-By Warner Todd Huston
Obama is an autocrat. Were we a South American nation he’d be our Hugo Chavez. He is not interested in democracy, our republican form of government, or listening to other’s opinions. And he most certainly is not interested in allowing the American people to see their will reflected in their duly elected officials. It’s his way or the highway. Period.
All this is the subject of a recent New York Times piece that, even as it notes Obama’s wild grabs for personal power, tries its best to give cover to a president that has decided that he has no need to work with Congress and intends to bypass both the courts and our elected representatives to put his radical agenda into place.
With its typical, hypocritical partisanship on full display, the Times, the same paper that repeatedly called George W. Bush an imperial president, is now bending over backwards to excuse even more egregious behavior from its Obammessiah.
In fact, the first paragraphs of the two stories liked above are telling in how the Times regards the two presidents and in how the actual issue of executive overreach is a but a device in stories meant to sell readers on a picture of the man, not the issue.
Let’s take the first paragraph of the 2006 piece on Bush (my bold):
You would think that Senators Carl Levin and John McCain would have learned by now that you cannot deal in good faith with a White House that does not act in good faith. Yet both men struck bargains intended to restore the rule of law to American prison camps. And President Bush tossed them aside at the first opportunity.
Now let’s look to see how the Times characterizes Obama’s imperialism:
One Saturday last fall, President Obama interrupted a White House strategy meeting to raise an issue not on the agenda. He declared, aides recalled, that the administration needed to more aggressively use executive power to govern in the face of Congressional obstructionism.
So, in 2006 the Times felt that Bush could not be trusted to work in good faith with Congress because he was a tyrannical, autocrat, yet today, with Obama grabbing far, far more power unto himself than Bush ever dreamed of doing, his actions are excused away because he has to get around that darned ol’ “Congressional obstructionism.”
The current Times piece goes on to introduce several “experts” that similarly excuse away Obama’s outrageous usurpation of power as no big deal, common, typical actions of presidents through history.
All this flacking for Obama’s outrageous misuse of his executive privileges by the Times — and its corresponding previous outrage over the same by Bush — is typical of how the left only uses issues to its advantage. It shows how actual truth doesn’t matter a lick to the left. One would think that executive overreach is executive overreach. If executive power grabs are wrong, then why would it matter from which political party the tyrant hails?
But executive abuses are not what The New York Times cares about. The issue is merely a conduit to express its opinion of a president. Hence, in 2006 Bush’s executive overreach was evil while today it is excused away because “Obama faces stiff Congressional opposition.”
A great resource on the destruction that Obama has wrought on our Republic is Phil Kerpen’s Democracy Denied, a book that details Obama’s attempt to bypass our democracy, our Congress, and you, the voters. In it, Kerpen warns that Obama is using his powers to create regulations to undermine Congress and “radically transform America.”
Regardless, the Times loves Obama’s radicalism and so his abuse of his executive powers is OK in their book… or paper, as it were.
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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.