We Over-Honor Our Presidents

I feel the same way as I told my wife.

Today the stock market will be closed, the federal government shut down, the mail will not be delivered and classes will be suspended. Why? George H.W. Bush died.

Irrespective of whether he was a great man or a poor one, George H. W. Bush was a public employee. He was not a king. He was not a pope. He did not found or save or design the republic. To shut down our civil society for a day in order to mark his peaceful passing is to invert the appropriate relationship between the citizen and the state, and to take yet another step toward the fetishization of an executive branch whose role is supposed to be more bureaucratic than spiritual, but that has come of late to resemble Caesar more than to resemble Coolidge.

In life they derided him and called him an elitist, clueless about real people and a Nazi (a title they give all Republicans).  Now that he's dead his political enemies on the Left call him a good guy. 

But he was a one term president and was elected to be Ronald Reagan's third term.  He had the good fortune to preside over the global successes of the Sainted Reagan. 

He did OK and lived a good, long life. 

RIP.

The man who won the argument that it’s not illegal if a president does it.

Obama is out to prove Richard Nixon right.

What’s the difference between Obama and a Latin American Caudillo?

Ruling by presidential decree is a characteristic of the typical Latin American “Republic.”

Does anyone care what the Brazilian or Venezuelan congresses do? What the Mexican Senate and Chamber or Deputies decide? Populated by powerless eunuchs, many of el Presidente’s own party, they don’t matter except as a façade.

So what’s the difference between the way Americans are ruled today and the way the heirs of Peron and Chavez rule their country? Is there that much difference between Obama and the rule of the president of Mexico whose term is often labeled the "six-year monarchy" because of the seemingly unchecked power that historically has resided in the office? 

Less and less.

And while the term “imperial presidency” has been bandied about for many years in this country, it has never been more blatantly practiced than by the current occupant of the White House. No other American president has ever had the brass to tell the American people that he will rule them with a phone and a pen.  And the Democrats in congress and the press cheered him on.

Debate in the Federalist Society, an organization that tries to advance the notion that the constitution should be the basic law of the land, pointed out that over many years Congress has ceded its power to the President.

“If Congress wants to restrain the discretion of the president, they are supposed to do what the separation of powers encourages them to do: Write the statute tightly so that it will be actually administered the way you want it administered," Baker said. "The reality is many members of Congress don’t care how it is administered until somebody squawks about it. They don’t read the statutes, so how do they know how it is going to be administered.”

Members of the Republican party, at least those who are actually opposed the Imperial Presidency (instead of paying lip service to it) are hoping the courts will bail them out. That's what they thought would happen the last time the Supreme Court ruled on the constitutionality of ObamaCare.   How did that work out?

“I do not think the executive is subordinate to the judiciary, and if the executive is not subordinate to the judiciary and has the power to independently interpret the Constitution, it can’t be exercised only at the veto point when a prior president may have signed the bill,” ... “The president who inherits the bill has to have the opportunity to interpret it himself and not be bound by the prior administration. The idea that the prior administration can tie the hands of a subsequent administration doesn’t make sense to me.”

So in 2008 with Democrats in control of both houses of congress and with the election of Obama, the nation was set on a new course. Barack and Michelle promised to “fundamentally transform” America, and with the assistance of the Democrats in the senate and house, they are well on their way. But because of the resistance by a majority of the American people and a minority of conservatives in congress, they have done so less by legislation and more by executive fiat.

Is there a constitutional remedy?  Yes, theoretically.  Impeachment is a remedy for a president who commits "high crimes and misdemeanors."  Those would include taking actions which he lacks the authority to take.  Charles Krauthammer calls amnesty via an executive order an impeachable offense.   But the Republicans are afraid of trying to remove Obama from office, even if they had the votes to convict, which they do not.

Obama has been applauded by the press because they support the direction he is taking the country. They approve of socialized medicine and government control in general … in fact there is very little about socialism they don’t support. But with the support of the goals, they have turned a blind eye to the means. They like the Caudillo when he’s ruling in their favor, believing – perhaps incorrectly – that the next Caudillo will continue the trend. That’s to be seen, but in the meantime the constitution is kicked to the curb and the rule of law is replaced by the rule of the strongman.

In the Banana Republics, the rulers often change when the military stages a coup. The problem with the Caudillo system is that it invites extremism.  Riots in the streets in reaction strong-man rule often leads to ambitious military officers restoring calm and occupying the centers of power.  Often the military has the greatest legitimacy among the competing power centers.  The current ruler of Egypt is the most recent example.  

In the US, the Gallup Poll shows that the military is the institution in which Americans have the greatest confidence with 74% approving "a great deal or quite a lot."   The presidency comes in 7th at 29% and congress is dead last, even lower than TV news.  

 Don't say we were not warned.

Respect the office of President? Why?

Barack “Corpseman” Obama couldn't spell RESPECT, despite the fact that it’s almost impossible to misspell.  That dreadful song by Aretha Franklin is burned in my brain thanks to hearing it played endlessly for years. 

 It brought to my mind that one of the most popular refrains one hears from the media is that we should “respect the office” of the President. Like any slogan or piece of propaganda that is repeated incessantly, you nod and agree. But why?

What does “respect the office” even mean? 

 Synonyms for respect include: reverence, admiration, esteem, veneration, high opinion. But if the slogan is right, we should esteem an office even if it’s occupied by a buffoon, a poltroon, a crook, an egotistical jackass on stilts. 

Though about that way it becomes immediately clear that it’s the person holding the office that give the office respect, not the other way around. An office is not a disembodied thing that exists ex nihilo and can go marching along without an occupant. So “respect the office” is one of those empty phrases that are mainly used in political arguments by the Left as a way of shutting off criticism of Obama. It’s used as a coat to clothe the naked truth about Obama; he’s just not respectable no matter what office he happens to occupy.

Millions Who Lost Health Insurance Are All Racists For Being Furious With Liar-In-Chief

Billionaire Oprah Winfrey says people lack respect for the Liar-in-Chief because of the color of his skin.

Some disagree ...

Level of disrespect?

I'll tell you a level of disrespect, you hateful shrew:

How about disrespecting the millions of Americans who just lost their health care after being promised dozens of times by the Liar-In-Chief that they could "keep their plans"?

How about disrespecting the families of those killed in Benghazi? A president who lied right to their faces about the cause of the attack and didn't lift a finger to save them.

How about disrespecting the families of the hundreds killed by Operation Fast and Furious? A president who gave or sold thousands of military-grade weapons to Mexican drug cartels as part of a truly evil plot to demonize gun-owners.

How about disrespecting all of those conservatives, Christian, and pro-Israel groups targeted by Obama? A president who used the IRS to win the 2012 election and then lied about it.

You're a hack, a clueless know-nothing, a Leftist kook who claims entirely legitimate criticism of the Liar-In-Chief's outrageous activities is based on "racism".

Go drink a nice, tall glass of shut-up juice and get the hell off of my television.

The fight between God and government

People have faith. They may not have faith in God but they have faith in something or someone. The alternative for faith in a just God - for many - is faith in government.

President Obama knows that if the peoples’ faith rests in government elites, his power has no competitors. When individuals abandon their own moral and religious compass, the ruling Democratic party can fill the void.

Much of Washington is power hungry. It pursues the blind faith of the American people, a faith that pushes aside personal faith. The systematic manipulation of the American public and the peoples’ abandonment of fundamental values has created a perfect storm of social issues intertwined with political agenda.

With the connivance of the media which shapes people's perception of reality political figures have created the "cult of personality" or the "Führerprinzip"

The “cult of personality,” as defined by Princeton University, is “when an individual uses mass media, propaganda or other methods to create an idealized and heroic public image.”

This technique can be best implemented when the burden of trust rests not on the shoulders of the governed, or on the sovereign God, but on the elites governing.

Americans have abandoned an essential truth: God is sovereign. This has led to god-like government and the demise of liberty, two results that are intertwined. In the middle of a godless society, the “cult of personality” flourishes. Who better to take God’s place than the President?

William Saletan is running up a red flag about the NSA spying scandal and has come to the conclusion that "Laws Are Not Enough." What are we to do if the laws no longer limit what government can do to and with us? I noted that

But suddenly people who are not into wearing tinfoil hats, receiving messages through their fillings or telling Dan Rather that George Bush went AWOL are starting to question just how constrained the government is by laws. What happens when an old piece of paper like the Constitution is ignored and even ridiculed? What happens if the law is what the government says it is? What happens if, when the government does it, it's legal?

When George Bush was president he was compared to Hitler numerous times by the very same people who today strongly support the vastly greater imposition of lawless actions taken by Obama.
 

So where are we today:

Then enters the “cult of personality.” The American people have placed all of their trust and faith in the government, ultimately abandoning trust in God and their own moral judgment.

The true unemployment rate is hovering near fifteen percent and Americans are more dependent on government assistance than ever before. The White House, uninterested in reducing this dependence, seems focused instead on expanding it.

Laws like Obamacare are wrecking the economy and expanding the government’s power. All the while, Obama claims it will solve all our problems, and that all economic destruction is the result of gridlock caused by the Republican-led House. As the train is flying off the tracks, the President is retaining his underdog, savior image, campaigning as if he’s defending middle class America from the big, bad Republicans.

The only way for the American people to take control of their government is to rediscover the fundamental truths of the United States’ founding. We the people must once again place our faith in the sovereignty of God and the foundational truth described in our Declaration of Independence:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

This is a fight, not between Republican and Democrat, but between God and government.

Speaking truth to power.

Who do we trust? Who do we fear most?

Some things just depend on the situation. When I go shooting at a range or hunting in the field I have no fear of the guns in the hands of the people around me. If I were to meet a masked man with a gun on a street, I would be very worried. That’s one of the reasons the law says that violent criminals can’t legally carry guns even after they get out of jail.  They have demonstrated that they are not to be trusted with deadly weapons.

Which brings me to the telephone and Internet surveillance the Obama administration has been conducting. I want the government to protect the people of this country from attack. And let’s not kid ourselves about the source of the threat: it’s the violent followers of Islam.

To that end, I trusted George Bush when he asked for the passage of the Patriot Act because I knew that he was an honorable man. Heck, I trusted Bill Clinton with some things; just not women or money because I knew his history with both. Hell, you could even trust Richard Nixon because he was a patriot.  And you could even trust him around the IRS because the IRS in Nixon’s time refused to obey orders to go after his enemies.

But I don’t trust Obama with the powers of the surveillance state because he is a liar who has shown no consideration for the Constitution and the limits on the power of the government.  In fact he has openly stated that he believes the Constitution is fundamentally flawed.  In addition, the series of rapid-fire scandals that have surfaced after the election have demonstrated that he has subverted the executive branch agencies.  From the IRS to the FBI, the CIA, the EPA and the HHS and are no longer to be trusted to obey the Constitutional limits that safeguard our freedoms.  Even the Supreme Court has shown itself to bow to the pressure of Obama and his allies in the press.  We don't trust a government that has, like a violent criminal, demonstrated that the law is no impediment to the advancement of the Obama agenda.  

 

At this point it's a shame, but we may have to choose who we are more fearful of, the Jihadi or the US government. 

From American Digest:

Lawyer speak "€œNobody is listening to your calls"€. Correct! It is a building full of Cray computers listening to your calls, looking for key words and phrases and faithfully reporting to whomever programmed it.

I don't even care if anyone is reading or listening in. I know how it works, they have a system that flags specific words and phrases to be examined, then if it looks problematic, the entire call/email/whatever is analyzed. 99.99999% of the stuff goes through without even being noticed, and the stuff that is almost none of it gets to an analyst, I get it.

The problem is that they're doing it to begin with, and that problem is insanely increased by an executive branch which has so completely and repeatedly demonstrated they are willing to use their power to punish political enemies for no other reason than disagreeing with them.

I mean, its one thing to have government scanning emails for phrases like "kill the president," its another to have them looking for "small government" and "overtaxed."

 

Also Revealed by Verizon Leak: How the NSA and FBI Lie With Numbers

Here’s a seemingly comforting statistic: In all of 2012, the Obama administration went to the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court only 200 times to ask for Americans’ “business records” under the USA Patriot Act.

Every year, the Justice Department gives Congress a tally of the classified wiretap orders sought and issued in terrorist and spy cases – it was 1,789 last year. At the same time, it reports the number of demands for “business records” in such cases, issued under Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act. And while the number of such orders has generally grown over the years, it has always managed to stay relatively low. In 2011, it was 205. There were 96 orders in 2010, and only 21 in 2009.

Thanks to the Guardian’s scoop, we now know definitively just how misleading these numbers are. You see, while the feds are required to disclose the number of orders they apply for and receive (almost always the same number, by the way), they aren’t required to say how many people are targeted in each order. So a single order issued to Verizon Business Solutions in April covered metadata for every phone call made by every customer. That’s from one order out of what will probably be about 200 reported in next year’s numbers.

If Only Stalin Knew

People in thrall of a powerful leader are tempted to believe that all the bad things that happen to them are the fault of the leader’s underlings. For years after the Terror began in the Soviet Union, the people whose friends and relatives disappeared in the Gulag would say “if only Comrade Stalin knew …” From ''Children of the Arbat''. The year is 1934, the beginning of Stalin's terror, when even relatives of the victims could still believe that the unexplained disappearance of their loved ones was some kind of mistake that would soon be set right, if only they could get word to Stalin.

She would take out the newspapers and gaze at the pictures of Stalin, his simple clothes, the kind wrinkles round his eyes, the wise, calm face of a man with a clear conscience. He was 53. His oldest son was probably the same age as Sasha, and there was another son and a daughter. He knew what family grief was - he had only just lost his wife. If only Sasha's case got to him. She was pinning all her hopes on Mark, her brother. He was the head of a huge construction project in the east, a favorite of Ordzhonikidze's. The whole country knew who he was. Stalin knew him, received him and talked to him. Mark would tell Stalin about Sasha. Stalin would ask for the file, perhaps even call Sasha to him. And he'd like Sasha, he couldn't help liking Sasha.

As far back as 2009, Neo-Neocon had people like Peggy Noonan, who was still in thrall to Barack Obama then, pegged. 

But the more basic error Noonan makes is that she assumes that the recent program of character assassination of the health care protestors isn’t what President Obama wants. There’s no evidence whatsoever to back that up, and plenty of evidence from his own mouth that he is fully on board with the program.

But Noonan (and certain others) who fell for Obama hard during the campaign now find themselves suffering the pangs that disappointed lovers often feel, and a similar reluctance to face the truth that they were hoodwinked and used by a con artist.

Happens all the time, I’m afraid. It happened during the Stalin years, as several commenters on the Noonan thread have pointed out (see this, for example). The phenomenon then was called “if only Stalin knew,” and was predicated on the belief that the bad stuff was happening outside of Stalin’s awareness and orchestrated by his underlings, and that if only Good Old Joe knew about it he’d stop it.

It seems laughable now. But as I said, hope dies hard. Very hard indeed. And this is especially true of many of those who voted for and supported Obama in the hope that he’d be the uniting and reasonable centrist he promised.

What was going on with them then, and what is going on now? If I wanted to be crude, I’d say that their bullshit detectors were and are seriously out of whack. Or, if I wanted to be more kind, I’d call it the need to believe in the goodness of this particular smooth-talking politician. Oh, and the fact that’s black, and that voting for him was a chance to strike a blow against racism in this country once and for all, didn’t hurt either in creating a false belief system based on wishful thinking about Obama.
 

What's amazing is how prescient she was.  Read her today, four years later:

White House Counsel Ruemmler was just protecting the president, says the WaPo:

But they agreed that it would be best not to share it with President Obama until the independent audit was completed and made public, in part to protect him from even the appearance of trying to influence an investigation.

This account of how the White House tried to deal with the IRS inquiry — based on documents, public statements and interviews with multiple senior officials, including one directly involved in the discussions — shows how carefully Obama’s top aides were trying to shield him from any second-term scandal that might swamp his agenda or, worse, jeopardize his presidency.

Many of the commenters at the link seem to buy this entirely, which just goes to show you how gullible people can be when they want to believe—or how well they can follow the party line even if they’re not really all that gullible.

There are so many problems with this story it’s hard to know where to begin, but the first one is whether it’s believable at all; I don’t think so, but many people will believe it anyway. The second is whether the lawyer tasked with “advising [the president] on all legal aspects of policy questions…[and] ethical questions” would ever, or should ever, withhold such information, and why. Even the WaPo says that a goodly part of Ruemmler’s motivation would have been political, “to shield him from any second-term scandal that might swamp his agenda or, worse, jeopardize his presidency.”

My translation of those words is that Ruemmler wanted to afford Obama plausible deniability, and also to shield the American people from knowledge that might cause them to turn on the Democrats before the election. I actually don’t believe he was shielded, as I’ve said—I believe Obama was told, but there is no proof and never will be any proof, unless someone decides to spill the beans and has documentation to back it up. But even if he was shielded, a third issue would be: who created an atmosphere where the most important function of the administration was to protect the president from any knowledge that might harm him politically, rather than to help him actually govern knowledgeably and effectively? My answer would be: Obama himself.

Back to "if only Obama knew:" so far the only person dragged out of his bed at midnight to be thrown in jail is Mark Bassely Youssef, Obama's scapegoat for the Benghazi attack and who remains in jail.  But his loyal attack dogs are telling everyone that he knew nothing and as soon as he read about it in the newspapers he worked tirelessly to set it right.

The strange thing is that despite incredible advances in communication, the oldest, hoariest propaganda devices are still being deployed by those who want to protect those responsible for setting injustice in motion.

If the President isn't accountable, then we really have the tea party nightmare of the runaway administrative state accountable to no one.

The Wall Street Journal on The Unaccountable Executive.  At this point the people who are covering for the President, his staff and the media "watchdogs" who are in reality like watchdogs whose master is Obama rather than the public, are telling us that Obama not only didn't know about the scandals, but he should not have known. 

When CNN political correspondent Candy Crowley [remember her backing up Obama's false claim that he called Benghazi a terrorist attack the day after it happened?]  asked Mr. Pfieffer why the White House and top Treasury officials weren't notified, he explained that Treasury's investigation was ongoing and "Here's the cardinal rule: You do not interfere in an independent investigation."

Now there's a false choice. The Treasury Inspector General's report, for starters, was an audit, not an inviolable independent investigation. He lacked subpoena power and could bring no criminal charges. Having the President know of the IRS's mistakes so that he could act to correct the problem was not a bridge too far or even clouding the purity of the process. Those things could have been done simultaneously without compromising Treasury's investigation.

Rush Limbaugh seems to be ahead of the curve again when he says that the issue that should be debated is not what Obama knew or when he knew it.  This country has so much invested in the first Black president that he will not be removed from office before his term is over, under any circumstances.  He could give Alaska back to Russia and the Southwest back to Mexico and he will serve out his term.  Limbaugh says that the focus should be on what the federal government under the Liberals has become: corrupt, lawbreaking, and unaccountable.

If the scandal is showing anything, it is that the White House has a bizarre notion of accountability in the federal government. President Obama's former senior adviser, David Axelrod, told MSNBC recently that his guy was off the hook on the IRS scandal because "part of being President is there's so much beneath you that you can't know because the government is so vast."

In other words, the bigger the federal government grows, the less the President is responsible for it. Mr. Axelrod's remarkable admission, and the liberal media defenses of Mr. Obama's lack of responsibility, prove the tea party's point that an ever larger government has become all but impossible to govern. They also show once again that liberals are good at promising the blessings of government largesse but they leave its messes for others to clean up.

The fundamental law of the land, the Constitution makes the President responsible for the executive branch, and every department that is involved in these scandals: State, Treasury and Justice report to the President.  He is responsible whether he claims ignorance or not.  But let's assume that Obama is telling the truth that he not only didn't know but could not have known.  The lesson here is that if the executive branch of the American government is so far out of control that it is beyond the control of the President it needs to be pruned back; way back.

Pigford Forever

At the time of his premature death, the great provocateur Andrew Breitbart was more than a year into a grinding crusade to bring attention to a little-known class-action settlement called Pigford, which had begun with plausible accusations that the U.S. Department of Agriculture had discriminated against a small number of black farmers, but which had spiraled into a billion-dollar, open-ended government kickback machine for untold thousands that showed no signs of letting up. The Pigford case represented everything Breitbart raged against in the American political order — large-scale cronyism, corrosive and cynical identity politics, unrepentant hypocrisy, and the predictable indifference of the mainstream media. A handful of conservative outlets reported on the story at the time — including NR — and a handful of liberal outlets dedicated only as much ink to these stories as it took to dismiss them. But in Breitbart’s lifetime, Pigford never cracked into “the conversation”; it never came to be seen as emblematic of a deeper corruption endemic in Big Government.

Perhaps that will now change with the publication, by no less an arbiter of “the conversation” than the New York Times, of a deeply reported 5,000-word piece on Pigford and its descendants that, if anything, reveals the truth to be worse than was previously thought.

Due to the pliability of the Clinton Justice Department and the dogged efforts of a few highly incentivized trial lawyers, the original Pigford settlement made $50,000 payments available to any African American who could merely claim to have been discriminated against by the federally deputized administrators of USDA bridge loans (loans designed to get farmers from the planting season to the harvesting season). And “claim” might even be too strong a word; since administrative records for the loan program were poor, the courts set the bar laughably low. To establish oneself as a farmer for the purposes of Pigford, it would all but do to establish that you had once bought a seed and passed within a country mile of a USDA office. And to establish that you were discriminated against there, it would all but do to affirm on a form that you found that experience less than satisfactory — and to have your second cousin affirm that you told him as much at the time.

Unsurprisingly, this cash bonanza spawned a cottage industry of mountebanks and small-time frauds, including a few who toured the churches of the rural South recruiting “farmers” to stake their claims in lieu of reparations. And the number of claims exploded. Some claimants were as young as four years old; others had their forms filled out by lawyers just to “keep the line moving.” There were many reports of duplicative, even identical forms written in the same hand. In some towns, the number of claimants exceeded the number of farms there operated — by individuals of any race. The Times quotes several USDA employees whose job was to process — and ultimately rubber-stamp — these claims. “You couldn’t have designed it worse if you had tried,” one says of the process. “You knew it was wrong,” says another, “but what could you do? Who is going to listen to you?” “Basically, it was a rip-off of the American taxpayers,” says a third.

But as the Times reports in great depth, instead of closing the spigot, in 2010 the Obama administration did not just acquiesce to, it spearheaded the expansion of, the Pigford con on the taxpayer’s dime, and saw to it that not just black Americans, but any woman, Hispanic, or Native American who could so much as gesture at discrimination had access to a billion-dollar pool of easy money.

It did this over the objections of career lawyers in the Justice Department. It did this by dubiously tapping a Justice Department fund reserved for court-ordered, not politically dispensed, payouts. And it did this, in most cases, under evidentiary standards even looser than the ones governing the original settlement.

The administration claims that it was worth settling the Hispanic and Native American cases to avoid the potential of adverse court rulings. But the Times quotes parties familiar with the litigation who say that the government would have easily prevailed had the trials run their course, rendering the administration’s decision inexplicable. In the suits brought by women and Hispanics, courts found the potential pool of legitimate claimants to number 91 in total, a “class” so small that the government could have dealt with them one at a time. The Native American settlement allocated $760 million, of which only $300 million could be awarded to claimants deemed legitimate. The rest will be distributed to Native American “nonprofits” that may or may not exist, and to trial lawyers, who admitted to the Times they were pleasantly surprised by the size of their cut, but “absent a court order” had no intention of returning any of it.

None of this sorry, shameful, and outrageous mess approaches the realm of “justice.” Pigford and its spawn instead resembles in organization and aim a criminal conspiracy of breathtaking proportions, and one in which the federal government was first complicit and then ultimately responsible. The Times report exposes — as Dan Foster did in his piece for us two years ago — Senator, Candidate, and President Obama’s advocacy for the settlements as barely alloyed quid pro quo, in which Pigford profiteers promised to help Obama run up the score against Hillary Clinton in the rural South in exchange for his work on their behalf. Similarly, the Hispanic case was negligently settled at the urging of the polluted Senator Robert Menendez, who threatened to make noise if the Department of Justice did not give Hispanics the same deal the president gave blacks.

At a minimum, a congressional investigation is needed, as is congressional intervention in the continued administration of the payouts. Representative Steve King (R., Iowa) has long called for such measures, and it is time his calls are heeded. It is shame, to the tune of billions in taxpayers’ dollars, that it has taken this long for the mainstream media and its readers to catch up to the reality of Pigford. But now that they have, perhaps they can be shamed into helping put an end to it.

OK so we know that the Obama administration is corrupt on a scale that the Clinton administration may only marvel at. But what now? The money has been given away, millionaire lawyers have become richer yet. There is absolutely zero chance that the man who arranged a pardon for Marc Rich, Eric Holder, and his boss Barack Obama will do anything about this multibillion dollar fraud. Until recently, Americans thought that this only happened in Mexico or the corrupt banana republics in South America. Today it's happening right here, an in-your-face example of political corruption. And that's not even discussing the multi billion dollar frauds like Solyndra and Fisker.

This kind of thing sets a precedent for other office holders unless someone is made to pay. Publicly. And sent to jail.

The Shrinking Jim Webb

What do you call a person who complains about a situation he helped perpetuate? I’m trying to come up with a label to apply to Jim Webb, former Senator, and occasional jerk. I recall the time he made a big show about lecturing George Bush about the Iraq war. Another time when he let one of his aides take the fall for carrying a gun in Washington DC. Unlike Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, Jim Webb was never reluctant to show his wounds and rode his military decorations to public prominence and public office. There is rarely a time when he does not take the opportunity to refer to his military past. However, once home, he appears to have left his political courage on the battlefield, preferring to attack people who were in no position to fight back.

 

Now safely retired he has decided to blame an amorphous “Congress” for giving up its constitutional power to the President. Here’s his essay from the National Interest and a column by George Will.

 

However, unlike Rand Paul, Jim Webb never faced down the Senate or even members of his own party while he was there. Instead, he engaged in navel gazing and dealt with minutia while he held the position that he could have used to make a difference. Webb, the “military hero” was a faithful member of the Democrat troop that surrendered its constitutional powers to the President without as much as a whimper. Say what you will about Rand Paul, an ophthalmologist with no military medals, he has demonstrated that he is willing to stand on principle and is not interested in being a cog in a political machine. Less than a year after leaving office, it’s hard to recall what impact Webb had while in office; what legislation he sponsored or what causes he espoused. Meanwhile Paul, a freshman senator like Webb, has already made a name for himself and forced the Executive branch to acknowledge that there is, somewhere, a limit to its power.
  
Jim Webb was once decorated for a military action in which he played a major role. After that he appears to have found it much, much safer to snipe from the sidelines. It’s much safer to write an article for the National Interest than to do actual battle in the Senate.