Let’s not hear this insipid and misleading talk from Washington Republicans anymore: “Barack Obama is incompetent and naïve.” That better describes them. 

Barack Obama is a committed leftist working through his agenda to “transform” America. Washington Republicans do injury to the cause of liberty with timid language. That the president and the left bungle or misstep at times detracts little from their successes. In terms of advancing leftist aims, the Obama presidency is historic.  

Remaking America didn’t start with Obama. It won’t stop without him, either, unless the left is stopped, period. Split differences with this foe? How so when the left works to erode liberty and pursues policies damaging to national security? We’ve entered days of the starkest differences between the left and us -- days that demand from us hard-eyed appraisals and resolute action. 

The left has been marching through America for decades, destroying traditional America as it goes. Ransacking our institutions. Torching our values and virtues. Shredding constitutional rights and undercutting the rule of law. If it’s possible to ransack, torch, shred, and undercut by enfolding actions in the language and symbols of traditional America, and the language of “compassion,” the vintage left did so. The telling contrast is that today’s left is dropping the cloak. It still pays lip service to compassion (toss in fairness and equality). But the modern left’s approach contains stridency, brazenness – open brutality… more of the naked iron fist. 

Brutality – in service of a cause. Brutality – in the pursuit of power. Leftism and statism go hand-in-hand. Statism and truncheons go… hand-in-hand. Obama isn’t shy about forcing his will on the nation. Ditto the left. Obama imposes his will through executive action. He unfetters federal bureaucracies and agencies. He’s doing so through foreign policy. He did so with help from the last Democratic Congress, which legislated a landmark health care law against majority will. He roughs up Republican Congresses.   

Let’s start with Obama’s dealings with Iran over its nuclear weapons development program. In a trenchant column, Wesley Pruden, the Washington Times’ emeritus editor, stated:

Describing Mr. Obama as an appeaser, in the tradition of Neville Chamberlain caving at a similar nexus of history in 1938, misses the point. Mr. Obama may not be appeasing at all, but enabling. Everything about Barack Obama suggests that he believes America must be cut down to size, that it’s the arrogance of thinking America is something special, the exceptional nation, that is the source of intractable trouble in the world. Once America is brought to heel, men of wisdom, brilliance, kindness, intelligence and good will -- rare men just like himself -- can make the rough places smooth and forge a lasting peace. [Emphasis added]          

If Pruden is correct, the president, along with the rest of the left, wants an enemy to develop nuclear weapons in order to diminish the U.S. Iran is developing ICBMs, too. The implications are stunning. Any deal Obama strikes with Iran will only be about forestalling nuclear weapons attainment.   

The consequences of Obama humbling his own nation: a nuclear armed Iran sparks a Middle Eastern nuclear arms race. (Sunni Saudi Arabia won’t tolerate Shia Iran menacing it.) Iran, with delivery capability, can strike targets in the U.S. Thirty-six years of hatred toward America, and calling for America’s death, by Iran can’t be shrugged off. 

Obama’s Iranian gambit is a type of brutality. It’s violence against U.S. national interests. Doing so imperils Americans.          

Now let’s jump back to ObamaCare. Liz Peek wrote for Foxnews.com in 2013:

Are you afraid of the Obama White House? If you challenge the president’s beloved health care plan, maybe you should be. Consider the fate of William White, the Washington, D.C. Insurance Commissioner, who voiced skepticism about President Obama’s hastily assembled “fix” for the millions losing their insurance policies.

A day after suggesting that the new demands on insurers could destabilize the marketplace and lead to even higher premiums, White was canned.

Telling the truth about ObamaCare is risky.       

We see bullied government officials. Bullied health insurers and providers. Even a stage-four cancer patient, Edie Sunby, who had the nerve to recount in an op-ed that the ACA cost her insurance coverage, was bullied by the White House. Sunby was one of millions of Americans forced out of insurance policies.

There’s the Ferguson, Missouri, racial strife. About that, the executive director of the Fraternal Order of Police, Jim Pasco, had this to say last August:

"I think what he has to do as president and as a constitutional lawyer is remember that there is a process in the United States and the process is being followed, for good or for ill, by the police and by the county and by the city and by the prosecutors’ office […]"

Pasco should know that constitutional processes matter less to Obama and the left than results. The Constitution was declared “living” during the New Deal. It lives as left-wing judges want it to. Increasingly, it lives as the president wants it to.   

Peter Kinder, Missouri’s lieutenant governor, criticized the Obama administration for “[inciting] a mob” in Ferguson recently:

“It’s bad enough the [Ferguson] protesters were behaving that way, but we have a right to expect much more from the attorney general, the head of the Justice Department of the United States, and the president of the United States. And instead, what we got too often from them was incitement of the mob, and, uh, encouraging disorder in Ferguson and disrupting the peaceable going-about of our daily lives in the greater St. Louis region.” [Emphasis added]

Welcome to the new world of leftist brutality, Lieutenant Governor, where cause trumps law and order; where nothing is abstract about the violence that a leftist president and his attorney general are glad to fuel or provoke.      

We can go on, discussing the harm done through the president’s lax borders and amnesty efforts. There’s violence along the nation’s southern border and higher crime in U.S. cities thanks to illegals. Violence being done to the nation’s fabric; injury to the rule of law. All to achieve a political end: to expand and nourish (at taxpayer expense) constituencies for the Democratic Party.

Lastly, Memories Pizza in Walkerton, Indiana. The pizzeria’s owners were threatened and intimidated by leftist and homosexual jackboots and fellow travelers. Threatened because they answered a reporter’s question consistent with their religious beliefs. Where was Obama’s and Holder’s outrage at the violence done to small business owners exercising their rights to conscience and religious freedom?

About Indiana, Memories Pizza, and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, Clarice Feldman wrote for American Thinker:

They [public accommodation laws] need to be pared back if we are to continue as a free people with the right to free speech, free association, and the freedom to practice our religion. If we don’t, we open the doors to totalitarians that decide what we can do and mobs like the Chinese Red Guards enforcing this week’s cultural fashion.

That’s the point, isn’t it? The left doesn’t really want a free people. It wants power -- power to radically change America. Laws that enable the left to do so are exploited. Laws that don’t are ignored and actions taken to secure the desired end… nowadays, with brutality… more and more.