Barking

Fred Siegel writes in City Journal,

In truth, there has been no such thing as a “mainstream” press since 2008, when, in a manifestation of the country’s political polarization, much of the media enlisted in the Obama campaign. The presidents of CBS and NBC have siblings on Obama’s national security staff who helped orchestrate the catastrophe at Benghazi. Key members of the White House staff are married to prominent national reporters for ABC and CNN. The morning news at CNN is anchored by Chris Cuomo, son of former New York governor Mario Cuomo and brother of current New York governor Andrew Cuomo, who has considered a presidential run. George Stephanopoulos, the anchor for ABC’s Sunday morning show, is a former senior advisor to President Clinton and maintains a connection to the Clinton Foundation.

The winners in Obama’s America, where the stock market has doubled even as wages have stagnated, have been the big guys—big business, big labor, big government. Unelected bureaucrats have never had it so good. The Affordable Care Act, for instance, created 159 new boards, commissions, or programs. Elected officials more and more resemble these job-for-life bureaucrats, likelier to die in office than to be fired (or voted out) for cause. In 2014, 95 percent of sitting members of the House of Representatives won reelection, according to the Center for Responsive Politics; most of those who left went to work as lobbyists or political operatives. Washington, D.C. recently passed Silicon Valley as the richest region in the U.S.: seven of the nation’s ten wealthiest counties are in the D.C metro area. Not incidentally, Washington now has the highest rate of fine-wine consumption in the United States.

The federal government’s reach has become so vast that it suffocates informed debate and political accountability. No one in the Obama administration has been held accountable—as Richard Nixon’s operatives were—for using the IRS as a mechanism to punish dissenters. Nor have the administrators at the Veterans Administration been held to account for their criminal conduct in running the VA in Arizona. GSA bureaucrats held a lavish conference in Las Vegas, complete with clowns and psychics. They have not only gone unscathed; they’ve also been rewarded with bonuses.

Elites in both parties had little to say about the almost 200 illegal immigrants with convictions for homicide, 426 with sexual-assault convictions, and 16,000 with drunk-driving convictions, who, instead of being deported, have been released into American communities. Altogether, over the last seven years, the Obama administration has let 104,000 people who by law should have been deported remain on American soil. The Republican congressional leadership dueled with Obama over immigration reform, to scant effect. Unable to come to an agreement with the opposition, Obama invoked executive privilege, bypassing the Constitution and Congress in an effort to legalize 5 million illegal immigrants—that is, future Democratic voters.

...Two weeks after Trump announced his presidential run, just 15 percent of Republicans supported him for president in a YouGov poll. But then Trump’s anti-illegal immigrant warnings were given ugly embodiment. On July 5, 2015, 32-year-old Kate Steinle, posing with her father for a photograph on a San Francisco pier, was struck dead by a bullet. Her devastated family discovered that the man who fired the fatal shot was Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez, an illegal immigrant from Mexico convicted of seven previous felonies and five times ordered deported from the United States—but who had cleverly taken refuge among the bien pensants of San Francisco, a sanctuary city that refused to cooperate with federal immigration officials. President Obama stayed resolutely silent on the Steinle killing and San Francisco’s nullification of federal law. Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton had nothing to say about the murder. She did, however, move a fundraiser scheduled at the home of the Steinle family lawyer to a new location.

By contrast, Trump furiously denounced the flouting of federal law that had resulted in Steinle’s death. The shooting helped send his poll numbers soaring. By the third week in July, Trump’s support had almost doubled, to 28 percent.

Read more here.