We have entered a new age under President Obama in America, one in which the crisis and leviathan is an open, frequently used strategy for running the country. For sure, manufactured crisis as a mean to a despotic end has a long history in this country. But never before this president has it become the dominant approach to governing.
This has been on full display throughout Obama’s tenure, which has never seen the passing of a federal budget. Sadly, many Americans are unable to recognize a manufactured crisis when they see one. Perhaps the facts behind the government shutdown can permeate through the information filter of an all-controlling, leviathan.
ABC News, who has now been completely reduced to regurgitating Democratic Party talking points, reported, “According to government estimates, 800,000 of the more than 2 million federal workers could be furloughed during the shutdown, and the offices that employ them have released contingency plans noting how many employees would be forced to stay home and how many would be ‘excepted.’”
That sounds horrible, doesn’t it? The federal government has been hollowed out to the point that it cannot perform the “necessary and proper” functions it must perform to keep us safe. Except, about 1,350,000 federal government employees perform “essential” tasks, thus they are still working. By the way, that number does not include the 589,000 postal employees who, too, are still delivering your mail. No neighbor or family member will get salmonella poisoning, because the Republicans are willing to shutdown the Food and Drug Administration unless they get their way.
Scare tactics, including the petrifying prospect that Michelle Obama may not be tweeting on her free Twitter account for weeks, is an essential ingredient in the crisis and leviathan recipe. Although they profess humanitarian-based concerns, in truth, President Obama, Harry Reid, and Nancy Pelosi couldn’t give one iota about furloughed government workers; they care only for government power and control. Democrats intentionally boarded-up the doors of the National Institute of Health, which is literally threatening to kill children who have cancer, then when asked by CNN’s Dana Bash whether or not the Senate would pass the House’s bill funding NIH, Reid answers, “Why would we want to do that?” Indeed, why would they? It doesn’t help the leviathan any to do so, but perhaps taking to the Senate floor to exploit the very children they are helping to kill, will.
In fact, unnecessary shutdowns have been ordered at the direction of the President’s Office of Management and Budget, with the sole purpose of punishing the American people for their dissension. The same National Park Service that enforced the order to close the privately established World War II Memorial in Washington D.C., has “marching orders straight from the White House” to close many more privately run, revenue-generating parks all across the country. Warren Meyer is owner and president of Recreation Resource Management, Inc., which employs about 400-500 camp workers and managers across about a dozen states. In an email sent Oct. 2, he wrote:
Yesterday, as in all past government shutdowns, the Department of Agriculture and US Forest Service confirmed we would stay open during the government shutdown. This makes total sense, since our operations are self-sufficient (we are fully funded by user fees at the gate), we get no federal funds, we employ no government workers on these sites, and we actually pay rent into the Treasury. However, today, we have been told by a senior member of the US Forest Service and Department of Agriculture that people “above the department”, which I presume means the White House, plan to order the Forest Service to needlessly and illegally close all private operations. I can only assume their intention is to artificially increase the cost of the shutdown as some sort of political ploy.
The Fourth Estate refuses to report on the fact that the World War II Memorial in Washington, as well as the various properties managed by Mr. Warren Meyer, are not run by the federal government. They are merely commercial tenants on federal property, who happen to have a landlord who is illegally refusing to honor their lease, all because they seek to punish the consumer – We the People. During the 1995 government shutdown, the Lincoln Memorial’s information desk was closed and the employees sent home. However, access to the memorial site was not under guard from government goons, who should ashamed at themselves for even obeying such an order.
These parks not only do not cost the taxpayers any money, they actually contribute substantial money to the U.S. Treasury out of the fees that park users pay. Shutting them down will cost the taxpayers money, but President Obama has ordered them to be closed, because again, he seeks to punish dissension from We the People. These are our memorials, funded by the we the taxpayers, with the federal government merely acting as a steward for our property.
And this is but the latest in a long list of instances in which the imperial president has used the levels of the federal government to punish the American people for their dissent, and retain powers that were never granted to him under the Constitution in the first place.
“How dare you elect Republican Scott Brown to Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat and destroy my party’s supermajority?,” Barack Obama and Harry Reid said to the people of Massachussetts. Apparently, not only does the seat not belong to the people of Massachusetts, but it didn’t belong to Ted Kennedy either, in reality. It belongs to the party of the imperial president, who went on to use the IRS to attack the Tea Party and the American people to ensure a rebuke of his imperial powers would not be repeated in 2012. Democrats did, however, organize and legitimize a true “anarchist” movement – Occupy Wall Street – because they hoped to counter the Tea Party message when Nancy Pelosi’s attempt to label them “racists” failed.
“How dare you report stories that highlight my tyrannical tendencies?,” Obama scolded the Associated Press over, right before he had his attorney general sign an unlawful warrant for James Rosen’s personal emails. Months earlier, Holder told a bold-face lie when he had testified to Congress, smugly claiming he had never heard of such an instance, let alone any specific instances. The Justice Department obtained the warrant only after federal officials accused James Rosen in an affidavit of being a potential criminal “co-conspirator” under a wartime law, known as the Espionage Act, because no judge seemed inclined to grant their request any other way. “Sure, write it up and make it look good!”
Even the passage of Obamacare was an illegal act, in and of itself, invoking budget reconciliation to pass it with a simple 51-vote majority. Of course, Obama, Pelosi, and Reid only decided to do so after former Sen. Scott Brown was elected by the people of Massachusetts for the sole purpose of stopping the law. Now, amazingly, we hear daily that the government shutdown is over a budgetary hangup, and the Republicans’ fight against Obamacare has no business in a budget battle.
Nevertheless, that does not sound like a president who just claimed he has “bet over backwards” throughout his presidency to accommodate Republican dissenters of his centralizing agenda. There was no debate or negotiation – and certainly no compromise – over a bill that 38 Democrats joined along with every single Republican – every single Republican – to vote against; which is now, unsurprisingly, a central reason for the government shutdown and chaotic political discourse.
“How dare Dr. Ben Carson expose Obamacare for the fraud it is by offering real healthcare solutions that do not require a massive government takeover at the National Prayer Breakfast? Better send the IRS to audit him, too?” Prior to the breakfast, in his entire taxpayer existence, Dr. Ben Carson had never been audited by the IRS, let alone have them request access to his personal investment properties.
Promises and punishment should have replaced “hope and change” in 2008, and backward should have replaced “forward” in 2012. Even if Barack Obama knew how to lead, he wouldn’t.
Obama’s presidency has seen one crisis after another and, the fact he has never pushed for the passage of a federal budget, which has brought the country to point of brinksmanship over the simplest functions of government, is wholly intentional. But that is what he set out to do; that is what a community organizer who seeks to “fundamentally transform” our nation should have been expected to do. He is an agitator, not a negotiator; an ideologue, not a compromiser; a divider, not a unifier. And, it works every single time. That is the strength and appeal of the crisis and leviathan approach, and why tyrants have used the crisis as their ace in the hole for as long as human civilization, itself.
You still think you are free America? Didn’t you get the memo? The crisis and leviathan is your reality now, if you would only come out of your fantasy worlds to see it.
