What Happened?

Midterm Elections-1Just what happened last week on election day? And what is going to happen in the years ahead?

The most important thing that happened last week was that the country dodged a bullet. Had the Democrats retained control of the Senate, President Obama could have spent his last two years in office loading the federal judiciary with judges who share his contempt for the Constitution of the United States.

Such judges — perhaps including Supreme Court justices — would have been confirmed by Senate Democrats, and could spend the rest of their lifetime appointments ruling in favor of expansions of federal government power that would make the freedom of “we the people” only a distant memory and a painful mockery.

We dodged that bullet. But what about the rest of Barack Obama’s term?

Pundits who depict Obama as a weak, lame duck president may be greatly misjudging him, as they have so often in the past. Despite the Republican sweep of elections across the country last week, President Obama has issued an ultimatum to Congress, to either pass the kind of immigration law he wants before the end of this year or he will issue Executive Orders changing the country’s immigration laws unilaterally.

Does that sound like a lame duck president?

On the contrary, it sounds more like some banana republic’s dictator. Nor is Obama making an idle bluff. He has already changed other laws unilaterally, including the work requirement in welfare reform laws passed during the Clinton administration.

The very idea of Congress rushing a bill into law in less than two months, on a subject as complex, and with such irreversible long-run consequences as immigration, is staggering. But there is already a precedent for such hasty action, without Congressional hearings to bring out facts or air different views. That is how ObamaCare was passed. And we see how that has turned out.

People who are increasingly questioning Barack Obama’s competence are continuing to ignore the alternative possibility that his fundamental values and imperatives are different from theirs.

You cannot tell whether someone is failing or succeeding without knowing what they are trying to do.

When Obama made a brief public statement about Americans being beheaded by terrorists, and then went on out to play golf, that was seen as a sign of political ineptness, rather than a stark revelation of what kind of man he is, underneath the smooth image and lofty rhetoric.

The president’s refusal to protect the American people by quarantining people coming from Ebola-infected areas — as was done by Britain and a number of African nations — is by no means a sign of incompetence. It is a sacrifice of Americans’ interests for the sake of other people’s interests, as is an assisted invasion of illegal immigrants across our southern borders.

Such actions are perfectly consistent with Obama’s citizen of the world vision that has led to such statements of his in 2008: “We can’t drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times … and then just expect that every other country’s going to say okay.”

In a similar vein, Obama said, “we consume more than 20 percent of the world’s oil but have less than 2 percent of the world’s oil reserves.” In short, Americans are undeservedly prosperous and selfishly consuming a disproportionate share of “the world’s output” — at least in the vision of Barack Obama.

That Americans are producing a disproportionate share of what is called “the world’s output” and consuming what we produce — while paying for our imports — is not allowed to disturb Obama’s vision.

Resentment of the prosperous — whether at home or on the world stage — runs through virtually everything Barack Obama has said and done throughout his life. You don’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to find the clues. You have to shut your eyes tightly to keep from seeing them everywhere, in every period of his life.

The big question is whether the other branches of government — Congress and the Supreme Court — can stop him from doing irreparable damage to America in his last two years. Seeing Obama as an incompetent and weak, lame duck president only makes that task harder.

Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: Click here.

Subscribe to Frontpage’s TV show, The Glazov Gang, and LIKE it on Facebook.

  • http://JudeoChristianAmerica.org Alexander Gofen

    What happened (looking at the years ahead)? Infamy and disgrace! A degenerate nation trapped into a twin party sham re-awarded the victory to candidates promising nothing and to the party already guilty in the 2008/2012 double treason (and numerous lesser crimes).

    Looking at the years ahead, the world will see more of a la mad dog international actions of America, destruction of its own and the global financial system, and other crises beyond our imagination. Yet the article is misguiding not only about the years ahead.

    It is the existing (not the future) judiciary sharing the contempt for the Constitution of the United States and sabotaging their duties.

    The other branches of government – Congress and the Supreme Court, and all the existing parties so far have only COLLABORATED with the Unidentified Foreign Operative under tentative names Obama-Soetoro-Soebarkach-Bounel… It is they who have allowed this unprecedented take over of the nation to happen, to last 6 years – plus 2 more until “completion”, reducing this nation to null and void, to laughing stock of the world and its greatest trouble maker…

  • JB Ziggy Zoggy

    Obama’s fundamental values and imperatives are different from ours?

  • Bamaguje

    Obama is a willful saboteur of America’s interest, and a traitor.
    There’s no other explanation for his ruinous domestic and foreign policies.

  • stringman

    I think the Skinny Pill adds have got the ‘before and after’ pictures reversed. Do people really fall for that?

  • punditwannabe

    Sometimes I actually lay awake at night and try to figure out the problem with “income inequality”, I just do no get it. Hasn’t the Keynsian idea of there being one “pie” of wealth that must be cut over and over to distribute and then run out been disproven? Is that at the core of the income inequality worriers? There are all sorts of things people “own” that I can’t own because I can’t afford to buy them but honestly, so what? Can someone help me out here? Why does my having something have anything to do w/your not having it? It just makes no sense to me whatsoever, this upset over “income inequality”; I’m always like, “huh?”

    • cxt

      Yes……..Keynes’s ideas are largely “dead” in economic terms.

  • ratonis

    Obama has no achievements or accomplishments in life that would remotely qualify a person for national leadership. Yet there he is. There is something profoundly weird about this whole moment in our history.

  • mtnhikerdude

    He will pound nails into America’s coffin til he leaves the Planet.

  • Chas Chandler

    Obviously Mr Sowell’s comment about “dodging a bullet” forgot about our feckless leaders: Mitch McConnell and John Boehner who cower in their leadership positions. What difference does it make to win elections if the Republicans are going to roll over and not even try to stop Obama other than a few sound bites whining about what his latest illegal act is on cable news.

  • Virgil Hilts

    With O’Bama…NEVER assume that his actions are based on incompetence, when MALICE will explain it sufficiently.

    • Shane

      O’s only goal is to empower himself & his party. He’s done a bang up job at accomplishing that goal as well.

      • Virgil Hilts

        Yes he has…were he to be hit by a meteorite….it would be no great loss; even better if Pelosi, Reid and Valerie Jarrett, and all of the remaining syphilitic chancres were all within the impact zone…No doubt that the Obama acolytes would visit the crater, as though it were some sort of ‘shrine’. Oklahoma’s getting closer to the top of the list; picturing high ground, where you can see people coming from a Long way off. :-)

        • Shane

          That made me think of a funny joke.

          When you wish upon a falling star your dreams can come true, unless it’s a huge meteorite hurling towards the Earth which will destroy all life, in which case you’re pretty much screwed no matter what you wished for.. unless you wished for death by meteorite…

  • Joy Beum

    His net worth is 12.2 million and he lives like a king, takes luxurious vacations, then complains that the elite should support the poor. Is this an oxymoron?

  • Dan Knight

    Dr. Sowell has a way of making good, solid points in a succinct manner. … Kind of like an adult.

  • Moa

    How did Barack Hussein Obama get nominated by the Democratic Party?

    In the 1990′s the Democratic Party was taken over by more radical elements. Obama was nominated as a result of the policies the Democratic Party wanted, not the other way around.

    Obama is doing *exactly* what he was selected to do, weaken the country’s military and disconnect all the US allies around the World. He snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in Iraq and vastly worsened things in Afghanistan. He advances the agenda of the Muslim Brotherhood whenever he can (and it is clear the Democratic Party have an undeclared policy to do this).

    In short, Obama is a traitor to America as it was, but no less treacherous than the ‘Democratic Party’ of control-freak Big State neo-fascists.

  • cxt

    Excellent read!

    Like everyone else I have a really busy day. But I always take the time to read the work of Prof. Sowell.

    Always worth the time. Always.