Mark America

Ready to Snap?

I try to steer well clear of conspiracy theories on this site, but occasionally, circumstances and events will lead you to seriously consider some of them.  This week, we had at least two instances of powerful Democrats calling for a diminution of our Republic by extra-constitutional means.  As I covered them, there was the case of Peter Orszag decrying the slow and ponderous process of democracy, and the other was the case of North Carolina governor Beverly Perdue allegedly joking that we should suspend congressional elections for two years to let the members work for a while without immediate consequences from voters.  Most people who have reviewed the audio question whether Perdue was joking, but on Friday, this story gained a good deal more traction when Rush Limbaugh brought it to the world’s attention with a story in the CanadaFreePress: Warning: The Threat of Suspended Elections is Real.

While this entire episode is somewhat disconcerting, we are easily heartened by remembering that such an action has never been undertaken even under the worst circumstances of our Civil War.  If ever there had been a President with the plausible excuse to try such a maneuver, it had been Abraham Lincoln, yet while the war raged, he did no such thing.  For a US President to even begin contemplating such an unprecedented idea would suggest a level of treachery and treasonous intent well beyond anything we have ever seen in the US.  The very idea of suspended elections is anathema to our core principles, when we remember them, and the fact of our sparse historical educations may leave us open to those who would actually consider such things.  This brings us to the question of Barack Obama’s temperament and his suitability for the office to which he has been elected.

In the CanadaFreePress article, Juid McLeod offers this on the subject of Obama:

“Now when we have a narcissistic Obama plunging in the polls, a democrat governor in North Carolina is pushing the envelope for suspending elections and covering up a notion she dropped a bombshell by claiming she was only using hyperbole to make a point for a Rotary Club.”

What McLeod offers here is what many of Perdue’s critics have asserted: That the line about suspending elections wasn’t a joke or sarcasm as she’s since claimed, but instead a sort of trial balloon on behalf of the Obama administration.  That sort of tactic is not unknown in Washington circles, and to be honest, it might not be only the Democrat establishment that is willing now to contemplate such a tactic.  There are many Washington-insider GOP establishment types who would really prefer to avoid a re-election in the coming year if they could because the grass roots conservatives and Tea Party folks are offering challenges across the board.  In fact, some now think the move of the Florida primary to an earlier date is a play in the direction of closing off Tea Party-friendly candidates, and to an extent, they may well have a point.  While in certain respects, it could play a lesser role at the presidential nomination level, this effectively kills off many of the primary challenges that might otherwise have been offered at the Congressional level.  In effect, this whole effort to move up the primary schedule by Republicans may be the play of the establishment in defense against a conservative and Tea Party insurgency, not merely to the White House, but to the rest of the ballot.

“If the election were held tomorrow,  Obama would go down in a landslide strikingly more humiliating than the shellacking he and his party got—and never got over—in the midterms.”

I believe this is fairly accurate.  We’ve known for some time that the President’s polling numbers have been sliding downhill at an accelerating pace, and pollsters and pundits like Caddell and Schoen urged Obama not to run, while Dick Morris now insists that he will not. (Let’s be careful to remember Morris has been substantially less accurate in predicting the political climate than your uncle’s bum knee in predicting the weather.)  It was not only Obama who received the “shellacking,” as an unprecedented number of Republican establishment types also went down to primary defeat.  Still, it is true that Obama has looked potentially “land-slideable” for some time.  Obama’s like most any other politician in his desire to maintain and extend his power, but how he would manage to suspend elections is difficult to fathom, but perhaps that’s the key.  McLeod continues:

“But the 2012 election is more than a year away, and the man who made it all the way to the most powerful office on earth sans identity documents has all the booty, and the absolute power it brings, at his command.  This is Obama’s well-stocked position at a time when only suspended elections would guarantee his re-election.”

It remains true that Barack Obama has been willing to carry out policies and strategies for their implementation that no previous presidents have even seriously contemplated.  What would it take for Obama to carry out such a coup d’etat against our constitution?  Violence?  Riots?  Certainly, one would think something even more traumatic than a civil war or insurrection, if Lincoln is to be our touchstone, but is it reasonable to expect Obama to restrain himself in any way if it is he who is driving the insurrection? McLeod seems to think otherwise:

“A dangerous new chapter is being written in American history that, if successful, is destined to impact the history of the West.  It’s called ‘Re-Election by Suspended Election Revolution’.  Patriots who want their grandchildren to grow up in a Marxist-free America should start the counter revolution called the ‘Revolution for an Obama-free America’ and they should start it “like yesterday”.”

It’s quite clear that Obama is unlike previous presidents inasmuch as he is willing to undertake actions that his predecessors would not, for instance, willfully ignoring laws enacted by Congress in refusing to enforce them, in matters of immigration, and frankly on any other matter that suits his administration.  We are learning from “Operation Fast and Furious” that there exists a cadre of people within his administration who are willing to sacrifice Americans and Mexicans to create an excuse for the restricting of gun sales, so what would lead anybody to suggest this administration would not go further still in maintaining power?  He may even have willing accomplices in the establishment of the GOP, still smarting from their own losses to the Tea Party, and with all this in mind, one can only imagine what sort of “bipartisan concessions” Congress might be willing to accept in the face of some ginned up or real emergency.

As I have said from the beginning, I tend to avoid conspiracy theories, but the problem is that in this case, there’s too much evidence to suggest that the potentiality is there, because the panic is there,  so that the intent may be there also.  Obama has a well-documented presidential record of driving our economy off a cliff, flouting the law, instigating unrest, and instituting extra-constitutional policies without reference to the rule of law.  In short,  he’s already taken on the appearance and behaviors of a dictator in many key ways, and it’s really not a giant leap to imagine that he could push the envelope a good deal further in the name of maintaining his power.  He’s desperate, and he’s building his army who will be happy to support such an operation.  Whether he will actually attempt something of the sort is perhaps a matter of controversy, but he’s clearly demonstrated the audacity and capacity for worse.