by Ben Shapiro
That same year, the Obama administration created a foreclosure relief program funded to the tune of $7.6 billion. A full $445.6 million went to the Illinois Housing Development Authority, run by former ACORN Housing Chicago operations manager Joe McGavin.55
In 2013, the White House hired a nonprofit group called the Center for Community Change to run its Obamacare youth video contest, created to promote outreach on the Affordable Care Act. The Center for Community Change is run by Deepak Bhargava, the top governmental affairs official for ACORN from 1992 to 2002. “The fact that the Obama administration is putting a senior staffer of the now defunct and notoriously corrupt ACORN in charge of giving away cash to bribe young Americans into accepting Obamacare is cause for grave concern,” Representative Paul Gosar (R-AZ) observed.56
Far from being dead, ACORN has merely morphed. As former ACORN CEO Bertha Lewis said, “these entities are carrying on ACORN’s work of organizing low- and moderate-income folks. . . . [We have created] bullet-proof community-organizing Frankensteins that they’re going to have a very hard time attacking.” That’s particularly true with an administration fully committed to overlooking the corruption and criminality of its allies. “Barack Obama is truly ‘the president from ACORN,’ ” Judicial Watch’s Tom Fitton said.57
CLOSING ARGUMENT
The charge of governmental corruption is about the worst charge that an administration can face. Such corruption fundamentally undermines the entire purpose of government, transforming it into a mafia-like organization with the power of force behind it. The only thing separating American government from thugocracies like Russia is our willingness to hold our politicians accountable.
And that distinction is disappearing.
In 2000, a young Russian politician named Vladimir Putin was running for president to replace the ailing Boris Yeltsin. His chief opposition in the media came from NTV, a network owned by one Vladimir Gusinsky. Just before the crucial election that would put the former KGB strongman Putin in power, Gusinsky’s NTV ran an exposé on the thwarted bombing of an apartment building in Ryazan the year before. The special alleged that the Russian security service, FSB—a service run largely by Putin—had set up the bombing as a way to push Putin’s political ambitions and cast aspersion on Islamist terrorists in Chechnya.
Putin struck back. Hard. The Russian information minister, Mikhail Lesin, said that NTV had “crossed the line” and become “outlaws.” Four days after Putin gained office, FSB troops invaded NTV headquarters heavily armed. Putin then leveraged NTV’s biggest creditor, the state-owned energy giant Gazprom, to call in NTV’s loans. Finally, Putin told Gusinsky that he could either hand over NTV to the state directly, or end up in court for fraud. As Putin biographer Angus Roxburgh of BBC News reported, “It was blackmail.” Gusinsky handed over the company. The largest independent television channel in Russia became a government-owned subsidiary.
Using the power of law to leverage against allies and to protect friends is the essence of tyranny. The Obama administration has practiced and perfected such tyranny. Whether hunting down George Zimmerman or protecting the New Black Panthers to boost racial animus, protecting Kevin Johnson or firing Gerald Walpin to save friends’ political hides, or unilaterally declaring the power to make and break duly enacted law at will, the Obama administration has destroyed the concept of fair and objective justice at the federal level. It is no wonder that Americans’ trust in government continues to decline further and further each year. Who would trust a thug government that could destroy due process for political purposes?
No such government deserves the trust of its people. That is why the RICO Act explicitly contains obstruction of justice as a predicate offense: if the justice system is perverted by a criminal enterprise, all faith in our democracy is lost. Unfortunately, that is exactly what is happening.
In September 2012, President Obama declared the ability of the executive branch to target American citizens who became anti-American terrorists with drone strikes. Attorney General Eric Holder said that no judicial intervention was necessary for such strikes to occur. “Due process and judicial process are not one and the same, particularly when it comes to national security,” Holder stated. “The Constitution guarantees due process, it does not guarantee judicial process.” President Obama added, “It’s very important for the president and the entire culture of our national security team to continually ask tough questions about, are we doing the right thing, are we abiding by rule of law, are we abiding by due process.” He went on to suggest that the government should “set up structures and institutional checks, so that, you know, you avoid any kind of slippery slope into a place where we’re not being true to who we are.”58
What did that due process look like?
Nobody really knew. The best description of the process came from a leaked report in the New York Times: “Mr. Obama is the liberal law professor who campaigned against the Iraq war and torture, and then insisted on approving every new name on an expanding ‘kill list,’ poring over terrorist suspects’ biographies on what one official calls the macabre ‘baseball cards’ of an unconventional war. When a rare opportunity for a drone strike at a top terrorist arises—but his family is with him—it is the president who has reserved to himself the final moral calculation.”59
President Obama may target the right people. He may do the right thing. But his willingness to pervert the judicial process speaks to a man hungry for power—and a man willing to do anything to achieve his desired political ends.
CONCLUSION
America has seen criminal administrations before. Over the course of American history, dozens of federal officials have been convicted of offenses based on corruption, including one cabinet secretary (Albert B. Fall, secretary of the interior under Warren G. Harding), four senators (two Democrats and two Republicans), and thirty-one members of Congress (twenty-five of them Democrats). Far more have deserved jail time. Presidents, too, have deserved jail time. In fact, it is difficult to name a president over the last several decades who has not risked prosecution, from Nixon to Clinton and from JFK to George W. Bush.
But there is one president who has topped them all. He has turned his administration into a hotbed of corruption, all the while claiming ignorance. His administration has been responsible for deaths, constitutional violations, and the dissolution of American power on the world stage. It is no wonder that trust in American government has hit all-time lows under President Obama.
President Obama has not hesitated to turn his administration into the most corrupt and criminal of all time. Stacking his administration with cronies and hungry bureaucrats in his legalized criminal syndicate, Obama merely sets out the end goals and lets his goons take care of the rest. He offers them protection, advancement, and the chance to change the lives of millions. He offers them both personal and collective salvation. All it will cost is a few souls who oppose his agenda, or who inconveniently find themselves in the way.
The White House’s gun smuggling throughout the Middle East, and its predictably murderous results in Benghazi, Libya, are unsurpassed in the annals of Oval Office treachery—the active cover-up of events, the attempt to quash the truth from coming out, the retaliation against would-be whistle-blowers, and the continuance of a policy of appeasement finds no parallel in American history. Jimmy Carter and his administration were incompetent; Barack Obama’s administration is malevolent. George W. Bush’s administration relied on bad intelligence and worse postwar planning, but at least he chose the correct side in the war on terror. President Obama’s quest to weaken America on the international stage found its apex in the death of four Americans, including an American ambassador, followed by an attempt to cast American free speech as the culprit for such evil. Benghazi represented the flash point for Obama’s vaunted Arab Spring: the rise of Islamism, the decline of American power, and the “blame America first” mentality of a cowardly internationalist with delusions of grandeur.
The Fast and
Furious scandal sprang from the bowels of the antigun hysteria of the administration. Willingness to overlook the obvious risks of handing heavy weaponry to Mexican drug cartels—or purposeful decisions to ramp up that risk—ended in the realization of many Americans’ worst nightmare: an even more out-of-control Mexican murder business unhesitating in its desire to kill and maim everyone in its path, including American border agents like Brian Terry. The administration has tried to cast Second Amendment advocates as the villains of a story the administration itself created, meanwhile letting the real culprits keep their jobs or their pensions. The Reagan administration smuggled guns. But those guns never ended up killing Americans.
The Obama administration’s use of the IRS is hardly unprecedented (see FDR, JFK, Nixon, and Clinton), but its very obviousness demonstrates the unconcern with which the administration violates the law. The Obama team has derided the IRS’s targeting of conservatives as a “phony scandal,” and has attempted to grow the IRS to unrivaled proportions. Tax law became a vehicle for leftist social engineering back during the Wilson administration. Nothing has changed. It’s just gotten more obvious, and more dangerous. The hallmarks of tin-pot dictatorship are stamped all over the president’s desk.
No administration has been more tenacious in pursuing leakers than the Obama administration—but only when those leaks harm the administration itself. When leaks help the administration, however, no administration has been more willing to destroy the national security of America and its allies for political gain than the Obama White House. Whether it is leaking Israeli national security information in order to stymie an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, or leaking information about the Osama bin Laden raid and endangering Navy SEALs in order to prop up the president’s flagging reelection efforts, the Obama administration has made a game of revealing self-serving classified information while targeting even journalists who inform the public of classified information harmful to the Obama image. Many Americans reacted in anger when Richard Armitage revealed the identity of CIA analyst Valerie Plame during the debate over the war in Iraq. Former vice presidential adviser Scooter Libby wrongly ended up in prison over that case; Valerie Plame and her husband, Joe Wilson, ended up with a terrible Hollywood movie about them starring Naomi Watts and Sean Penn. Nobody has gone to prison over the Obama administration’s leaks. But men and women are already dead because of those leaks—and more men and women will die because of the Obama administration’s leaks.
While the Obama administration is profligate with classified information, they are happy to seize our personal information. When Edward Snowden revealed to the American public the extent of the government’s surveillance of the American people, we reacted with shock and horror. Perhaps we shouldn’t have. Perhaps we should have recognized that the Patriot Act would be perverted to allow government almost unlimited power; perhaps we should have considered the possibility that a government powerful enough to gather all our information for our protection could also be large enough to use that information to our detriment. But Americans could not have foreseen an administration switching sides in the war on terror, ignoring obvious markers of terrorism like association with known terrorists overseas (Nidal Hassan, the Fort Hood shooter, communicated with terrorist cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, and the government knew about it), and yet simultaneously insisting that it needed all our Gchats in order to keep us safe. Thanks to the Obama administration’s terrible record of targeting its opposition, Americans do not feel safe in its hands. They feel even less safe knowing that the government has the power to monitor us, keystroke by keystroke.
Bribery is the key to the Obama administration’s success. While Obama’s 2012 Republican opponent, Mitt Romney, complained that 47 percent of Americans were dependent on the government and therefore likely to back Obama, that was a sin against the American people. The truth is that a vast swath of Americans take government benefits not because they want to, but because they have to. And they are not the Americans who control the direction of American politics. Those who do are our political elites, who have been bribed in ways heretofore unseen in American politics. The Obama administration bribes the unions, who will see millions of new government union members thanks to the bureaucratic class created by Obamacare—and who receive waivers from that same godawful program. And those unions pay him back in votes. The Obama administration cows businesses into doing its bidding via the power of threats and regulation. And those businesses pay up their lunch money. The Obama administration pays off the environmental lobby while putting its boot on the throat of the energy industry, and pays off Hollywood while seeking to leech the lifeblood of major industry. The outright bribery of the Obama administration has turned America from a republic to a massive kleptocracy.
The ultimate mark of corruption lies in the use of government power to target political opposition. The Obama administration hasn’t just done that through the IRS. It has done so through the Department of Justice—the single most corrupt branch of the single most corrupt White House. Whether urging the public to string up George Zimmerman while leveraging federal resources to push local prosecution, or clearing the field for criminal FOO—Friends of Obama—the department has become the perverse instrument of tyranny.
For all of these crimes and many more, there have been no consequences whatsoever for the Obama administration, despite Obama’s repeated avowals that such corruption and abuse of power would be punished.
Here’s White House press secretary Jay Carney on Obama’s response to Benghazi: “He is very interested in bringing the perpetrators to justice and ensuring that we find out what happened, why it happened and taking steps to ensure that it never happens again.”1 Promise unfulfilled.
Obama on Fast and Furious: “People who have screwed up will be held accountable.”2 Promise unfulfilled.
Obama on the IRS scandal: “[P]eople have to be accountable and it’s got to be fixed.”3 Promise unfulfilled.
Obama on leaks: “I am troubled by the possibility that leak investigations could chill the investigative journalism that holds government accountable. Journalists should not be at legal risk for doing their jobs.”4 Promise unfulfilled.
Obama on the NSA scandal: “I am tasking this independent group to step back and review our capabilities—particularly our surveillance technologies. And they’ll consider how we can maintain the trust of the people, how we can make sure that there absolutely is no abuse in terms of how these surveillance technologies are used.” The group starred perjurer director of national intelligence James Clapper.5 Promise unfulfilled.
Obama on corruption in government: “My Administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government. We will work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration.”6 Promise unfulfilled.
Obama to Americans on perversion of justice: “Ask yourself your own questions about, am I wringing as much bias out of myself as I can?”7 Obama certainly isn’t.
OBAMA’S PLAUSIBLE DENIABILITY
So how is Obama able to get away with this vast bevy of untruths about his own administration? Plausible deniability—the ability to claim ignorance on subjects on which Obama is intimately involved, and with regard to which his interests have been undeniably forwarded. It’s the name of the game in Chicago politics. It’s how some members of the Daley family have been able to avoid prison for decades, despite widespread suspicion of corruption. It’s why those who breach that rule do wind up in prison, from Representative Jesse Jackson Jr. to Governor Rod Blagojevich. And it’s why President Obama claims ignorance on every major scandal to hit his administration.
Here’s Obama on Benghazi, after being asked if it had changed his mind at all about his faux Arab Spring: “This is going to be a rocky path. The question presumes that somehow we could have stopped this wave of change.”8 It was unforeseeable.
Obama on Fast and Furious: “This is a pretty big government, the
United States government. I’ve got a lot of moving parts.” Obama also said that he first heard about Fast and Furious “on the news.”9 He had no knowledge.
Obama on the IRS scandal: “I first learned about it through the same news reports other people learned from.”10 Once again, no knowledge.
Obama press secretary Carney on the Justice Department targeting journalists who worked with leakers: “Other than press reports, we have no knowledge of any attempt by the Justice Department to seek phone records of the Associated Press. . . . [Obama] found out about the news reports yesterday on the road.”11 Good thing Obama watches the news, or he’d never know about anything.
Obama on the NSA scandal: “We don’t have domestic spying.”12 Oops.
Obama top adviser David Axelrod on Solyndra: “I don’t know anybody associated with Solyndra and I know nothing about the project.” Former White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel also claimed ignorance.13
Obama press secretary Carney on the trial of Kermit Gosnell, black abortionist and murderer in Philadelphia: “The president does not and cannot take a position on an ongoing trial, so I won’t, as well.” Except, of course, for George Zimmerman, Henry Louis Gates Jr., and any other trial that tickles his fancy.14
Yet somehow Obama was intimately involved with the circumstances surrounding the killing of Osama bin Laden, the bailout of General Motors, and the circumstances surrounding the Arizona immigration law. Obama is surprisingly well informed, but only when he wants to be. Otherwise, he’s about as knowledgeable as Al Capone was about his finances. Which is to say, perfectly well informed, but able to deny he’d ever heard of whiskey.