The president’s rewards—refraining from litigation and continuing the flow of federal resources—to states that decline to enforce laws against illegal immigration
ARTICLE VI
Failure to Execute the Laws Faithfully: The Department of Justice
The reckless Fast and Furious operation intentionally armed criminals, foreseeably resulted in violent crimes that include the murder of at least one U.S. Border Patrol agent, and has been covered up by the attorney general’s contemptuous obstruction of a congressional investigation and the president’s specious invocation of executive privilege
The willful denial to Americans of equal protection under the law by the Justice Department’s racially discriminatory enforcement of federal civil rights law
The systematic politicization of hiring at the Department of Justice
The politicization of investigation and prosecution by the Department of Justice in order to coerce compliance with administration policy, to punish critics, and to appease political supporters
The sweeping investigation of journalists in contravention of Justice Department guidelines, and the attorney general’s misleading testimony to Congress regarding the investigation of a journalist as to whom the Justice Department had obtained a search warrant
Coercing state compliance with Obama administration policy by politicizing enforcement actions and encouraging state attorneys general to abdicate their duty to defend valid state law
The systematic stonewalling of Congress
ARTICLE VII
Willfully Undermining the Constitutional Rights of the American People That He Is Sworn to Preserve, Protect and Defend
The president’s selective targeting of political opponents for harassment and abuse by the Internal Revenue Service, and obstruction and corruption of the resulting investigations
The president’s abridgement of First Amendment free-speech rights in order to appease Islamic supremacists by adopting repressive sharia blasphemy standards
The president’s suppression of information about Islamic terrorism, including its occurrence in the Fort Hood massacre
The president’s abridgement of First Amendment free-speech rights by selectively and vindictively prosecuting a high-profile critic
The president’s denial of First Amendment religious liberty under Obamacare by gratuitously imposing an abortifacient and birth-control mandate on conscientious objectors
The president’s infringement of Second Amendment firearms rights through an international treaty he joined despite widespread congressional opposition
Endnotes
Index
“Be careful how you make those statements, gentlemen.” Barack Hussein Obama had been president of the United States for all of two months. He was lecturing the titans of American finance who were struggling to explain to him, a man with no meaningful business experience, how high salaries are necessary if American companies are to compete for talent in a global market.
“The public isn’t buying that,” scoffed the president. He wasn’t talking about the public, though. “My administration,” he warned, “is the only thing between you and the pitchforks.” The pitchforks: that’s his public.
Obama’s formative background is the left-wing fever swamp of Chicago “community organizing,” a gussied-up term for systematic rabble-rousing that has now become acceptable enough to put on a résumé. The pursuit of raw power is the gospel according to the seminal organizer, Saul Alinsky—if we may use “gospel” in connection with an atheist whose most famous book, Rules for Radicals, opens with an ode to Lucifer for winning his own kingdom by rebelling against the establishment.
In Obama terminology, “hope” is the possibility that power may be wrested from society’s “haves” by infiltrating their political system. Just as Willie Sutton robbed banks because that’s where the money is, organizers must target and enter the very system they reject in order to acquire power. They must make themselves attractive to the great mass of society despite having “contemptuously rejected the values and the way of life of the middle class,” as Alinsky put it. This is the formula for transformational “change”: the acquisition and exploitation of power so as to redistribute wealth and elevate the left’s professionally aggrieved vanguard.
Though the quest for “social justice” must wend its way through regular politics, the goal cannot be reached by regular politics. That’s where the pitchforks come in. “Direct action”—as Mr. Obama’s longtime confederates at ACORN (the Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now) euphemistically put it—is the organizer’s signal tactic. Action, Alinsky taught, is the very point of organizing. “Direct action” is barely disguised code for the occasional use, and the omnipresent threat, of mob mischief against the law-abiding bourgeoisie. The organizer prospers by defining down our ethical boundaries—or, looked at the other way, by legitimizing extortion.
“Grass-roots community organizing builds on indigenous leadership and direct action,” Obama wrote in his contribution to After Alinsky: Community Organizing in Illinois, a retrospective published fifteen years after Alinsky’s death in 1972. In another revealing passage, the up-and-coming organizer elaborated:
The debate as to how black and other dispossessed people can forward their lot in America is not new. From W.E.B. DuBois to Booker T. Washington to Marcus Garvey to Malcolm X to Martin Luther King, this internal debate has raged between integration and nationalism, between accommodation and militancy, between sit-down strikes and boardroom negotiations. The lines between these strategies have never been simply drawn, and the most successful black leadership has recognized the need to bridge these seemingly divergent approaches.
Breathtaking! No wonder that Obama’s media allies resisted reporting on these cogitations, even as they scoured the earth in search of Sarah Palin’s third-grade report card. Lawfulness and lawlessness, thuggery and regular politics—we’re not to divine any moral or ethical differences. They are just different “approaches” to empowerment. They only “seem” to be “divergent.” It may be important to maintain the veneer of respect for legal processes, but it is just as legitimate to stretch or break the rules whenever necessary to achieve social justice—a higher form of legitimacy than society’s rule of law. Separatism, menacing action, civil disobedience: none of these is beyond the pale. They are simply choices on the hard-power menu that Obama “bridges” with soft power (i.e., the system’s mundane legal and political processes).
As recounted in Stanley Kurtz’s Radical-in-Chief, the definitive political biography of Obama, the young organizer’s formative experiences included the use of Alinsky’s “direct action” tactics—alliances with aggressors like ACORN and the SEIU (Service Employees International Union). Indeed, Obama personally orchestrated a demonstration in which scores of protestors broke into a private meeting
