I am increasingly dismayed by the direction this country is taking. The move toward centralization, which began after the Civil War, was enabled by the federal income tax, and institutionalized by the New Deal, is now accelerating toward meltdown at a rate that would make the global warming crowd gasp in awe. The collectivist impulse, which is the pulse beat of leftist ideologues, the socially guilt-ridden, and the chronically underachieving has now acquired a momentum that may be unstoppable. We are, in short, being shoved down the primrose path toward socialism, and soon we may not be able to return.
As I watch this dreary course of events, a thought strikes me about our president. Mr. Obama has quickly proved himself to be both incompetent and corrupt, a true fabrication of the old Chicago-style political machine, but that is only what is evident. What is less clear is the possibility that he may not be a legitimate president at all, but, rather, that he is merely the congenial face and charming mouthpiece of the people who put him in power. We all know now that when Obama reads a speech, he does well, even admirably, but that once off the prompter, he is uncertain, inarticulate, and sometimes just plain wrong. It is this fact, together with his embarrassing lack of experience, that has inclined me to think that he is nothing but an amiable figurehead.
The real owners of power are the far-left oligarchs and ideologues who discovered Obama, molded him, and boosted him into the presidency. They were fortunate that he is young, personable, can be articulate when prepared, is attractive, and ran against one of the oldest presidential candidates since Reconstruction. I continue to think that the socialist power brokers would have preferred Hillary Clinton, but her baggage was such that she had to be left at the station, and the Obama express fitted onto tracks to the White House that she was convinced ought to have been hers. However, Hillary is the most prolific liar in American politics since Richard Nixon, and her strident self-aggrandizement and monomaniacal lust for power made her unreliable in their eyes. In short, the architects of the 2008 victory concluded that, much as they would have liked to seem enlightened by forwarding a female candidate, they could not trust her.
Of course, the fact that Obama is half-black more than compensated for the loss of Hillary's gender in their eyes, and so that, together with his near total lack of executive experience and his pointless rock star appeal, made him the clear choice to run against John McCain in the chum-filled wake of George Bush. Thus far, the far-left cabal has managed to use Obama's popularity (and the fear of being branded a racist if you oppose him) to push through the most sweeping socialist legislation in the nation's history, while at the same time imposing the most onerous debt in its history. But what do the billionaire leftists care? They are fixed for life, and now they can bask not only in their wealth and privilege, but also in the vicarious sense that they are moral to boot. (This is their chief psychic drive: their wealth makes them feel guilty, and so they seek exculpation by using the government to do what they define as good.) After all, did they not provide health insurance to millions (at the taxpayers' expense - not their own), did they not take over several major profit-hungry industries (at the taxpayers' expense - not their own), did they not, in effect, nationalize the evil banking and finance industry (at the taxpayers' expense - not their own), and have they not begun a full frontal assault on the bogey of free market capitalism - the very same capitalism that enabled them to acquire their wealth in the first place?
This, I fear, was their true agenda from the start: the utter transformation of American society through the destruction of free market capitalism - a system that has provided more prosperity and more freedom to more people than any other in history. Ironically (one might say grotesquely), the far left oligarchs who created Obama hate the source of their own success - the free market and the capitalist system. They want to dismantle it and replace it with European-style socialism, and using Obama as their figurehead, they are well on the way to doing so. The massive debt with which their vast and fruitless spending programs has burdened the economy is not meant to achieve economic stimulus or social justice, but, rather, to bankrupt the capitalist system, leaving America with no apparent alternative but central, collectivist control and a command economy. That command economy, of course, will be dictated by them, through the smiling offices of people like President Obama, who spends much of his time these days insisting that he is not, and his programs are not, socialist. I think he doth protest too much. Or even worse, I suspect he may believe what he is saying, which means that he does not understand what he is doing.
That Mr. Obama is being manipulated by a neo-socialist agenda and may not even suspect it is, of course, the most disturbing prospect of all. But with a pessimism bred by decades of observing the American political experience, I cannot shake the fear that it is true. How else to explain the administration's obsessive need to spend us to the looming brink of bankruptcy, and the president's bland assurances that it is not doing so, or, even if it is, that it does not matter? I am afraid it does not matter to Mr. Obama, but to those who created and control him, it is a socialist wet dream coming true. While to our children and their children, who will inherit this debt and a nation so unlike the one entrusted to us - effectively stripped of the blessing of liberty, the challenge of free enterprise and the fruits of personal initiative - there will be left nothing but nightmare.
