Give Us Liberty

The Obama Administration Wants To Govern By Permanent Crisis

IBD.com

Bill Clinton governed by the permanent campaign. Barack Obama wants to govern by the permanent crisis. What most see as disasters Obama sees as opportunities to ram through his progressive agenda.
With scandals and corruption breaking all around him, the president attended a $34,000-a-plate Democratic Party fundraiser in New York City Monday night and while there revealed that he wants an America in constant crisis. Why? Because he believes that would make the country more docile and compliant.
"More than anything," he told supporters including Justin Timberlake and Tommy Hilfiger, "what I will be striving for over the next 3-1/2 years is to see if that spirit we saw in Boston and West, Texas, if we can institutionalize that. If we can create a framework where everybody's working together and moving this country forward."
People tend to look for answers when a crisis hits. Their desperation often clouds their judgment. They want someone to do something, anything.
Demagogues know this. It's why Rahm Emanuel and Hillary Clinton, both high-ranking administration officials during Obama's first term, live by the tenet that politicians should never squander a good crisis.
"You never want a serious crisis to go to waste," Emanuel said in 2008 as President-Elect Obama's chief of staff. "And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before."
A few months later, Secretary of State Clinton advised the European Parliament to "Never waste a good crisis. ... Don't waste it when it can have a very positive impact on climate change and energy security."
In other words, take advantage of human fears. Use tragedy to push through policies that a clear-thinking people would reject.
This is what Obama is yearning for — a "spirit" of acquiescence, a submissiveness that just wants whatever the crisis is to go away. Except that in Obama's perfect world, the crises would never end.
More Bostons, please. And another factory explosion. How about a few more school shootings? And please, please, please let someone who can be tarred as a right-wing nut commit the most vile sort of mayhem — preferably during a hurricane that can be blamed on man's carbon dioxide emissions.
Then it's on to the next disaster and a plan to ensure there is never another. Invariably it will be a plan that increases government's interventions into private affairs.
It is said that good leaders — in the military, in the private sector, even in government — know there is opportunity in crisis. But how many of these good leaders are devotees of the Cloward-Piven strategy, as Obama must be?
And how many know that Cloward-Piven encourages the orchestration of crises to force political changes that yield more government — and more power to those who hold government authority?
This is the sort of depraved thinking that has influenced Obama. It's also the sort of thinking that could bring down this country. Voters should have been paying closer attention when Obama promised he would fundamentally transform America.