Using the powers at your disposal to dispose of those who challenge your power

Neil Cavuto zeroes in on the common theme linking Obama’s scandals: “If you’re not gonna love me, fear me.”

Obama himself has put his philosophy in just those terms, telling Latino voters before the 2010 midterms to “punish our enemies and reward our friends.”  At the end of the 2012 election, he was telling his supporters to think of voting for him as an act of revenge against their enemies.  And you can’t help but notice his politics are deliberately divisive – he and his allies advance every single policy by conjuring an “enemy” group motivated by nothing but pure evil.  

It’s not just rhetorical posturing.  It’s an attitude that has spread throughout his Administration, which is remarkably energetic in its abuse of power to injure and intimidate those “enemies.”  A just government is fearsome to criminals and foreign enemies; Obama’s government keeps the law-abiding in a constant state of terror.  One false move and you’ll run afoul of a vengeful regulator agency.  Any day now, the President could pop up with another round of demands to confiscate your income.  The most severe critics of Operation Fast and Furious note the many inconsistencies between its stated purpose and execution, concluding that its true purpose was to crank up gun crimes south of the border, to frighten American voters into support for Obama’s gun control agenda.  And with the IRS scandal, we saw the abuse of government power in the most wide-ranging voter suppression operation of the modern era – a highly successful effort to intimidate Obama’s political enemies right out of the election.

It’s all banana republic stuff, and as Neil Cavuto notes, nobody ever really takes responsibility for any of it.  Nobody loses their job.  No one gets punished.  The President could be firing people or demanding their resignations, but he’s still pushing his Empty Chair routine, pretending to be a helpless bystander as his out-of-control underlings run amok.  If he survives these scandals, we can at least hope for some restraint to return to the State of Fear after the next election, because there is exactly zero point zero percent chance the media would allow his Republican successor to get away with any of this crap.