As I tried to suppress my anger over the news this week about the unfolding corruption within the Obama administration, I took a look back to see if our Founding Fathers had anticipated this.
It didn’t take me long to find a quote from Thomas Jefferson, who wrote: “Experience has shown that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.”
This is precisely what we are facing today with the Obama administration perverting its power to create a Culture of Corruption. The executive branch has become the defacto center of power, with the Constitution’s advocacy for checks and balances with the other two branches nowhere to be seen.
In his 2012 State of the Union Address, President Obama stated: “The executive branch also needs to change. Too often, it’s inefficient, outdated and remote. That’s why I’ve asked this Congress to grant me the authority to consolidate the federal bureaucracy so that our government is leaner, quicker and more responsive to the needs of the American people.”
Well it’s leaner and quicker, but only on issues favored by the Obama administration and its army of cronies, who receive favors in exchange for contributions. Cronyism, at its core, is a job killer. Companies receive favors in the form of loans and grants, knowing that some of this money will flow back to the Democrats while the Administration makes a feeble attempt to pick this nation’s winners and losers.
If you want examples, just look at Solyndra, Fisker Motors and the Chevy Volt. All received federal money. All fell into financial hardship. And all fired most of their employees from jobs that these grants or loans were supposed to create — a slap in the face of every tax-paying American.
And what happens when the things you believe in clash with those of the president and his party? We found out when we learned that the IRS had a separate process for reviewing applications for tax-exempt status submitted by groups with “Tea Party”, “Patriot”, “Limited Government” and related terms in their names. In some cases it also sent intrusive and inappropriate questionnaires to those groups.
How is this not corruption?
Obama spokesman Dan Pfeiffer didn’t think so during TV interviews during which he said the White House did not know about the IRS targeting of conservative groups until it was recently alerted about an ongoing Inspector General investigation.
Is this supposed to appease the American people? The defense is plausible denial? So if the White House didn’t know about it, then it was OK? The bigger question is: Why didn’t the White House know about it?
So how did the White House respond? By employing their tested method of throwing their staff members under the bus to save face and deflect blame away from the president — the president asked acting IRS Commissioner Steven Miller to resign.
Remember last year, to save face for Hillary Clinton over Benghazi, three State Department employees were fired? There’s a pattern here. It’s cancer, and Obama’s people have to keep cutting pieces away so it doesn’t spread farther up the administration.
What is troubling is that Obama, touted as a constitutional attorney, has turned his back on the Constitution and subverted it for his own use. In fact, in 2001, when he was a state senator in Illinois, Obama described the U.S. Constitution in an NPR interview as having “deep flaws,” adding that the country’s Founding Fathers had “an enormous blind spot” when they wrote it. He also remarked that the Constitution “reflected the fundamental flaw of this country that continues to this day.”
It’s almost as if he has embraced the flaws and set out to fix it with his own version, interpreting it as a sanction to give him the type of executive power that our Founding Fathers tried so hard to prevent.
In a book by the late historian John A. Andrew III “Power to Destroy: The Political Uses of the IRS from Kennedy to Nixon,” he described a number of abuses during the 1960s and 1970s, including the fact that President Kennedy’s administration authorized an “Ideological Organizations Project” that targeted conservative organizations, such as the John Birch Society, with Kennedy’s apparent knowledge. During his years as president, Lyndon Johnson is accused of promising tax favors in exchange for votes.
If these are Obama’s role models, we’re in big trouble. And is the Obama administration’s surveillance of The Associate Press any different than Nixon’s enemies list? This is a corruption of the first amendment.
From corrupt individuals being given positions of power to loans and grants given to unqualified company officials without due diligence, to profiling and punishing anyone not in lock-step with his administration to spying on media, and to ignoring the will of the people when it comes to health insurance, we are indeed in a culture of corruption. We must find our way out before it drags down our proud heritage.
I’ll let Thomas Jefferson have the last word: “Our country is now taking so steady a course as to show by what road it will pass to destruction, to wit: by consolidation of power first, and then corruption, its necessary consequence.”
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