From the first days of his Presidency Obama has created legions of straw men in service of his agenda, demonizing opponents real and imagined in the process.

But imaginary straw men in the Obama era become real enemies of a "rogue government," as Victor Davis Hanson describes at PJ Media. 

Law-abiding gun-owners are an easy target in this climate:

...the stereotyped camouflaged, weekend gun enthusiast is not the problem that leads to Columbine, or the nearly 532 murders last year in Chicago. But because we can't or won't address the causes of the latter, we go after the former...

While the tea party is compared with radical Islam:

One wonders how Lois Lerner's IRS division would treat a hypothetical "Sarah Palin Foundation" versus "The Dr. Zawahiri Charity."

And of the minority who pay the majority of taxes, Hanson observes:

These are the would-be proverbial "fat cats" who did not build their own businesses. They are reluctant to spread their wealth. They certainly did not know either when to stop making money or when the age of profit altogether had passed.

Somewhere along the line, Obama's inflammatory rhetoric has become grim reality - consider a Reason.com headline explaining a recent Gallup poll:

Gallup: 54% of Americans Think Govt is Too Powerful; Rest Too Scared to Answer

Hanson sees "a climate of fear growing throughout the United States," asking why "millions of Americans are terrified" of the IRS and the alphabet soup of federal enforcement, complete with hollow-point ammunition:

These government agencies have never been bigger, more powerful, and more ideologically driven. Citizens fear them for understandable reasons: those who do nothing wrong, whether in filing tax forms or trying to buy a rifle, are considered suspect and deserving to be the target of either federal scrutiny or presidential slurs.  

At the same time, as Hanson observes, ATF gun traffickers, NSA eavesdroppers and IRS obfuscators "seem exempt from punishment - and, more chillingly, sense that they are so exempt."

Hanson concludes his tour of the upside-down world of Obama's friends and enemies with the observation that Obama's "most pernicious" legacy "will be the creation of a rogue government that has cut off and terrified half the population - and for no other reason than that they seem to represent things that Mr. Obama simply does not seem to understand."

Or want to understand.