PrintAugust 25, 2009
The Tin Ears of the Bully-in-Chief and his Comrades in Arms
Two years ago, my 9 year old son was pushed against a wall in the boys' bathroom and told that he better not try out for the football team if he knew "what was good for him." Not surprisingly, my son came home distraught and unsure as to what to do. I told him that the way to beat a bully is to stand up for "what you know is good for you" and not allow intimidation to cause you to make decisions that will forever haunt you and change your path in life. Football was not the issue. Controlling his own destiny and freedom to choose whether he would ultimately play football was the lesson of the day.
Now, just a few years later, Americans are faced with a similar dilemma. Succumb to the bullying tactics of the leaders in Washington or stand up for what they know is good for them. Americans need to make it very clear to the Democrats running this country that Obama's rise to become the leader of the free world was not the equivalent of a mandate to retract individual choice on personal matters such as what car to drive, food to eat, or healthcare to purchase.
The litany of offensive measures pouring out of the Obama administration is so lengthy that it is difficult to know where to begin. Notwithstanding the clear warning signs throughout the campaign that candidate Obama was not a centrist, I still find myself hearing about the latest decisions and statements made by Obama shaking my head in amazement at his arrogance. One would expect that the plummeting approval ratings of both Obama and Congress would alert someone running the show in Washington that Americans are not supportive of the direction in which the Democrats are taking the country. Yet it is apparent that the dictators in D.C are hell bent on changing the country, Americans be damned.
One cannot read the latest news without getting the sense that our leaders are bullying the citizens of this country into submission. I was always under the impression that our elected leaders' mandate was to uphold the Constitution and move the country slowly forward on a sustainable path through policy decisions representative of the will of the people. However, at record breaking speed, we are watching our elected leaders gut the Constitution and implement potentially irreversible and damaging legislation that the majority of Americans do not favor.
The latest intimidation tactic came from Democratic bully, Henry Waxman, Chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Seemingly in response to the private insurers' lack of support for Obamacare, Mr. Waxman, without the knowledge of his Republican counterparts, sent 52 letters to health insurance companies requesting financial records in connection with an investigation into their business practices. As stated in a Fox News report:
"Raising the intimidation stakes: the Waxman letter offers insurers no explanation of what is being investigated or why.Industry insiders fear the beginning of reprisals for anyone daring to dissent from the Obama agenda."
One need not read Alinsky's Rules for Radicals to understand how easy it is to pick a scapegoat and go on the offensive. But in just seven short months, we have seen too many targets and Americans are simply getting sick of the assaults, confrontations, and negativity - especially now that they have become one of those targets. We have seen vitriol launched by the Democrats against George W. Bush, Rush Limbaugh, Joe the Plumber, Sarah Palin, FoxNews and Sean Hannity, corporate executives, health insurers, various strawmen, and now the American people. We have been accused of being mobsters, racists, partisan, stupid, un-American, and mean.
Watching the attack machine evolve and grow to these extremes despite the falling approval ratings is fascinating. Recent polling indicates that the Democrats may lose huge numbers of seats in the 2010 election and yet they do not seem to care. They are so caught up in their bullying that America's voices are falling upon deaf ears. As John Bolton wrote in a Wall Street Journal editorial regarding the selection of Mary Robinson as a recipient of the Medal of Freedom:
"Ms. Robinson's award shows Mr. Obama's detachment from longstanding, mainstream, American public opinion on foreign policy. The administration's tin ear to the furor over Ms. Robinson underlines how deep that detachment really is."
And Dorothy Rabinowitz wrote a terrific piece in the Wall Street Journal in which she noted:
"The president has a problem. For, despite a great election victory, Mr. Obama, it becomes ever clearer, knows little about Americans...He is a stranger to the country's heart and character.He seems unable to grasp what runs counter to its nature. That Americans don't take well, for instance, to bullying, especially of the moralizing kind, implicit in those speeches on health care for everybody. Neither do they wish to be taken where they don't know they want to go and being told it's good for them.Who would have believed that this politician celebrated, above all, for his eloquence and capacity to connect with voters would end up as president proving so profoundly tone deaf? A great many people is the answer-the same who listened to those speeches of his during the campaign, searching for their meaning."
After Obama won the election, a liberal neighbor said to me, "I just hope you all support this presidency and don't cause partisan politics to interfere with its agenda." That was before the big tough bully in the Oval Office told the world, "I won" and started finding scapegoats to blame for all his woes. That was before the name calling, the threats, and the fascist tactics now being implemented in order to force an agenda on a citizenry that values its freedoms.
Americans will beat these bullies and will ensure that what is good for the country - free markets and capitalism, small government, and civil liberties - will survive notwithstanding the tin ears of the Democrats in DC.
