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In the first article in this series, we examined the remarkable fact that as President, Barack Obama has presided over the loss of not one but two wars and yet, polls say, he is still a viable candidate for re-election. It's hard to think that a majority of voters might not mind us losing two wars, but apparently the pollsters would have us believe that it's so.
It's almost as hard to believe that voters don't have a problem with corrupt politics, but that seems to be the case as well. From start to finish, the Obama Administration has been a never-ending sludgefest of taxpayer dollars being used to line the pockets of Democrat donors, who make sure to send a healthy chunk of change to the election campaigns of the Democrat politicians who made their ill-gotten gains possible.
One of the few memorable lines from this campaign season is Vice President Biden's constant refrain:
Osama Bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive!
Bin Laden is indeed dead, though as recent events in Libya showed, we're not as much safer for that as we hoped. In the technical sense GM is alive, though even Mr. Obama's own Treasury department estimates the loss to taxpayers at $25 billion.
The problem is that, thanks entirely to that $25 billion loss, the UAW is still alive and well. When Mr. Obama bailed out GM and Chrysler, he slashed apart centuries of bankruptcy law in order to steal corporate value from the creditors who were legally entitled to it so that he could award it to his union thug allies who weren't. As a result, GM still suffers from the same problem that led it to the brink of bankruptcy: it is still held captive to outdated work rules and uncompetitive high labor rates.
Why did Mr. Obama spend your money on not solving the problem? Because that's not the problem he wanted to solve. As his countless statements make plain, he could hardly care less about companies making money; in fact, most of the time he'd rather they didn't.
He does care very deeply about unions being able to collect dues, enforced by law and union contract regardless of the desire of individual workers. Why? Because unions donate well over 90% of their money to Democrats. Indeed, unions are collectively the largest source of Democratic fundraising. And that's not to mention the boots on the ground they provide at protests, rallies, election day, and not a few boots in the teeth of conservative opponents.
So Mr. Obama brazenly gifted taxpayer dollars to his political allies. What about car industry players that weren't overwhelmingly Democrat? They got the shaft: the White House required GM and Chrysler to close most of the Republican car dealerships in order to get the survival money.
Using the power of government and taxpayer dollars to harm your political enemies and support your political friends is corruption, pure and simple. Mr. Obama has become so notorious for this sort of theft that Mitt Romney could hammer him with it in the recent debate, in the context of green energy:
In one year, you provided $90 billion in [tax] breaks to the green energy world... A number of them happened to be owned by people who were contributors to your campaigns.
Mr. Obama's response? He didn't have one - because it's true and it's on the record.
That's just money - big money, admittedly, but as the Fed proves every day, we can always print more of that. Far more serious is the Fast and Furious scandal, in which our government provided assault weapons to known drug dealers who used them to murder hundreds of innocent Mexicans and several American law enforcement officials as well. Our mainstream media doesn't seem to care, but Spanish-language Univision television was incensed enough to run an in-depth report on this travesty.
This outrage took place under the administration of Attorney General Eric Holder. Did it take place under the orders of President Obama? We don't know and we aren't going to find out, because Mr. Obama has falsely exerted "executive privilege" against investigative demands by Congress. We'll quote ourselves on the bottom line:
The trouble is that it's an executive privilege - i.e. it applies to the President and only to the President. Barack Obama is claiming a privilege that applies only to documents involving him, when previously he went on TV and said he knew nothing about Fast and Furious and had never seen any documents about it!
Either he does, or he doesn't. Either he was lying then or he is lying now.
Politicians lie every day, but even politicians don't usually lie about events that led directly to... well, we'll let Univision describe.
On January 30, 2010, a commando of at least 20 hit men parked themselves outside a birthday party of high school and college students in Villas de Salvarcar, Ciudad Juarez. Near midnight, the assassins, later identified as hired guns for the Mexican cartel La Linea, broke into a one-story house and opened fire on a gathering of nearly 60 teenagers. Outside, lookouts gunned down a screaming neighbor and several students who had managed to escape. Fourteen young men and women were killed, and 12 more were wounded before the hit men finally fled. Three of the high caliber weapons fired that night in Villas de Salvarcar were linked to a gun tracing operation run by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF). [emphasis added]
On second thought, we take that back: if our decisions helped 14 teenagers be machine-gunned to death by psychopaths who crashed a birthday party, yeah, we'd be tempted to lie about it too. But then, we hope we'd have the shame and common decency not to run for President afterwards.
Yet Mr. Obama is, without a moment's hesitation, and two-thirds of Hispanic voters plan to vote for him. It's bizarre and unprecedented.
We've had political corruption and scandals before, but much of the time the disgraced don't run again, and when they do they're usually unceremoniously sent packing. Ulysses S. Grant is remembered as a fantastic general but a terrible president because he presided over an administration loaded with corruption, even though he has never even been suspected of personally or politically benefiting from it as Mr. Obama has. President Harding was so disgraced by the Teapot Dome scandal even though he himself didn't benefit, that he died of exhaustion and shame.
We could go on and on about Mr. Obama's corruption, from his blatant lawlessness in ordering government contractors not to send out legally required layoff notices before the election, to the infamous dropped case against Black Panthers who intimidated voters who might have been inclined to vote for someone other than himself. But instead, in the next article in this series we'll take the advice of that august political sage Bill Clinton - "It's the economy, stupid!"