A Dependency Train Wreck

With four Americans including a US ambassador killed by a motley band of terrorists, our consulate burned down, a highly decorated general and CIA Director dissembling before Congress, a Secretary of Defense, a UN Ambassador and a President publicly contradicting themselves, we are witnessing malfeasance on a spectacular scale.

Ask yourself this:

If we can’t find out who in this government ordered our special ops forces to “stand down,” how on earth can we expect it to know where the next WMD attack is coming from?

Were this debacle to occur during a Republican administration, it would certainly be the beginnings of a disgraced presidency.

In the intervening weeks between the election of Barack Obama in November of 2008 and his inauguration in January 2009, I remember telling my wife on numerous occasions that I predicted that his presidency would be a “train wreck.” In December of ’08 my dire predictions of this administration were somehow miraculously published in the San Francisco Chronicle under the headline, The New New Deal Will be a Disaster. In the run up to his inauguration, I even went so far as to predict to acquaintances, some of whom were no doubt aghast, that not only would Obama fail to be reelected in 2012 but that he wouldn’t even be the candidate.

In many respects, I feel as though I had it almost right. While it took our government two centuries to amass its first trillion in debt, under Obama, we’ve been adding another trillion in debt to our children’s accounts every nine months. We are now arguably the most bankrupt people ever. If you add all debt, federal to local, and our unfunded liabilities, every man, women and child owes this government $200,000 which, as Mark Steyn points out, is more than the average hapless Greek owes.

But obviously, I was utterly wrong in predicting that Obama would be a one-term president.

I did not dream that his success at creating dependency, that is, in augmenting the numbers of Americans dependent on their government, would be so great as to profoundly change the electoral calculus of a presidential election. Most of us have become aware that now 1 in 7 Americans live in poverty. Over the past four years those receiving food stamps has risen from 32 to 47 million. Medicaid, free healthcare for the poor, has grown 46.9 million to 56 million. Add to these 94 million recipients those who receive benefits from smaller programs such as disability and you can conclude that roughly half the country participates in entitlement programs. The trend is catastrophic. Perhaps we can derive some small solace in the realization that, with all this new dependency, Obama won by 3 million votes or only three percent.

In making this recession even worse through massive new regulations built into Obamacare, Dodd Frank, and enactments by massive numbers of unelected bureaucrats at the EPA, the IRS, and the Interior department, his out of control government has created a hiring drought, driving unemployment to near depression levels. This recovery is the weakest since the great depression. The level of unemployment has grown substantially since Obama took office. Every entitlement program has also grown substantially. While all of this malfeasance might have meant political demise for an incumbent president in our past, in 2012, it worked in Obama’s favor. He proved that greater dependency is a winning formula. A left-wing presidential candidate who has several hundred million in campaign money can demagogue his opponent, convincing the dependent that his opponent is callous, uncaring and out-of-touch, all of which is code for saying: ‘Vote for me, and I will take from the rich and pay you.”

America’s Post Constitutionalist Ruling Class

In 2010, Angelo Codevilla, Professor Emeritus of Boston University, wrote a piece, America’s Ruling Class, which gained much national notoriety. He maintained that America was in the grip of a new “ruling class” where the differences between the Bushes, Clintons, and Obamas are “of degree, not kind.”

I don’t agree.

While it is true that President Bush and candidates Obama and McCain uniformly agreed upon the eventual commitment of trillions of nonexistent dollars in ways unprecedented in American history, only the ruling class of the Left operates outside the rule of law. The Left makes up our post-constitutionalist ruling class. If you doubt this, watch what happens with the Benghazi cover-up.

As usual, in this affair, they will smear and attack those who accuse them of malfeasance, invoke executive privilege, gain exoneration in the mainstream press, succeed in cowing the Right, and escape any and all prosecution. Unlike Obama, only a Republican president who was caught giving the order to stand down when an American consulate was under attack and then attempted to cover that up would be subjugated to a Watergate-like investigation.

The Ruling Class of the Left is now above the law.