It
will not surprise that on the IRS scandal and other permutations of Obamagate,
I consider Obama both responsible and guilty. I’ve warned time and again for years that Obama has a
totalitarian streak, and now some of the results of that are coming out.
Yet
I do not expect some smoking gun to come out linking him directly to IRS
targeting, NSA overreach, EPA targeting, Fast and Furious or anything else.
History
illustrates why a Watergate-style smoking gun is unlikely. As Erick Erickson points out, Henry II
probably never directly ordered the assassination of Thomas Beckett. But, in a rage (And Henry II had an
infamous temper.), he let his displeasure with Beckett and his desire to be rid
of that “turbulent priest”, that “low-born cleric” be known.
And
he had thugs around him who were too willing to do just that.
Closer to our times (and at the risk of violating Godwin’s Law), there is no known
document in which Hitler ordered the Holocaust. But the Holocaust most certainly did happen, and Hitler was
most certainly responsible for it.
But it is an open question how he could have been convicted for it had
he lived:
The lack of direct documentary evidence linking Hitler to genocide
is interesting and if he had been captured alive, I'm not sure how the
Nuremberg prosecutors would have built a case against him. Especially if he had
pulled an Obama, thrown Himmler and Goering under the bus and piously claimed
that the first time he had heard of the whole death camp thing was when he had
read about them in the papers.
Recently,
I’ve been reading an interesting book, The
Nazis – A Warning from History by Laurence Rees. Rees points out something not generally well known about
Hitler – he was no administrator.
The
Nazis have a reputation as being efficient and making the trains run on time
and all that. But to a large
extent the opposite was the case.
Hitler loved conquest, but was not interested in the nuts and bolts of actually governing. One result was that the
domestic bureaucracy under the Nazis was chaotic. Hitler himself was lazy, sleeping late, taking long naps, watching movies and disliking being bothered with lowly documents.
But
he was very good at making his wishes known and at surrounding himself with
loyal thugs eager to make his wishes true. The thugs did not so much follow direct orders (as they
later claimed in their feeble defence) as much as they “worked towards the
Fuhrer,” i. e. they took the initiative to act in the spirit of Hitler’s aims.
(Rees, p. 57-60)
Now
Obama is no Hitler, but is this beginning to sound familiar?
Obama
would rather play golf (125 times and counting) and jet around fundraising and giving speeches than
actually governing. Heck, by one
account, he went to bed during Benghazi, leaving poor Panetta in charge. Of course, the next day he jetted off
to Vegas.
At
the same time, Obama is very ideological and lets it be known very publicly
(and no telling how much privately) what he thinks of his “enemies” and that
they should be punished. And he
surrounds himself with thugs like Eric Holder, Lois Lerner, Kathleen Sebelius,
Lisa Jackson, etc. who are all too willing to do some punishing.
So
there is no need for him to directly order the IRS to target conservatives, for
example. And it is possible he
never did so. Let the thugs do the
dirty work.
Thus
we may very well have once again a leader responsible for outrageous evil, but
with no direct documentary evidence for that, with no smoking gun.
If
so, dealing with Obama and stopping him will be that much more difficult than
dealing with Nixon.
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