The Turning of President Obama

I will admit right up front that President Obama would never likely be my first choice for President or any other elected office. On the other hand, the candidates put up against him by the Republican Party did not offer much of an alternative leaving no real different choice in the past two elections. When President Obama won election and took the oath of office for his first term I hoped that he would at least minimally fulfill some of my hopes and not necessarily make some of the changes I most feared. I have attempted to satisfy myself by believing it could have been far worse. The passage of Obama’s healthcare reforms has instilled in me a trepidation which goes very deep. The biggest trouble I perceived was the fact that the main enforcement agency for the Affordable Health Care Act is the Internal Revenue Service. This little fact makes it appear that the healthcare bill will be more aligned as a revenue enhancement system which by default supplies healthcare while its primary mission is to collect funds. The evidence implies that the government will take whatever measures possible to minimize the costs of healthcare even if the cost saving measures result in denial of care as the general rule for any costly measures such as surgeries, experimental procedures, highly priced new drugs, extended physical therapies, and other costly procedures. But at least we did not see such items in legislation such as a carbon tax and some of the socialist causes which are counter to a free market economy that candidate Obama claimed he would enact.

 

I do not pretend to understand why it almost always seems to be that Presidents become entangled in conspiracies or other legally questionable events soon after beginning their second term. Such has definitely struck President Obama with the first scandal began during the final leg of the campaign and election cycle in which President Obama still managed to be reelected. The scandal concerned the events around the murder by a terrorist attack of our Libyan Ambassador Scott Stevens and three support personnel in Benghazi. As if this was not causing sufficient problems for the Obama Administration officials, now there are another pair of predicaments that have struck the Administration with the IRS conducting politically motivated audits and special treatment of applicants for tax-free classifications and the Justice Department snooping into Associated Press phone records and tapping their reporter’s phones in order to uncover the identities of any whistleblowers. Each of these tribulations would be sufficient to trouble a President sufficiently to add a dozen years to his appearance and President Obama has definitely begun to show the signs of stress of a man under siege. He even joked about such affects during 2013 White House Correspondents’ Dinner when he said, “I’m not the strapping young Muslim socialist that I used to be.”

 

While Benghazi is about more than just President Obama, he is still the leader and must be held to answer for the actions or lack of actions for those within his Administration. From what has transpired resulting from the catastrophic events of that fateful day of September 11, 2012, President Obama has appeared to have dodged much of the blame until these other two items hit the news cycle. The entire Benghazi troubles had appeared to begin to wind down and might have passed into the darkness of history after very short hearings held last week but for some reason it appears to be resurrecting itself back into the mix. The apparent tie in has been the lack of personal involvement by the President in these disparate scandals which gives the appearance that either President Obama is not truly in control of his subordinates or is simply uninterested in performing the requirements of his position and has relegated the running of the country to others while he simply reads his teleprompter and otherwise enjoys the privileges of the office. Such suspicions make for a serious problem for the President as if he now takes complete and total ownership of these issues he will face possibly serious charges and if he allows his actions to be interpreted as his being disengaged and uninvolved he risks being seen to be complacent and diminished. The other possible difficulty which could come out of the disaster in Benghazi is what might follow if Benghazi ends up being tied to Syria and the movement of weapons and manpower from Libya into Syria as some of the rebels in Syria are aligned with the same organizations as rebels forces which fought in Libya, namely al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood. Such assistance to some of the rebel forces in Syria would also serve the desired results sought by Turkey and Prime Minister Erdogan, a close Obama friend and ally.

 

The common element connecting the Internal Revenue Service scandal with the Associated Press phone tapping and records outrage is the evidence of an Administration out of control taking vindictive retribution against all opponents and utilizing every possible office and force that government can bring to bear. This is exactly the manner of overreach and abuse of political and governmental power which most angers a plurality if not an outright majority of American voters. In addition there are all the untruths, obfuscations, invasions of privacy, exchanging sensitive information, illegal use of confidential information, and any denials or cover-ups that will be the eventual downfall if anything develops and has lasting effects. The obvious targeting and investigating of conservative political groups, small government organizations, anti-tax political action groups and Pro-Israel Jewish groups on the grounds of potential support for terrorism because terror groups exist all around Israel are blatant politically motivated witch-hunts which go way beyond the cusp and into the valley of underhanded deceits and dirty tricks. President Nixon was charged with similar activities leading to his impeachment hearings, especially those currently being committed by the Internal Revenue Service at the presumed behest of the Obama Administration. If nothing else, all of these potential investigations which some may even birth other areas to investigate will have one extremely positive result, Congress will have something to fill their days and thus might just be sufficient to keep them from inventing more problems for which they will then proceed to solve by causing even more problems.

 

The particular items which are most likely to have the strongest legs and persist both in the congress and the media will be the phone scandal of the Justice Department snooping through the Associated Press phone records to discover the names of whistle-blowers and the excess of requirements and information gathering demanded by the Internal Revenue Service of any groups deemed problematic by the Obama Administration. I would be remiss if I did not admit that the entire debacle of Benghazi being relegated to trail off like echoes bouncing off the canyon walls until they fade beneath the winds is not an insult to the senses and patriotism of every red-blooded American as well as to the dignity and efforts put forth by our Ambassador and those who gave all in an attempt to protect him and defend the honor of the United States. There are a number of questions which I very much desire to have answered. I would like to know whether any of the Commanders of the various assets available even considered breaking orders and coming to the aid of our people under siege in Benghazi. I would have hoped that we had one Commander somewhere in theater who would act as did the Naval Commander of the Navy destroyer USS Bainbridge, Cmdr. Frank Castellano, who took action on Sunday April 12, 2009, when he determined the situation was dire and waiting for the requested clearance from the White House might come too late to save the hostages from Somali Pirates and took actions necessary and successfully rescued everyone. Beyond this I so dearly demand that the person who was responsible for the stand-down order to be identified and brought up on charges for dereliction of duty. Whoever gave such a heinous and odious order deserves the most extreme punishment which can be brought under whatever code of law is applicable be it the UCMJ or civil laws. The originator of the order which left at least two of our bravest stand against unbelievable odds where they, through miraculous personal efforts, withstood an onslaught of a combination of small arms, rocket propelled grenades, and mortar fire brought down on their defensive position by over one-hundred-fifty terrorist forces carrying out an organized assault. To allow such a cowardly act to go unpunished would serve for all time as an insult to our fighting forces who given even the most remote possibility of success would grab any opportunity to save their countrymen no matter the extremes of the odds or direness of the situation. That is the kind of operation which many of our most elite forces train long, hard and mercilessly so as to be prepared in any situation when the order comes down. Unfortunately, they feel cheated in such an instance as Benghazi where their unequalled abilities are not even given the chance to prove that to our military personnel there is no such thing as impossible, only that which will take a little while longer.

 

Beyond the Cusp

 

Can America Survive in a World Without G0d?

There has been a slowly rising crescendo for half a century from a growing group of conservatives who are religious and hold their faith in the L0rd as dearly as they hold to the rights as delineated in the founding documents, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and increasingly the Declaration of Independence. It is in the Declaration of Independence that these religious conservatives find their strongest arguments that they are uniquely positioned to more fully understand the ideas and ideals behind the founders and what they viewed as the origins of the nation they wished to found. They also take to heart many of the arguments made between the different founders which many were fortunately preserved in the letters of correspondence. The likely most famous coming from John Adams who wrote, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” But even this quote falls short of the delineation of the manners for power distribution which was the backbone of the Declaration of Independence. Despite the watering down of the reference in order to pacify a select group of founders who feared placing too strong a reference to things religious as they feared relating too close an interdependence between the Almighty and the governance of the country they were to found. Still, the distribution of power is given a direct flow from the Creator to the individual people and from them to government. The government was relinquished to accepting only those powers permitted by the people and the people retained all other powers and rights not relegated to government. And taking things one step further, the power which was relinquished to the purview of government was to be most powerful at the most local level and from their powers would be relented upwards until the Federal Government would receive the least power and only those powers which were furthest from the citizens as those powers were to be retained at the governance closest to the people and most readily monitored and corralled by the citizens. The Constitution went even further in limiting the powers of the Federal Government in that it spent more words forbidding powers to the Federal Government than granting it powers.

 

It would be an impossible argument to try and claim that as time has passed that the Americans as a peoples have strayed from their strict religious beliefs and are now at best evenly divided between religiously observant and largely secular. If one were to query a plurality of Americans as to where their rights originate, they would likely say they were granted by the government and likely the Federal Government. This is exactly the opposite of the ideas that were the underpinning of the intentions and inspirations of the Founding Fathers. This belief has become so widespread that the Federal Government does not even pretend to follow the restriction on their powers as delineated in the Constitution. This has been a growing problem which found its origins in the humanist movement which really gained steam at the turn of the twentieth century. The prominence of the humanist, secular humanist in particular, was given a huge impetus with the writings of two men of science, the first being Charles Darwin and the second Sigmund Freud. Between these two gentlemen much of what had been wonder and the purview of the Creator were now reassigned to the purviews of science and given Earthly explanations. This drove the movement that culminated in <a href=http://www.usconstitution.net/xconst_Am17.html?ModPagespeed=noscript>Amendment 17</a> to the Constitution which stripped the States of their representation at the Federal Level thus removing the power to limit the powers stolen from the States by the Federal Government which over time allowed the Federal Government to gather far superior power over that of the States and other local governances. This inverted the power curve from G0d – People – Local Governments – State Governments – Federal Government to the new divisions of power which now appears to closely resemble Federal Government – State Governments – Local Governments – People. When the followers of secular humanism rearranged the structures of power in the governance of the United States they not only inverted the entire power curve, they removed the Creator from the picture completely and placed the Federal Government as the originator of all powers, rights, and grantor of all privilege. The same year that Amendment 17 was ratified there was another, namely Amendment 16. This permitted the Federal Government to collect an income tax from the people which further placed the peoples under the thumb of the Federal Government as the governance now had a direct access to one’s wealth.

 

Once the Federal Government inverted the entire power structure which had been implemented under the system designed by the Founding Fathers it began to take over those areas which had been relegated to religion and seen as the place where religion and thus G0d was responsible. Such areas included assisting those who were in need, those unable to care for themselves, feeding the hungry, assisting those who were unemployed, the homeless, providing for the education of the people, providing health care, childcare of orphans, and all distribution of charity. One by one the government took control of these areas with the concept that the government would provide such care without subjecting those who were in need with sermons and other pressures which religious institutions were presumably guilty of forcing upon those they helped. The fact that a church run soup kitchen might impinge upon those receiving their food that they say a prayer and listen to hymns while they ate was cast as being an unnecessary victimization on those who were needy. Why should anybody have to put up with such an imposition of their sensibilities just to receive a meal. Government was going to save these needy people from such an imposition. Government took over the care for children in orphanages with the reasoning that the government would be more suitable and particular when choosing adoptive parents and this would free those seeking to adopt from the possibility for meeting unnecessary religious requirements. The result was that the main determination for adopting a child became more aligned with wealth or who one knows than more humanistic qualities. Unemployment, charity, you name it and the government crept in and usurped responsibility replacing religion in every sector of our society. By the end of this year the government will be well on their way to replacing religion in its last bastion, hospital and health care. The death knell for religious provided health care is known as Obama Care which will slowly morph health care in ways that will wrest it from the hands of religious institutions eventually making government the sole provider for health care just as they have taken over every other area in society which once was provided by religious institutions. This was not done by accident as government was seeking to replace religion and replace G0d as the originator and guarantor of rights and freedoms. Let us pray that when we find that we the people can no longer suffer the overreach and domination of government over the individual that we can find the strength of character and the power of faith and trusting in our Creator take back from government those rights and privileges it has stolen from us the people and return the balance of power such that the people are under the protection of G0d and not the vassals under government.

 

Beyond the Cusp

 

The President’s Echo Chamber

There will likely be accolades and great fanfare to inform the American people back home over how well President Obama’s speech in the Israeli capital city of Jerusalem was received by those attending. Never mind that only a very select few members from the Israeli government were allowed to attend and that the President refused an invitation to address the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, and return the gracious respect shown the United States Congress at every available opportunity by Prime Minister Netanyahu who gladly accepts every opportunity to address American legislators. The news reports will likely not include that not only did President Obama choose to speak solely to university students but he also insisted that one Israeli University specifically be refused any slots to have their students attend the speech. The singled out university is Israel’s newest, Ariel University. There was no reason given but if this is mentioned at all it will be assured that the fact it is Israel’s only university in the “occupied territories” and thus it would be inappropriate for the President of the United States to allow students from a university that is on occupied lands to attend. There are a few things about Ariel and its university that you will not hear. Some of these items in which it stands apart from the other universities are that it has the highest number of Palestinian students attending; the highest number of Arab professors; is in Ariel which is a city of over 20,000 people; Ariel is a mixed community of Jews and Arabs living side by side in peace; the city is home to an industrial plant in which Jews and Arabs, both Israeli and Palestinian, work side by side; and Ariel was one of the first cities to be considered as included in the lands Israel would retain until President Obama gave his sanctification to the idea of complete withdrawal to within the 1949 Armistice Lines in a speech meant to blunt any discussions with Prime Minister Netanyahu which was given as the Israeli Prime Minister was boarding his flight to the United States.

The coverage of President Obama’s speech will likely cover in great detail how he received numerous standing ovations, that his statement that the only path to peace for Israel was to make difficult but necessary concessions to Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinians was one of the best received parts of the speech, and there will be the emphasis that the speech was held in western Jerusalem, Israel’s half of their capital city. This is all quite true but leaves out a few interesting and essential facts. These were not a random set of students but were hand-picked by the President’s team. Almost all of them were leaders in the tent protests which occupied downtown Tel Aviv among other cities two summers past. These students are members of groups so far to the left of the political spectrum that even Tzipi Livni and Shelly Yachimovich, leaders of two of Israel’s left to center-left political parties and Shelly Yachimovich is even the opposition leader in the new Israeli government, would not think of allying with them as they represent sectors of Israeli society well outside political acceptance, and those allowed to cover the President’s speech were also left to a selected group. This will be the sole venue in which President Obama will make any speech other than a short acceptance speech at a State dinner where Israeli President Peres will be awarding President Obama the Presidential Medal of Distinction, Israel’s highest civilian award. This is a reciprocal granting of awards as President Obama had similarly honored President Peres. The only other public speech other than short sound bite type responses such as the one given at the reception at the airport and likely one at the official departure ceremony was a speech given to an equally selective group of Palestinian youth as part of President Obama’s trip to Ramallah. That speech also was not broadcast and for the most part the Israeli public will not be able to hear any of President Obama’s full speaking engagements. This is a definite departure from protocols between the two allies and is a definite departure from visits to Israel by Presidents Bush and Clinton as well as from the usual high profile appearances President Obama has given in Europe and numerous other nations he has visited. Some might wonder what it is that President Obama is avoiding by not speaking to the Israeli public as a whole or even giving the common courtesies to the Israeli parliament, the Knesset.

In many ways the President’s trip will receive longer and more in depth coverage back home in the United States than he will within Israel. One might be tempted to call President Obama’s visit the Obama stealth tour as he will pass through Israeli and barely be seen and definitively not heard. One might try to be surprised by this treatment of an allied nation but the path traveled by President Obama and Israel has not exactly been a walk in the park. One might rather refer to it as a cross between an adventure hike and a five kilometer run and a game of hide and seek. The one identifying trait of President Obama’s and Prime Minister Netanyahu’s interactions is that it almost spears to have been a game of tag with each one attempting to make the other one “it” and otherwise avoiding contact as much as possible. Unfortunately for Israel, Netanyahu has appeared to have been “it” for the majority of the time as Obama has appeared to have been avoiding him when the two were in the same town or even appearing at the same venue. Prime Minister Netanyahu has been refused meetings with President Obama at a minimum of when both appeared at the United Nations speaking on consecutive days and at an AIPAC Convention where they spoke on consecutive days. The one plus that can be taken from President Obama’s trip was that he did finally include Israel in his itinerary.

The number one question is what can be made of all the peculiarities evidenced in President Obama’s schedule? Taking into account that everything in the Middle East is examined, torn apart, interpreted, and subject to inquisition style questioning attempting to find the hidden meanings and conspirational properties which can be hidden within; Israel’s Arab neighbors will definitely derive many implications which will all point to President Obama placing Israel at arm’s length with a dash of disapproval from the fact that the President refused to address the Knesset. They will find similar meaning from the lack of public appearances made by the President. The withholding of places for students from Ariel University will be an indication that the President recognizes the Palestinian claims to all of the contested lands and as reinforcing Obama’s speech calling for the 67 lines to serve as the start point for negotiations over final borders. The complete lack of condemnation or even mention of the Gaza rocket attack from within Hamas territories on the Israeli town of Sderot which occurred prior to his speech or even his trip to Ramallah will be seen as complicit approval of such terror attacks or at least not an abject rejection of such attacks. There will also be found an equality of respect for the Palestinian people as there was for the Israelis as the President also had a private address with Palestinian youths. Not being quite as proficient at conspiracy theories, though I have been accused of having believed many, I am sure that this list is far from complete and with time the reaction from the Arab and Muslim worlds will become more evident. The one prediction that can be made is that the Palestinians can feel empowered by President Obama’s actions as can much of the Arab world especially the Muslim Brotherhood and affiliates. The first real consequences will be drawn when we can review the results from Secretary of State Kerry’s scheduled talks with Prime Minister Netanyahu for Saturday where Secretary Kerry will likely making certain that whatever points President Obama expected or even insisted of Israel have been understood and the proper and correct actions explained in full. What is up to interpretation is exactly how much weight can be placed on the fact that Secretary of State Kerry has scheduled his meeting with Prime Minister Netanyahu on the Jewish Sabbath. One might find some level of insult or simply infer that the message is that the administration does not care if Israel is comfortable with the state of things and simply expects compliance and obedience from Israel and nothing more. Then again, it might just be an oversight from the most calculating Presidency in the recent history of the United States.

Beyond the Cusp