PrintApril 10, 2010
The Great Political War Obama Never Expected
Man proposes and God disposes. A big part of the trouble for Barack Obama and all those crackerjack leftwing strategists and the brigades of Alinsky thugketeers is that they've never gotten the hang of the second part of that old axiom. For the left, God disposes of nothing, because God is, well, nothing more than an opiate. The rest of us who believe in God know otherwise. History is strewn with fine examples of man's grand designs coming athwart something -- anything -- that makes those designs not worth the paper they're drawn on. By chance, does anyone know what happened to the British North American Empire?
So it is today in the United States of America. We have a president and a party (infested with a cabal of heathen leftists) whose grand design is to bloat the state and, hence, their own power. But the left's smart plans have come athwart something, that something being the freedom-loving intransigence of God-fearing conservatives and many other Americans (God-fearing as well). What Barack Obama and the left have gotten is what they never expected: a political war -- perhaps one on an epic scale that will bring down the House of FDR.
Providence is no friend of hubris, and there is much foul hubris in the left's maximum leader, Barack Obama, and perhaps as much in his minions. Whether the Tower of Obama meets the same fate as the Tower of Babel depends on the outcome of the political war underway. Expect the war to be protracted and a close-run thing, for when push comes to shove, Mr. Obama and the left are choosing to govern in semi-caudillo fashion -- that is, contrary to the will of the people. Utopia is being foisted on Americans for their own good.
The cocky President Obama; his chief henchman, the bullying locker-room nudist, Rahm Emanuel; and his Rasputin, a Chicago political machine consigliere named Axelrod, all misinterpreted and overestimated the results of the Democrats' ascendancy in 2006 and 2008. They were buoyed by the analyses of shifts in the electorate penned by liberal pundits. America, the left believed, was ripe for a sharp turn left.
But almost from the get-go, Americans wanted no decisive swing leftward. Opposition to Mr. Obama's big-government hash was nearly instantaneous. Conservatives were in the vanguard of fighting the revolutionary -- perhaps more accurately, reactionary -- march of the left toward heretofore unheard-of liberty-depriving dominance.
So a political war came. Early on in the war, Mr. Obama expected something on the order of Sherman's famous (or infamous, depending on what side of the Mason-Dixon Line you live) March to the Sea. Statism would go boldly across the rich, wide land, taking and ravaging health care, business and industry, and anything else that got in the way of creating a People's Republic. Mr. Obama's band of leftwing bummers vowed to strong-arm the rich into surrendering even more of their money to support benevolent government, and they brazenly lied to the middle and working classes that the citizens thereof needn't worry about the pilfering of their wallets.
Wary middle Americans weren't buying into the propaganda that Barack's band had no intention of someday, someway, picking their bones clean, too. Americans, long accustomed to the wild and woolly ways of free markets, know something about assurances and offers: They usually come with hitches. Buried deep in Mr. Obama's fatigues is a list with every taxpayer's name on it. Those many thousands of IRS agents Mr. Obama plans to add to the government payroll will be there for one reason and one reason only: to better plunder the modest earnings of the country's un-rich.
Yet as the vagaries of war would have it, Mr. Obama finds himself not triumphantly marching to the sea. Instead, he's at the political equivalent of Cold Harbor -- a major Civil War battle -- having to slug it out with a determined foe. The president gained ground on health care only after tremendous losses. The façade of the unifier and centrist that Mr. Obama and his flaks threw up in the 2008 election is in tatters. A majority of voters no longer hope for the change that Obama the leftist ideologue has unveiled.
Cold Harbor was striking in that it presaged the trench warfare that would curse Europe in the first world war. And there's where both opposing forces in the war for America's future are now: fighting across trenches, locked in something of a stalemate. Liberty's soldiers have dug in deeply; they have greatly retarded the statists' advances and are making the statists pay dearly with precious political capital for each bit of sod gotten legislatively. In this war, at this moment, attrition doesn't favor the statist aggressor; it favors the freedom-loving defenders. The clock is Mr. Obama's enemy, too. The greater the president's delay, the greater the chances of sending him packing.
But ultimately, this war will not be won in the trenches. Victory depends on a breakout. The strategy is for freedom-lovers to hold the line until November. Then sober-minded voters, moving en masse to the polls, will elect a conservative majority via the Republican Party to the U.S. House or Senate, or both. Congressional majorities will then commence a new phase of the war, a war of maneuver aimed at outflanking Mr. Obama and the left.
If triumphant -- if voters depose Madame Pelosi, the droll Harry Reid, and their forces -- Republicans, with new conservative backbone and muscle, can begin Operation Starve, Replace, and Repeal. Starve Mr. Obama's wretched government health care scheme of funding. Repeal it when a Republican president assumes office in 2013. And replace the Obama monstrosity with market-oriented, consumer-empowering reforms shortly thereafter. And do the same with any other legislation that the pale reds pushed through in their brief but disruptive tenure.
"If" is a mighty big word in human events. Battlefield commanders know that war plans are good up until the first shot. Then it's up to the smarts, the wiles, the adaptability, and the will of their forces to carry the fight in the face of the unexpected. Political wars and battles, just like the real things, have their ebbs and flows, their good days and bad. Nothing is a given. The expectation is that all must be earned. Serendipity and the folly of one's opponents can't be counted on.
Liberty-loving Americans need to keep the fight up not just to November, but well past it. Victory comes to those who weather adversities and persevere. American patriots propose not just to secure recently imperiled liberties, but to eventually restore the liberties lost to the statists over the last eight decades. Let us pray that God disposes well of the patriots' intentions.
