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 16th 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.
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