For the third time, a court has found it necessary to order President Obama to comply with the law. The first two times, he thumbed his nose.
Twice before, courts ordered his administration to lift its moratorium on pending oil drilling permits and re-start the approval process. After the first court order, the administration rescinded it and instantly replaced it with the same moratorium, with a different file number. After the second court order, Obama did lift the new moratorium, but the administration has simply dragged its heels since then, approving hardly any.
Now a federal court has given him 30 days to stop screwing around and handle these pending permits with reasonable dispatch. He probably won't. He will dare any judge to find him in contempt of court. I doubt any judge will. He is Lindsay Lohan in this little play, certain he is above the law.
People should think of this every time they pay at the pump. Or any time they ignore a law, go before a judge, and are not given one opportunity after another after another to blithely ignore the judge's ruling and do as they please
This is only one of many examples - most lightly reported and hastily moved on from - of this president's utter contempt for the rule of law, for the U.S. Constitution, for states' rights and governors of states, and, of course, for you and I.
With his GM crimes, he circumvented established federal bankruptcy law that provides fair protection to all affected parties - shareholders, suppliers and workers - and made up his own law, robbing the shareholders and gifting the unions. It should be noted the shareholders he shafted include Grandpa and Grandma via pension funds, mutual funds, 401Ks and IRAs invested in the company's stock.
Obama also facilitated GM's summary termination of a thousand or so franchised dealerships. Many were successful family-owned businesses, vital to their small towns. Shuttering them put tens of thousands of their (non-union) workers on the unemployment line. And there has never yet been an investigation into or explanation of the criteria used to determine which of these dealership owners and their employees got bumped off and which were permitted to live. The only thing more remarkable than such arbitrary destructiveness is how quickly and easily the media, the abused business owners, the governors of their states and mayors of their cities gave up the fight.
Obama is now engaged in a financial conspiracy, putting the squeeze on small, independent banks, deliberately crushing them under weight of impossible compliance demands for an avalanche of new regulations, with intent of forcing their owners to sell, to roll them all up into a small number of giant, way-too-big-to-fail national banking institutions more easily controlled. Any owner or executive of a small bank who feels he can speak honestly will verify this, as some have to me. There is a very big story here of destructive, transformative intent, waiting to be dug out and exposed. Abundant evidence shows that Obama is as far from "the man of the people" he sells when campaigning. He hates small business and is firmly in bed with the biggest Wall Street megaliths, endlessly bailing out, subsidizing, and conniving to benefit them. In the health care arena, he jammed through a scheme that states have sued over and hand-picked corporations in his favor have been granted exemptions to.
The president's most recent correct and, if you wish, heroic action as commander in chief ending the life of Bin Laden deserves acknowledgement and approval. But it can't serve as a pass to act as an outlaw time and time again here at home, anymore than a street mugger or criminal mastermind gets a pass because he rescues a cat from a tree. Good deeds do not counter-balance robbery and worse.
If the media were as unanimously zealous in their investigation and exposure of President Obama's outside-the-law activities as they were in their war with Richard Nixon, we wouldn't be worrying about his re-election in 2012. We'd see him waving from the helicopter as it carried him away - or we'd see him doing a perp walk and then standing in front of a judge who would finally require him to pay the just consequence for his unlawful acts.
MSNBC's Chris Matthews currently stars in a commercial for his own network and show, running on his own network, to what purpose I can't decide. In it he says that some Republican presidential contender needs to stand up and say that, while he differs with the President on policy, he acknowledges that the President is as American as he or any other American is. That would seem to be so, in birth certificate context. But certainly not in the context of abiding the law, honoring the Constitution, respecting private individuals' rights of ownership.
No, he is contemptuous of our laws and of our rights, and we must find him in contempt.