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.

Though he never would have been foolish enough to make a major production of the gun issue during the campaign, he is exploiting the mass shooting in Newtown, Conn., to press for stringent gun control measures. He’s playing his leftist constituents’ emotions like a fiddle, encouraging them to ignore the facts and statistics and join him in imposing measures that violate the Second Amendment.

Nor is there any tolerance for dissent from Obama and his leftist cohorts, as we’ve seen with his selective assault on religious liberty. If you disagree with their proposals, then you simply don’t care about the death of schoolchildren – just as if you oppose unending extensions of unemployment benefits because the empirical evidence shows it hurts people in the long run, you’re heartless. Or if you oppose open borders, you are a racist.

Remember when Obama told an open-borders crowd that he couldn’t enact the DREAM Act without Congress, only to change course shortly thereafter and implement many of its provisions via executive order?

He got away with that, so why not try the same thing with guns? It’s not just his proposed actions that are unconstitutional; so is his method of imposing them. Vice President Joe Biden said Obama could and would take executive action to change the law.

In his gun control initiative, Obama is planning on using the same tactics of corporate bribery and cronyism he used to buy off major opponents of Obamacare. His ploy is to craft the law in a way that will benefit businesses, such as Wal-Mart, that sell guns.

If you are operating under the assumption that this nation is still operating under the old checks and balances system established in the Constitution that leftist professors are now openly condemning as obsolete, then you haven’t been keeping up with Obama’s pattern of governance through administrative regulations.

Tom Donohue, the CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, described the tsunami of new regulations coming out of Washington: 447 new rules are planned for the Dodd-Frank financial reform law, and you can be sure they’ll function to thwart, as much as facilitate, the law’s stated purposes. Obamacare’s massive regulations will impose federal control over aspects of our lives not remotely contemplated by the Framers.

The Environmental Protection Agency is at war with conventional energy producers and is using its unchecked regulatory power as a weapon of mass destruction – destroying the coal industry, devastating producers of oil and natural gas, and dictating unattainable gas emission standards to force us out of our cars, for starters.

Freedom isn’t the only issue here; a National Association of Manufacturers study shows that six EPA regulations alone could cost $630 billion, millions of jobs and up to 4.2 percent of gross domestic product. The EPA isn’t just an unchecked regulatory agency issuing its edicts outside the reach of normal accountability; reports have surfaced demonstrating collusion between this corrupt, politicized agency and environmental activists.

Meanwhile, Obama is also gratuitously rubbing our faces in the dirt with his recent appointments. He nominated Chuck Hagel for secretary of defense despite Hagel’s unmasked hostility toward Israel and his softness on Iran – and then trotted out the hapless Jay Carney to deny both, effectively imploring us to abandon our rational and sensory faculties.

He is appointing White House chief of staff Jack Lew to replace Timothy Geithner as treasury secretary. Lew is widely known to be a strong liberal and partisan Democrat who, according to a senior House GOP aide, “has consistently stood in the way of efforts to deal with our debt and deficit.” He reportedly approaches these issues with the same uncompromising militancy Obama does, issuing his demands and repeating them over and over while refusing to listen.

Obama also intends to appoint John Brennan as his new CIA director. Brennan told us in 2009 that Obama doesn’t describe our fight against jihadis as a “war on terrorism.” He said that we need not only to defeat al-Qaida and its allies but to address ignorance, poverty and repression and that we should reach out to “moderate” elements of the Hezbollah terror group. He calls Jerusalem “Al-Quds,” its Arabic name.

Obama may not believe we’re at war with terrorists, but he’s firmly at war with Republicans and conservatives.

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