America has never had a President so openly hostile to the First Amendment, and the very concept of dissent, even rhetorical dissent. (If you attempt meaningful practical dissent of his policies, he’s got a fresh army of IRS agents standing by to deal with you.)
Barack Obama is far more petty about his complaints than Richard Nixon ever was, and unlike Nixon, Obama has the vast might of the establishment media very, very, very firmly on his side. He’s whining about a small guerrilla force of samizdat dissenters when he says things like this: “All of us need to stop focusing on the lobbyists, and the bloggers, and the talking heads on radio, and the professional activists who profit from conflict, and focus on what the majority of Americans sent us here to do.”
Yes, the Community-Organizer-in-Chief just complained about “activists..” The man who shoveled countless billions of your tax dollars to his cronies in the “green energy” movement just complained about people who “profit from conflict.” The faker-than-fake politician with a million phony Twitter followers and a personal account run by professional political activists is warning you that somebody else might try to manipulate your opinions. And no, your memory is not faulty: this is the same guy who invited a group of lefty bloggers into the White House last year.
Why won’t those cursed conservative bloggers just let Barack Obama be clear? (He actually used a variation on his favorite rhetorical crutch during this news conference, saying “Let’s be clear, there are no winners here.”)
There’s a lot going on here beyond the typical Obama hypocrisy, ego, and vindictive small-mindedness. Read his words again. He’s saying, quite literally, that dissent is intrinsically illegitimate. Nobody has a fair, intelligent, or moral reason for disagreeing with him – they’re all just selfish rabble-rousers and the paid operatives of sinister interests.
This fits in with the new Obama concept of the despotic presidency, in which the one and only election that actually matters is the presidential contest every four years. You’re not supposed to rally, encourage your representatives to cast votes Obama disapproves of, or even insist on the proper Constitutionally-mandated procedures for modifying legislation in Congress. You get one chance to weigh in on your fate every four years, peasants, and if you can’t arrange a working majority to eject the imperial presence, your support for everything he wants to do is required.
Of course, the Left doesn’t start organizing for elections just a few months out, any more than they recognize the despotic authority of the President when he has an “R” after his name, or consider anything they disagree with “the settled law of the land.”
Also, there’s a dash of the usual Empty Chair scapegoating and evasion of responsibility at work here, too. “We hear some members who pushed for the shutdown say they were doing it to save the American economy,” Obama said during the same news conference. “But nothing has done more to undermine our economy these past three years than the kind of tactics that create these manufactured crises.”
Got that? Obama’s dead-parrot high-unemployment no-growth debt-addled economy is all the fault of talk radio hosts, bloggers, and feisty members of Congress. The Oval Office remains empty, the President still a helpless victim of manufactured crises. Remind me again, who was it that frantically labored to manufacture crises over the past couple of weeks by barricading monuments and telling Wall Street to panic?
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