Is it really any wonder Americans are shouting?
by Bob Hoig, Publisher
Midlands Business Journal
Former President Richard Nixon reportedly kept an “enemies list” with an eye to intimidating opponents.
To generations of Democrats and ACLU types, he was the best. Some even called it fascism.
But there’s a new king of the hill now in President Obama, who last week instructed Americans to inform the White House of any “fishy” e-mails they might receive regarding his health care policies.
And not just inform, but forward the offending e-mails to him in care of the White House.
“Fishy” was largely undefined. But what must be clear, even to Democrats other than the Nancy Pelosi-Harry Reid types, was the potential for abuse.
The infamy of capturing a citizen’s e-mail into White House computers hardly needs explanation. It is patently wrong. It is certainly unconstitutional, based on a law forbidding any branch of government from doing just what Obama is doing.
As an invasion of privacy, it looks all the worse coming from a president who in his earlier political career railed against government spying, even on messages coming from overseas to known or suspected terrorists.
Where Nixon was said to have kept a little black book of his enemies, Obama’s sophisticated computers can slice and dice interesting information to near infinity.
Team Obama has been criticized in some quarters, including this one, for its fondness for methods that come uncomfortably close to those of totalitarian regimes.
Raucous, but non-violent town hall meetings were escalated to street thuggery by purple-shirted Obama sympathizers, SEIU union members, who beat a black protester and threatened others. The man had to be hospitalized and later put in a wheelchair.
Add that to the president’s open invitation for one American to inform on another to the White House, there is cause for real alarm. No American president has ever called for this kind of thing.
“We won” – the standard line from the Obama White House to push proposals, no matter how outrageous – shouldn’t encompass a rationale for Stalinite and Hitlerite beatings and snitchings.
Presumably the “fishiness” Obama refers to applies to the e-mails of people who really know fish when they smell it. There are multiple odors spewing from the thousands of pages of Obama’s signature pieces of legislation – the stimulus giveaways, the pending energy curtailment legislation, bailouts of the domestic auto industry, financiers and speculators, the unions associated with Detroit, and the various proposals for taking over health care and health care insurance.
Socializing health care, which Obama obviously intends, will remake one-sixth of the U.S. economy.
Nobody quite knows what the cap-and-trade energy limitations bill will do if enacted. It surely will keep U.S. manufacturing growing only slowly, if at all. And give China and India a major advantage.
Obama tomes, masquerading as legislation, are complicated and chock full of legalese, referring often to other equally complicated laws.
Making matters worse, it is a rare senator or representative who will own up to actually reading the bills they sign.
This means staff functionaries, aided and abetted by lobbyists and others in the Barackracy, are the authors. Who elected them?
Obama attacks Americans who simply ask for specifics. He doesn’t realize the day is over when his “trust me” pleas work. Many Americans are beyond that now.
Thirty-eight “czars” – unanswerable to Congress or anyone else other than President Obama – are 38 czars too many. It is time, in fact, to retire the word.
Is it any wonder that Americans are shouting at town hall meetings?
August 12, 2009
