Our nation’s 238th birthday took place on the 4th of July and corresponded with Ramparts of Civilization’s 4th birthday, also born on the Fourth of July as a celebration of and defender for the accomplishments of that great day so many years ago, and the many other examples of similar greatness throughout the long and compelling story of western civilization. July 4th, 1776 held one of the most treasured places in the pantheon of western civilization’s accomplishments, in its bold recognition of the individual as primary to the story, rulers as a servant to the people, and not the other way around. The Declaration of Independence proclaimed that all men as a right of their birth, are created equal and by their existence as equal men, maintain unalienable rights, that of life, liberty, and their individual pursuit of happiness. It declared that government existed to preserve these rights and was instituted among people, deriving its powers from the consent of the governed.
The revolutionary words stimulated the passions of an extraordinary generation of people, and by 1789, had achieved the miracle of a constitution designed on those principles, and a series of carefully lain limitations and balances to maintain them. Through the wrenching pain of a civil war, the sins toward an indigenous culture, the stain of a hypocritical enslavement of a race of people born under the same protections, the calamitous world of market crashes and the impact of two massive world wars, the founding documents preserved a means of governance that led to the freeist, most prosperous society on earth. The United States was a beacon to those who came from environments with less or no respect for those unalienable rights, and flourished as the singular example of what was possible when a person’s talents are freed and left to their own devices. The United States became not only the most desired, but the most powerful country on earth, an accomplishment achieved through the power of words and a people’s respect for their meaning.
It devised a council of elective representatives that would create a nation of laws, a judiciary that would ejudicate them and an executive that would see the laws were faithfully executed. The Chief Executive was asked to swear a specific oath:
I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States
The key concept of the Chief Executive was that of the defender of the Constitution, that he would seek election to that critical post to help lead the nation towards a future in the Constitution’s image, not his own image.
On November 4th, 2008, the nation elected someone who presented themselves as a Constitutional scholar, and on January 20th, 2009, swore the very oath above as the 44th President of the United States.
And that was pretty much the last time the Constitution was basis for any consideration of this particular man, Barack Obama. The first hint of this individual’s determination to not to uphold, but overturn the carefully constructed checks and balances that had brought the country such prosperity, was illuminated five days before his first election as President in October 2008:
And he meant it. To him transformation meant the necessary destruction of that which came before him. Facing a recession caused by a fiscal crisis, he ignored the multiple previous examples of successful resolution of recessions by removing the hand of government upon the economy through tax cuts and relief from regulation, and went instead for a boundless stimulus spending process, that significantly lengthened the recession and injected into government a massive increase in size that all but doomed any future ability to achieve budgetary control. When budgets were suggested to control the out of control spending, he ignored the concept of presenting a budget altogether. In the 232 years of governance and 43 Presidents before him the nation had incurred a 10.6 trillion dollar deficit. In the six years he has been in office he has almost doubled the deficit and will have expanded it 2 1/2 times, to 22 Trillion dollars when he leaves office. He achieved the largest grab of governmental control over the private economy in history when Obamacare was enacted in 2011 without a single opposition vote of support, then rather than enforce it as law of the land, has amended it without any legal basis over twenty times to fit his purposes.
When he was unable to persuade the opposition or even at times his own party in regard to so called immigration reform or global warning legislation, he simply went over their heads by injecting regulations not based on any law, and ignored laws that were already there. If the voting population could not be persuaded his ideas were sufficiently mainstream, he determined to change the make-up of the voting population, allowing hundreds of thousands to illegally enter the country, ignoring the laws of border security he had sworn to uphold, precariously putting his country’s whole southern border at risk to calamity, disease, and crime, as well as forever changing the voting demographics to something more of his liking.
He entered people’s private property through increased power of the NSA, the corruption of the IRS, and awesome power of his regulatory commissions to reek havoc. He turned the power of the IRS on citizens who had differing views then his and sought to destroy them, He sent his minions from ACORN to corrupt voting processes and secure voting assurance for his desire to transform. He promoted class warfare to hide his failures, and promote the innate power achieved in securing a dependent population to the whims of government control.
He purposefully undercut the painfully won strategy to secure Iraq for the simple concept of proving his notion that the previous administrations’ policy were wrong, and he was willing to waste the sacrifice of over 4000 American deaths and countless casualties to prove it by withdrawing all military support from the shakiest of new democracies, surrounded by ravenous neighbors. He may have illegally supplied weapons to the most dangerous of opponents to the Assad regime in Syria, sacrificing the life of his Libyan ambassador to prevent exposure of the arms process, ultimately arming the very insurgents who have declared a caliphate in Syria and Iraq and threaten to destabilize the entire middle east. He destabilized governments in Libya and Egypt, supported long term sworn enemies of American policy in the Middle East. He slashed the military at the very time when the nation’s position and influence was growing more perilous by his actions, securing for Russia and China more aggressive policies toward their neighbors, and in Russia’s case, allowing the largest baldfaced land grab since World War II, in Russia’s consumption of Ukraine’s Crimea region.
Obama institutionalized a pattern of behavior more fitting of a despot than an elected leader in his desire to “transform”. He envisions a certain utopia from his actions, an America radically transformed into a socialist democracy fundamentally ruled by one party, with a bounty secured to a progressively dependent population obtained from a steadily diminishing group of producers, the majority fed by continuous immigration with promises of access to the bounty, a financial indebtedness that will remove America forever as the securer of the world’s free trade and markets, and an emasculated military that will prevent any influence on the more dangerous developments in world events, leaving her vulnerable within her own borders. The concept of a series of checks and balances that would prevent this utopia are anathema to him, and he is gambling on the country’s unwillingness to call him to account for his actions, until they are irreversible. To him its all so obvious, and reasonable. If the checks and balances of the system require him to persuade, and he can not, he will need to simply do “something” – He will do what he wants – its Economic Patriotism:
When we look up in 2016, we will see the ruins of a republic and lament its passing. Like all great national efforts before it, America’s own hubris brought to the position of power its own poison pill, and we swallowed it in 2008.
‘Preserve, Protect, Defend the Constitution’ will be actually our own epitaph, for by standing by passively helpless while this individual remade the country, whose founding principles he hates, in his own image, we cemented our own demise.