How Obama ended the rule of law

Victor Davis Hanson wrote at National Review Online on February 17,

Somehow, having an Enemies List is all right if you’re Barack Obama and not Richard Nixon. It has become an iffy idea to cross Barack Obama. After seven years, the president has created a Hugo Chávez–like deterrent landscape, intended to remind friends and enemies alike that he is perfectly willing to use the federal government’s vast power to go after those he finds politically inconvenient, while exempting those he understands to be sympathetic to his agendas.

...To have a legitimate disagreement with the president is to be caricatured as either a coward or a bully. On illegal immigration, Obama complained that Republicans were “scared of widows and orphans coming into the United States.” Earlier, he had claimed they wanted to round up kids having ice cream: “But now, suddenly, if you don’t have your papers and you took your kid out to get ice cream, you’re going to be harassed.”

But aside from the psychodramatic tics and the jokes in poor taste, Obama has used government in a fashion contrary to the Constitution. IRS official Lois Lerner directed the federal tax agency to dole out tax-exempt status to groups on the basis of their ideology, and — particularly during a campaign season — on whether they were perceived Obama supporters. After staging a phony question-and-answer mea culpa, she pled the Fifth Amendment before a congressional committee of inquiry and retired with her full pension and apparent exemption from criminal prosecution.

...The common thread in the scandals or incompetence at the EPA, GSA, ICE, IRS, Justice Department, NASA, Secret Service, and VA has been Obama’s desire to advance his own particular political agendas in a fashion contrary to the supposed disinterested nature of these bureaucracies, if necessary putting in place political incompetents who would unquestioningly do his bidding. NASA, for example, has no business making its “foremost” aim outreach to Muslims. In the Obama era, most Americans now just assume that Black Panthers can intimidate voters at a polling place; and that illegal aliens with criminal records do not face deportation in sanctuary cities; and that failed green companies can extort federal dollars, while successful coal companies and utilities are hounded; and that Cabinet secretaries facing accusations of scandal, incompetence, or unethical behavior — Lisa Jackson, Eric Shinseki at the VA, Kathleen Sebelius at HHS, Hilda Solis at the Department of Labor — just seem to quietly resign and float away in a fashion most unlike General Petraeus.

...Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, an obscure Internet video-maker, suddenly was jailed on a minor parole violation and was damned publicly — and falsely — as the catalyst for the 2012 Benghazi attacks, in which four Americans were killed. No one now believes — as President Obama, National Security Adviser Susan Rice, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for so long insisted to the world — that Nakoula’s amateurish video prompted spontaneous mobs to take to the streets of Benghazi (just by coincidence on September 11) and to torch the American consulate and zero in their ad hoc GPS-guided mortars on the consulate annex.

...CIA Director General David Petraeus was forced to resign shortly after Obama’s successful reelection campaign in 2012, under mysterious circumstances, reportedly because he had improperly revealed classified information to a biographer, with whom he was having an affair. But that fact had been revealed to, but was not disclosed by, members of the Obama administration, months before the November 2012 election. The strange timing poses the question of why such misconduct was considered a non-firing offense before, but not after, the president’s reelection, when Petraeus, as CIA director, was likely to be slated to testify again, and at greater length, to a closed session of Congress on the Benghazi disaster.

The serial message goes out that it is unwise for a federal official or a prominent individual to oppose President Obama and his policies — while illegal or incompetent conduct, if undertaken in the president’s perceived interest, is considered to have been for a good cause and thus exempt from accountability.

In other words, there is no rule of law any more — an ossified relic in our pen-and-phone era of social justice.

Read more here.