The Sprawling, Dimming Age of Obama

Via the Daily Beast

The Age of Obama, writes Lloyd Green, is mandated healthcare, crony capitalism, and First Family TV spots as modern iteration of bread and circuses.

In Barack Obama, America elected a chief executive whose Department of Justice has repeatedly targeted the press, whose Internal Revenue Service has gone gunning for conservatives, and whose government has elevated secrecy into a cardinal virtue. The Obama administration’s data grab is not just about national security, or Edward Snowden. It is also an epilogue befitting a candidate who delivered his 2008 convention acceptance speech in front of a temple façade dedicated to himself, and whose faith in government and the state is at the center of his presidency.

Forget Obama’s paeans to civil liberties. The Age of Obama is a celebration of ever-growing and ever-more intrusive government, with mandated healthcare, crony capitalism, and First Family daytime and late-night television appearances as the modern iterations of bread and circuses.

And what does Obama get in return for his push for big government? A government that loves him back. Unlike the financial, insurance and real-estate industries that have been fickle about him — showering him with hosannas and cash in 2008, while offering a relative trickle of support in 2012—Obama remains the living end for government workers.

IRS employees donated to Obama over Romney by a 4-to-1 margin, IRS attorneys favored Obama by 20-to-1, and government lawyers at the National Labor Relations Board and the Department of Education shut out the Romney campaign completely. The federal bureaucracy had effectively lined up against nearly half the country.

Meanwhile, the White House press secretary dissembles daily; the intelligence community appears incapable of delivering a complete and truthful answer to Congress, and IRS employees apparently enjoyed a giant tax payer funded party catered by Wolfgang Puck.

Given this totality, public distrust of Washington should come as no surprise.

For the record, spending $2.4 million on an Olympics-themed confab, complete with an open bar while America’s housing market was crashing, is not prudent. Using credit cards to buy bottles of wine and $140 dinners is not what we want from the IRS’s green-eyeshade brigade. Trust, what’s that?