The Empty Chair shutdown defense

In response to The NPS Government Shutdown Contingency Plan:

No doubt Obama’s loyal followers will soon be pushing the Empty Chair defense.  They’ll tell us Obama is as surprised as the rest of us by these outrages.  He’ll probably say he didn’t know the memorials were closed until he read about it in the newspaper.  

The willingness of his followers to believe this stuff is remarkable.  Obama is the world’s first helpless despot, a commanding authoritarian presence who discards the Constitution like used Kleenex when it stands in his way… but also a helpless child cowering under the Resolute Desk, unaware of anything that’s happening in the world around him, unable to do anything positive to improve the lot of his fellow Americans.  A flatline economy after five years and 20 “pivots to job creation?”  Not his fault, nobody could have done any better, lower that bar until ants would have trouble doing the limbo beneath it.  But he’ll seize control of the entire health insurance industry and micro-manage it into oblivion, and when the American people object, he’s suddenly a no-compromises Castro-style Maximum Leader.

I don’t understand why any of Obama’s bitter clingers are comfortable with that dichotomy: the guy who’s never responsible for anything – not even the “red line in Syria” language tumbling thoughtlessly from his mouth – is going to manage every aspect of their lives, and they’re ready to believe him implicitly when he says $20 trillion or more in accumulated debt is no problem, so only mean old Grinches would hesitate to keep raising the limit on his credit cards.

For anyone who isn’t still chugging that Obama Kool-Aid, the seeming contradiction is easily resolved: he’s all about making demands, not fulfilling duties.  He’s not even terribly interested in what happens with power after he seizes it – who cares how those ObamaCare exchanges are crashing left and right, or staying online just long enough for starry-eyed Hopenchange voters to discover just how expensive “free” health care is?  What matters is the precedent, the expansion of the State.  Likewise, Obama’s not going to lift a finger to fulfill his executive duties and make the government run smoothly during a partial shutdown, any more than he’s interested in rooting out those billions of dollars in waste and fraud oozing from every agency.  He takes, we give, and we’re supposed to thank him for taking.