Guilt by Association

          I’m always on the lookout for a clever turn of phrase.  I found one today in a Wall Street Journal article by Richard Brookhiser.  We are all familiar with the expression “guilt by association.”  Well, in writing about our 16^th president, Brookhiser said that “Lincoln wanted to wrap himself in the founders’ aura—gilt by association.”  This immediately got me to thinking about our current president.

          Who have been President Obama’s associates?  Going back to his formative years in Hawaii, we know that he was mentored by Frank Marshall Davis, a Communist.  In Columbia (where he enrolled fraudulently as a foreign student) he studied Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven who proposed a strategy for the destruction of capitalism.  He adopted community organizing tactics from radical leftist Saul Alinsky.  He befriended Bill Ayers, former leader of the Weather Underground.  He listened to sermons from Jeremiah Wright, the notorious America hater.  Is this gilt by association or guilt by association?

          Lincoln also said that public opinion is everything.  It would seem that Obama learned this lesson well, as he has made a career of traveling around the country wooing, shaping, and educating public opinion.  He has never stopped campaigning, and the mainstream media never misses a chance to show him making speeches while surrounded with fawning sycophants who buy into his false promises and applaud his serial mendacities. 

          From the Oval Office he signs a health care law with great ceremony, shamelessly insensitive to the deplorable fact that it was passed in Congress on a purely partisan vote and in the face of public disapproval.  Now that the law’s demonstrable flaws are surfacing on a daily basis, he doesn’t hesitate to rewrite it, ignoring all the while the extra-constitutional nature of his actions.

          President Obama swore an oath to uphold the Constitution and faithfully execute the law.  Instead, he brandishes a pen and proclaims his intention to bypass Congress, to use his executive authority to ignore the parts of the law he doesn’t like, and to write new ones as he sees fit. 

          Constitutional professor Jonathan Turley, a liberal who happens to agree with the president’s policies, tells us we are seeing a very dangerous shift of gravity within our system, a system created by our founders to protect us from authoritarian power and to protect civil liberties from abuse.  They would be horrified, he says, to see the concentration of power in one branch.  Turley sees the president’s claim of the right to basically rewrite, ignore, or negate federal law as the path to authoritarianism.  I would call it the road to tyranny.  His mentors, teachers, and radical associates would be proud.