Columnist.
For the first time, I am wondering about the long-term viability of the Republican Party. I say this not as an advocate of its demise or restructuring but as an observer of troubling signs. The Republican Party is thought to be the institutional vehicle for the advancement of conservative policies, but for decades, the conservative movement has been frustrated with the party's deviation from conservative principles -- its refusal to live up to its decidedly conservative platform. I believe that the disappointing results for Republicans in the 2006 elections and probably the 2012 elections, as well, were in no small part attributable to frustrated conservatives staying at home.
How can anyone take President Obama seriously when he tells us our national debt is no big deal? Well, we have to take him seriously, because, unserious thinking or not, he has serious power, including the power to obstruct progress on reducing the debt. I'm not making this up, of course, which is too bad because it illustrates why it is so hard for Republicans to work with this man. He neither views the fiscal world from the same lens nor shares the goal of significant debt reduction. In an interview with ABC News' George Stephanopoulos, Obama said, "We don't have an immediate crisis in terms of debt. In fact, for the next 10 years, it's going to be in a sustainable place." Not only is that delusional on its face based on what we already know but there is no telling what kinds of financial strains his favorite monster, Obamacare, is going to have on the debt or what kinds of extraordinary circumstances might necessitate spending surges over the next decade.
There are three major factors that stand in the way of entitlement reform and the other responsible budgetary measures that must be taken to avert an eventual national financial catastrophe, and they have a common source. The first is that too many American people remain, amazingly, in the fog about the scope of the problem. The second is that a certain political ideology refuses to substitute a designated driver for the intoxicated entitlement state, which is driving the American bankruptcy bus. The third is that the leader of this noxious ideology has a further conflict of interest precluding a solution to the crisis, which is that he is hellbent on inflicting harm on the only political party pushing for reform and on successful entrepreneurs, who are critical to economic growth -- a key component of any reform measure.
The Republicans had better not squander the good will Sen. Rand Paul purchased for them in his filibuster over the Obama administration's potential use of armed drones to kill non-enemy combatants in America. I am not simply referring to the constitutional issue of whether the president can engage in such acts, though that's very important. I believe the significance of Paul's filibuster transcends the drone issue. It was about challenging the administration's lawlessness and accountability across the board and his runaway spending and statism. It was about championing freedom, God-given rights and the Constitution. Under questioning, Attorney General Eric Holder has simply refused to give a straight answer about these questions and acts as though the administration has a superior right to hold such matters close to the vest and as though Congress, let alone the American people, doesn't have a say in them or any right even to be apprised.
Is it possible that Obama's arrogance, personal pettiness, sanctimoniousness and egotism (for starters) could finally be his unraveling? Even the liberal media are starting to notice, but will it last? Up to this point, they've dutifully played along with his Alinskyite tactics -- converting the office of the presidency into a headquarters for community organizing at a federal level and a position to organize and fund a perpetual campaign against his political opponents instead of governing. The liberal media share Obama's leftist policy goals and the ends-justify-the-means mentality that accompanies them and have thus far been eager not only to ignore Obama's thuggishness and deceit but also to proactively help him in accomplishing his goals and concealing his chicanery.
It's most gratifying that people are beginning to wake up to the bullying tactics of the White House toward those in the press who occasionally stray from the government-owned media model, but this has been going on for a while. Veteran reporter Bob Woodward has said in interviews with Politico and CNN that a White House official warned him he would "regret" publishing a story reporting that the sequestration was President Obama's idea. "(The White House aide) yelled at me for about a half-hour," said Woodward. The aide later apologized to Woodward in an email and claimed he was not making a threat but merely observing that Woodward would regret "staking out that claim."
President Obama told a meeting of the National Governors Association: "At some point, we've got to do some governing. And certainly, what we can't do is keep careening from manufactured crisis to manufactured crisis." Really? Yes, really. He added, referring to the sequestration: "These cuts do not have to happen. Congress can turn them off anytime with just a little bit of compromise." Obama has repeatedly demonstrated that he does not consider himself bound by a duty of good faith to square with the American people. He has shown that he is unafraid to utter the most egregious distortions and exaggerations; he has no fear of being called on them.
President Obama's demagoguery and fear-mongering on his sequester cuts are breathtaking, even for him. Lest you think I am engaging in hyperbole, let me give you the dictionary definition of a demagogue. One definition is "a political leader who seeks support by appealing to popular desires and prejudices rather than by using rational argument." Obama's ordinary MO is to stir people against one another, to stoke the flames of envy among some against others in lieu of rational argument to rally support for his causes.
It seems the liberal media are more concerned about Sen. Marco Rubio's midspeech sip of water than about President Obama's State of the Union commitment to double down on his disastrous policies. What will it take for once-reasonable people to become alarmed at the state of this nation's fiscal condition, its stagnant economy and its egregious unemployment? Is there no number of irresponsible liberal policies from an extremist liberal president that will exceed their willingness to tolerate? Do liberal media -- and rank-and-file Democrats, for that matter -- believe that this recklessness can go on forever? Knowing President Obama's capacity for fiscal folly and for scapegoating others for problems he's caused, even I find it hard to believe he could stand before the nation and masquerade as a Washington outsider -- as a crusader against the squalid conditions he is engineering and exacerbating.
President Obama must have been stunned at the "audacity" of Dr. Benjamin Carson in challenging his core assumptions right to his face in front of thousands of people at the National Prayer Breakfast. Obama is not used to being challenged, especially in public, even if indirectly and without being specifically named. From the look on his face, it was obvious Obama was none too pleased with Carson's message or with his "presumptuousness" in presenting it in that forum, while he had to sit still and -- remain silent. I think we can best understand Carson's message in light of his opening statements, which laid the foundation for the thematic body of this speech.
President Obama and his liberal cohorts are noticeably puffed up after his re-election and are making their move on a wide array of fronts. The liberals' voracious appetite is incapable of satiety. Obama's cockiness was on full display during the fiscal cliff negotiations, during which he treated Republicans, the only ones remotely serious about addressing our deficits and debt, as annoying stepchildren he has to endure as a nuisance. Actually listening to their ideas is not on his playlist. We've also seen Obama's cockiness in his behaving as though he is above the law and doesn't have to answer to Congress, the courts or the Constitution. Obama has brazenly ignored his legal duty to submit a budget, as if he were King Henry VIII. This is not some ministerial function, mind you, but the budget, which is at the heart of the nation's problems today.
The Senate's "advice and consent" role doesn't require it to rubber-stamp a presidential appointee for secretary of defense who senators believe would weaken America in this increasingly dangerous world. Notwithstanding former Sen. Chuck Hagel's diminished view of the post -- "I won't be in a policymaking position" -- the secretary of defense is an exceedingly important position and must be filled with someone who understands the complexity and gravity of the threats we face. In his testimony at his confirmation hearing, Hagel demonstrated a remarkable unwillingness to clarify his past statements, a stunning misapprehension of the identity, intentions and capabilities of our enemies, and a disturbing ignorance of the critical subject matter on which he would be advising the president. For example, he was unaware that the sequester cuts come out of the Budget Control Act.
Many have rightly condemned MSNBC's serpentine editing of a video to make it appear that certain gun rights activists heckled the father of a 6-year-old victim of the Sandy Hook shooting massacre, but let's not pretend this was a one-off event. The liberal media long ago forfeited their respected role as watchdog over the government and have voluntary descended to the status of a public relations arm of the Democratic Party and various liberal causes. It doesn't do it justice to call them cheerleaders, for they are active participants, every bit as much involved in bringing about the events as the party with which they collude. They no longer merely report the news. They deliberately influence it to advance the liberal political agenda. So while they engage in plenty of deceptions on the micro level, they daily engage in a category of sin that far exceeds the despicable doctoring of videos.
President Barack Obama is not just a radical leftist; he is obviously so ensconced in his ideology that he believes -- or wants you to believe -- that anyone who opposes him must have sinister motives. One of his recurring themes is that some Republicans would work with him but can't do so for fear of reprisal from Grover Norquist on taxes, the National Rifle Association on guns, the conservative House caucus, radio talk show hosts and your garden-variety racists, who allegedly oppose Obama just for sport. In mid-January, Obama accused the "gun lobby" of "ginning up" fears that the federal government would use the Newtown, Conn., shooting tragedy to seize America's guns, saying, "It's certainly good for business." Is that how presidents should talk?
Welcome to an America with liberalism in full ascendancy as golfer Phil Mickelson apologizes for doing nothing wrong while the Obama administration lambasts its opponents for justly demanding it apologize for doing plenty wrong on Benghazi. Welcome to a land where the gravest problem threatening the nation is spending, where the Democratic president refuses to cut, where the Democratic Senate lawlessly refuses to pass a budget and where Democrats thwart congressional GOP efforts to enact spending and entitlement reform, yet the public is conned into believing that Republicans are the problem. Welcome to a culture in which the political left is frighteningly intolerant toward dissenting views yet convinces many that right-wingers are the close-minded ones.
Isn't it ironic that Republicans keep receiving advice to be more conciliatory and work with President Obama while President Obama not only is receiving the opposite advice but fully intends to be even more divisive in his second term? On "Meet the Press" last week, former Secretary of State Colin Powell said: "There's also a dark vein of intolerance in some parts of the (Republican) party. What do I mean by that? What I mean by that is they still sort of look down on minorities." That is outrageously false, but lest you think hypersensitivity to race is all that's bothering Powell, he made clear that he also has a problem with the GOP's policies. He said: "In recent years, there's been a significant shift to the right, and we have seen what that shift has produced: two losing presidential campaigns." A shift to the right? You've got to be kidding. Why isn't Powell concerned about Obama's uber-leftism?
Liberals have an uncanny knack for designing solutions that do not address the problem at hand, and they're doing it again in their current effort to use the Sandy Hook shootings as fodder for promoting stringent gun control measures. It's as if President Obama and his fellow travelers lie in wait for the unfolding of big events that they can use to incite the public's passions and thereby gain popular support for otherwise unpopular government action. Liberals aren't just exploiting Sandy Hook to promote their unpopular gun agenda; some are now invoking false charges of racism to aid their cause, as well. Rep. Hank Johnson asserted that the National Rifle Association opposes Obama's gun control policies because it "still cannot get over" the fact that the president is "black." Rep. Charles Rangel was a smidgeon more subtle, suggesting that while his state of New York is more progressive than other states (and has thus enacted strict gun control measures), some of the "Southern areas have cultures that we have to overcome."
President Obama's latest news conference was further confirmation that his voracious appetite for spending was not satisfied but whetted by the fiscal cliff deal, which he views as an appetizer. We were told that the GOP achieved a coup in the fiscal cliff negotiations because they lured Obama into an agreement to lock in the Bush tax rates except for the highest-income earners. Never mind that Obama agreed to no spending cuts or entitlement reform after demanding a "balanced approach" to deficit reduction; they told us he'd be forced to address those matters in a couple of months in the debt ceiling negotiations. They argued that by agreeing to make the Bush rates "permanent," Obama had tacitly admitted that he couldn't sustain the welfare state through tax increases on the middle class and that he'd now have to -- grudgingly or not -- turn his attention to spending cuts and entitlement reform.
Hey, folks, remember the good old days when candidate Barack Obama at least pretended to be bipartisan and conciliatory? Now it's as if he's on a mission to prove he was faking it. Obama is behaving like a bitter ex-spouse who knows all our hot buttons and delights in pushing them. He is governing by crisis, fear, alienation, cronyism and anti-constitutional fiat. He is openly flaunting his militant radicalism, as if he's trying to provoke us -- and his second term hasn't even begun. He is horrifying all Americans who have the slightest concern about our deficits and debt, refusing to address them, demonizing and obstructing those who are, and flagrantly lying about both by pretending he's the one tending to our national solvency.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell tells us the tax issue is behind us and that we can now move on to spending. Really? What makes him think the GOP will succeed this time when it couldn't last time? The just-concluded fiscal cliff deal included no material spending cuts, which the GOP justified by saying it had achieved locked-in rates for most of Bush's tax cuts, which would force Obama to seriously discuss spending cuts and entitlement reform as part of the upcoming debt ceiling negotiations. But a White House memo announcing the deal said that postponing the sequester for two months "will give Congress time to work on a balanced plan to end the sequester permanently through a combination of additional revenue and spending cuts in a balanced manner."
