Fearing Obama

By Alan Caruba

I have been sensing something about the mood of many Americans that I think is unprecedented in the history of the nation. It is a fear of the President. A fear that one observer, Daniel Henninger of The Wall Street Journal, calls “the president’s creeping authoritarianism.”

Obama has had four and a half years to pursue his goal of “transforming” America and, along the way, he has continually expressed his disdain for the constraints of the Constitution, his contempt for Congress and the Supreme Court, and, if his recent speeches are any indication, his belief that enough Americans are so dumb they will believe anything he says.

Overall, there is a growing sense of foreboding as four in five Americans are facing some degree of poverty and a small chance of finding work. One can feel the nation slowing down, its momentum sapped, its national sense of optimism being drained.

The bankruptcy of a major American city, Detroit, tells one everything they need to know about the result of decades of liberal governance and its acceleration under Obama. What other cities face a similar fate? Is the nation on the path to becoming a third-world economy?

I had my own fears evoked by a news report that “The U.S. government has demanded that major Internet companies divulge user’s stored passwords, according to two industry sources familiar with these orders, which represent an escalation in surveillance techniques that has not previously been disclosed.”

In countless ways, the Constitutional protection of privacy is being eroded along with reports that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been purchasing huge quantities of ammunition and military-style vehicles. A new book discusses the way local police forces have been developing SWAT teams with similar capabilities. What kind of domestic uprising is DHS anticipating? And why is it anticipating it?

The National Security Agency is building a huge complex in Utah, larger even than the Pentagon, to store data it collects, presumably about Americans as well as foreigners. Kiss the Fourth Amendment goodbye, yet Congress just voted to sustain the NSA without restraints.

Why hasn’t Congress acted to repeal the National Defense Authorization Act that permits the government to arrest and detain any American without recourse to an attorney or the courts?

The Department of Justice (DOJ) has been on a tear, presumably to find out the sources of leaks in the Obama administration, seizing the telephone records of the Associated Press without giving the AP due notice.

Americans are beginning to suspect that there is little justice to be found in the DOJ, particularly since the revelations about “Fast and Furious”, an idiotic program of the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agency to purchase and “walk” guns into Mexico in order to “track” them. It was obvious they would end up in the hands of the drug cartels. It took an executive order by Obama to shut down a congressional investigation into this bizarre scheme. His administration has done everything it could to undermine the Second Amendment.

Over at the Internal Revenue Service, one of its officials accused of targeting patriot organizations seeking tax except status has plead the Fifth Amendment to avoid answering a congressional committee’s questions.

Meanwhile, the Affordable Care Act—Obamacare—is in the process of expanding the IRS as the government begins its takeover of one sixth of the nation’s economy with a piece of legislation that has already been declared a “train wreck”, unmanageable and, most importantly, so intrusive into our personal lives that no previous generation would have ever allowed it. Obamacare is already wrecking the economy as businesses large and small try to anticipate its costs.

The appalling lies about the terrorist attack on the U.S. Benghazi consulate are evidence in themselves that the Obama administration is prepared to deceive Americans about the killing of a U.S. ambassador and three of his security personnel. The orders given during the course of the attack were to do nothing. This is unprecedented. And frightening.

Millions of Americans out of work have very real cause to fear for their well-being, but the President recently told them the real threat was “climate change”, not an economy that is not producing jobs, but in fact shedding them, keeping the rate of unemployment unchanged for years.

There is a point when one must ask if this is deliberate and not just the result of bad domestic policies. If the answer is yes, then Americans have real cause to fear the President and the prospect of living in a surveillance state where everything they communicate and everyone with whom they communicate can be identified.

There are those raising warnings about the direction in which the nation is going, but unless there are demonstrations by Americans that want to see an end to these laws and trends, the progress toward tyranny will continue.

Marches are being planned for Washington, D.C., and they may hold the key to the future before America becomes a totalitarian nightmare.

© Alan Caruba, 2013