascism over the last six years. No one gets elected in a democracy saying “I want to take away your rights” although they often do get elected saying they are going to take away someone else’s. Once they have their hands on the reins of power however, particularly of the DOD and DHS, it’s only a president’s integrity and appreciation for America’s greatness above their own that keeps him from seeking to manipulate the levers to extend his stay. (Remember, Nixon left without putting up a fight beyond the courtroom.) With Barack Obama, a man with little compunction about lying, an ego that makes Donald Trump look like a wallflower and who has both a disdain for the Constitution and a love affair with Executive Orders, I find myself a little concerned about the potential for a contrived American version of the burning of the Reichstag.