-By Warner Todd Huston
In 2008 Obama ran for president claiming that he wanted to make Washington more transparent than ever. Obama ran as the law-and-order man, he ran as the anti-lobbyist man, and he ran as the man for all the people, the great centrist that would finally work for the people. He ran saying that Bush was a lawless president and that he, Obama, would shut down the illicit Guantanamo facility and immediately end all the “illegal wars” that Bush was prosecuting.
As president we’ve seen that he’s lied with all those claims.
One of Obama’s main bogeymen has been lobbyists. He claimed that he’d purge them from Washington. But the truth was a far different thing once he fairly became president. In fact, as soon as he became president Obama began to waive the rules that were supposed to keep lobbyists out of his administration.
He also made sure that lobbyists from left-wing advocacy groups were big winners in the Washington sweepstakes assuring that K Street had its biggest payday ever once he took office. And all the while he was taking millions from lobbyists.
And now it has been reported that lobbyists have even skipped White House visitor logs by benefiting from secret meetings between themselves and the administration with off-site meetings away from the White House.
Transparency shmaceparency.
As to Guantanamo, one of the very first acts Obama took was to sign an Executive Order that said he’d close Guantanamo a year after his signing of the order. A year later the facility was still open, remains so to this day, and Obama is making no moves to fulfill his own EO. Further he ramped up the military’s presence in Afghanistan not to mention the many thousands more unmanned vehicle predator drone strikes that have killed thousands in Taliban controlled Pakistan and areas of Afghanistan where the US military cannot effectively reach.
As to Obama’s lawlessness, there are many examples of this.
To name just a few cases Obama has ignored the rulings of judges to allow offshore oil drilling to the point where he is now n contempt of court. He has also refused to prosecute the obvious voter intimidation perpetrated by the Black Panthers in Philadelphia. Additionally he has told his Dept. of Labor to allow unions to violate disclosure rules. And this week we see his next lawless action.
This week Obama’s Justice Dept. has announced that it simply won’t prosecute cases brought under the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). DOMA is law, not just policy, yet Obama has simply decided that he won’t prosecute cases brought under the law.
Imagine if a Republican president simply decided out of hand that his Dept. of Justice would not take any abortion cases, or perhaps decided that affirmative action cases should be stonewalled? Or what if a Republican Dept. of Justice decided to ignore any violations of any other law that leftists love? The left and its friends in the Old Media establishment would be up in arms (as they should be for an administration being so lawless).
It all goes to show that Obama says one thing and does another. It also goes to show that he simply does not care about the Constitution or the law. His left-wing, lawless agenda is all he cares about.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, RightPundits.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
For a full bio, please CLICK HERE.
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