Order of the Ephors – Can the Republic be saved?

I hear many conservatives these days talking about following the example of their forbears who escaped tyranny in Europe by fleeing to America.  They’re reading books about a quieter, more stress-free life in Costa Rica, Ecuador, or Panama.  At the other end of the spectrum we have those who’ve given up on the idea that Republicans will ever have the guts to go toe-to-toe with Obama and his criminal gang.  They’re in a stand-and-fight mode, hoping either for secession or a second American civil war.  I tend to find myself in both camps, depending on what day it is, but allow me to offer a heretofore overlooked theory that may cause us all to reconsider.

As political pundits speculate about the possibility of a Hillary Clinton run for the White House in 2016, it becomes clearer and clearer that, beginning sometime prior to 2008, Democrats made a critical strategic decision.  Since they were unlikely to ever again elect a president based on ideology… because it simply is not possible to ram a blatantly liberal agenda down the throats of a population that is largely conservative… they concluded that the only way they could win back the White House was by engaging in political “gimmickry.”

But first some history.  Looking back to the Vietnam era… the first major pivot point in U.S. political history since the end of World War II… they found that Republicans had occupied the White House for 28 years, while they had controlled the White House for only 12… and those were not particularly satisfying years for rank-and-file Democrats or for liberal ideologues.

Jimmy Carter (1977-1981), was not a “big picture” leader.  Unlike Nixon or Reagan, Carter was a micro-manager, and although he was the “cream of the crop” among the eight who sought the nomination in 1976, he turned out to be the sort of man who would dole out the paper, pencils, and paperclips from the White House supply closet.  And when he failed to take decisive action to rescue the fifty-two Americans held hostage for 444 days by radical Islamists in Tehran, he caused major damage to the Democrat brand and was defeated for reelection in 1980.

Bill Clinton (1993-2001), owed the greatest success of his presidency to Newt Gingrich and a Republican-controlled Congress.  However, welfare reform was not popular among Democrats who’d spent more than four decades creating a permanent underclass of poor and disadvantaged who populated the Democrats’ welfare plantation and who were all reliable Democrat voters.  To the extent that millions of Americans at the lower end of the economic spectrum discovered that the “pursuit of happiness” in America was all about becoming independent and self-supporting, the ranks of the Democrat Party shrunk proportionately.  A simple cause-and-effect analysis proves that, as more people realize the American Dream, the fewer Democrats there are.

Coupled with the fact that Clinton was only the second president in American history to be impeached, the failure of his healthcare reform effort in his first two years in office, and the success of his Republican-sponsored welfare reform program in the last two years of his first term, put his presidency in a less than favorable light among many rank-and-file Democrats.

With all of these things in mind, and with George W. Bush nearing the end of his second term, Democrats apparently concluded that the only way they could guarantee a return to power in the White House was by engaging in political “gimmickry.”  They would have to nominate either an electable black man or an electable white woman.

The black male “gimmick” Democrats chose was Barack Obama, an inexperienced and totally unprincipled “community organizer.”  It was irrelevant to Democrats that, had they hired an executive search firm to evaluate the eligibility, experience, and leadership capacity of the 1,000 most able black men in America, Obama’s name would not have appeared on that list.

Not only was he ineligible to serve as president… he is not a natural born citizen… he couldn’t produce a valid birth certificate, he used a stolen Social Security number, his draft registration card was forged, and he couldn’t pass a simple Social Security E-Verify test.  However, he was an attractive man with an engaging smile… Joe Biden once described Obama as “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy”… and although he is incapable of delivering a simple declaratory sentence, extemporaneously, he has been trained to read a speech from a teleprompter with such conviction that low-information voters will swear he knows exactly what he’s talking about.

In short, Democrats didn’t care that Obama was ineligible to serve or that he had no relevant experience.  What the Obama gimmick was all about was his ability to charm low-information voters into voting for him.  No other black male Democrat in America had a snowball’s chance of being nominated or elected.  Obama was, and is, a one-of-a-kind political “gimmick.”

The white female “gimmick” Democrats offered up was Hillary Rodham Clinton, the carpet-bagging U.S. senator from New York.  To enumerate the many shady escapades of Rodham-Clinton’s adult life would require a book.  However, to recall just a few, we can begin with her highly questionable commodity futures trading experience.  In 1978, while serving as first lady of Arkansas, Hillary Clinton was able to turn an initial investment of $5,000 into a $100,000 windfall in just ten months, relying on the cattle futures trading advice of an attorney for Tyson Foods, Inc., one of Arkansas’s largest corporations.

In late 1998, with more than two years remaining in her husband’s second term, New York Democrats were not confident that they could defeat former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, the likely Republican candidate, for the open U.S. Senate seat.  Unable to recruit a New Yorker with real star power, they began to focus on potential carpetbaggers.  Several top Democrats urged first lady Hillary Clinton to move to New York to run for the Democratic nomination.

After winning the senate nomination unopposed, Clinton campaigned heavily in the large and influential New York Jewish community.  Six weeks after the 2000 election she participated in a 45-minute meeting with her husband and Rabbi David Twersky, of New Square, New York, a Hasidic community that had given Hillary 1,400 votes to only 12 for her Republican opponent. The Rabbi pleaded the case of four New Square men who had been convicted of bilking the federal government out of some $30 million in federal housing subsidies.  In one of the most controversial decisions of his last day in office, Clinton granted clemency to all four of the men.

Another major constituency Hillary needed was the New York Puerto Rican community.  So it was quite fortuitous that, on August 11, 1999, her husband commuted the sentences of sixteen members of FALN, a violent Puerto Rican terror group that set off 120 bombs, mostly in New York and Chicago, killing six and maiming dozens more, many of them police officers.  The sixteen men were convicted of conspiracy and sedition and sentenced to prison terms ranging from 35 to 105 years.  During her campaign, Hillary initially supported the commutation but when the commutations backfired on her husband she withdrew her support.

But now, as Hillary ponders a second run in 2016, and as Democrats, generally, feel that Hillary is still owed something big because of her courage in standing by her philandering husband, she is once again embroiled in controversy.  Apparently as a means of assuaging any bitterness that remained after her loss to Obama in 2008, she agreed to serve as Obama’s secretary of state.  And although liberals and Democrats are fond of proclaiming her to be “one of the greatest secretaries in history,” the fact is that she had little or no impact on U.S. foreign policy during her four-year tenure.  During her four years at the State Department she was given a large staff, an airplane, and an unlimited expense account and told to just travel.

And while she visited most capitols on the globe and participated in thousands of photo-ops… exactly what Obama wanted her to do… he and his pro-Islamic aides conducted U.S. foreign policy out of the Oval Office.  And when a U.S. ambassador and three others were murdered by Islamic terrorists… all on her watch… Clinton insisted to the surviving families that the attack was in response to an obscure Internet video, promising that she and Obama would bring the murderers to justice.  The fact is, she was such a non-entity as Secretary of State that her own Benghazi Accountability Review Board didn’t even bother to interview her.

The thing that conservatives and Republicans need to recognize is that Obama and Hillary are nothing more than political “gimmicks.”  Democrats reasoned that whichever one lost in 2008 would be all but a shoo-in for the 2016 nomination.  But that’s not the way things are turning out.  All Hillary has accomplished in four years at the State Department is to further damage her already shaky credibility.  As the Benghazi cover-up continues to unravel and more and more whistleblowers step forward, her political prospects grow dimmer and dimmer.

Since George W. Bush left the White House in January 2009, the Democrat Party has been a “one-trick pony.”  The American people have now seen that trick and they’re not likely to want to sit through an encore, with Hillary as the star performer.  So, take heart, patriots, take a long hard look at the Democrat Party.  What you’ll likely find is that they only had two political “gimmicks” worthy of mention; they don’t have a third waiting in the wings.  And if they should try to create a Hispanic “gimmick” between now and 2016, they’ll soon find that Republicans now have Hispanics who can easily top theirs.  Unlike Hillary and Obama, Hispanic Republicans are true patriots, men and women of real quality.  They are not “gimmicks.”

On the 1,560^th day of his bogus presidency, Barack Obama left the Oval Office and walked the short distance down the hallway to the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room.  As he entered the auditorium he held a short list of six names clutched tightly in his hand.  The list contained the names of six White House correspondents, selected in advance by his press secretary, who would be allowed to ask questions of the make-believe president.

The list was headed by Ed Henry, chief White House correspondent for Fox News… an all but obligatory inclusion because of Henry’s position as the outgoing president of the White House Correspondents Association.  The others on the list were the usual suspects: Jessica Yellin, of CNN; Jonathan Karl, of ABC; Bill Plante, of CBS; F. Chuck Todd, of NBC; and Antonieta Cadiz, of the Spanish language newspaper, La Opiñion… a sop to his upcoming trip to Mexico and Costa Rica.

With the exception of the Fox correspondent, it was a group that could be expected to ask only “softball” questions… but that’s not what happened.  His third questioner, Jonathan Karl, of ABC News, asked, “Mr. President, you are a hundred days into your second term.  On the gun bill, you put, it seems, everything into it to try to get it passed.  Obviously, it didn’t.  Congress has ignored your efforts to try to get them to undo these sequester cuts.  There was even a bill that you threatened to veto that got 92 Democrats in the House voting yes.  So my question to you is, do you still have the ‘juice’ to get the rest of your agenda through this Congress?”

Obviously stunned by that punch to the political solar plexus, Obama responded, “Well, if you put it that way, Jonathan (chuckle, chuckle), maybe I should just pack up and go home.  Golly.  You know, the… I think it’s… it’s a little (chuckle, chuckle) as Mark Twain said, you know, rumors of my demise may be a little exaggerated at this point.”

Then, returning to his tiresome old blame-it-all-on-Congress theme, the most petulant political leader in American history said, “Look, we… you know, we understand that we’re in divided government right now.  Republicans control the House of Representatives.  In the Senate, this habit of requiring 60 votes for even the most modest piece of legislation has gummed up the works there.  And I think it’s… it comes as no surprise, not even to the American people, but even to members of Congress themselves, that right now things are pretty dysfunctional up on Capitol Hill…”

It is a recurring theme with Barack Obama, who regularly reminds all who will listen that he was reelected in 2012.  What he fails to mention is that he won reelection with only 51.1% of the vote, while Republicans won 54% of the congressional seats across the country, compared to the Democrats’ 46%.  At the county level, nationwide, Mitt Romney carried 2,421 (78%) of the 3,113 counties, while Obama carried only 692, or 22% of the counties.  Obama won reelection by carrying the big cities, heavily inhabited by those who want something from government, those who rely on the “nanny state” for their shelter, their healthcare, and their “daily bread.”

Republicans won the governor’s office and both houses of the state legislature in 24 states; Democrats won the governor’s office and both houses of the legislature in just 12 states.  If the voters declared a mandate in 2012, it was Republicans who won it.  So, take away the non-producing parasites from the vote totals and we are left with a massive GOP victory.

When questioned about his policy on the Syrian civil war, Obama said, “My policy from the beginning has been that President Assad had lost credibility… and that the only way to bring stability and peace to Syria is going to be for Assad to step down and to move forward on a political transition.”

In that brief statement, Obama stated, not a policy, but an opinion and a distant hope… an opinion that most fifth graders share and a distant hope that has near zero chance of coming to fruition.  But the “leader of the free world” thinks it’s a “policy.”  He went on to say, “But even if chemical weapons were not being used in Syria, we’d still be thinking about tens of thousands of people, innocent civilians… women and children… who’ve been killed by a regime that’s more concerned about staying in power than it is about the well-being of its people.”  (Oops!  The pot should not call the kettle black.)

Then, F. Chuck Todd, of NBC, asked a question about Obama’s attitude toward those Democrats in Congress who are beginning to see Obamacare as a “potential train wreck.”

Demonstrating that he has no concept whatsoever of either economic principles or the Law of Unintended Consequences, Obama replied that, “The Affordable Care Act… Obamacare… has now been with us for three years… A huge chunk of it has already been implemented.  And for the 85 to 90 percent of Americans who already have health insurance, they’re already experiencing most of the benefits of the Affordable Care Act, even if they don’t know it…”

What tens of millions of Americans who already have full time jobs and health insurance do know is that they will soon find themselves without either.  Being a liberal Democrat and unable to process any cause-and-effect situation beyond a single factor, he seems not to understand that a great many employers, unable to afford the higher costs of health care for full time employees, will be cutting 40-hour work weeks back to part time 29-hour work weeks so that they won’t have to provide the part time workers with health insurance.  As a result, millions of American families will be struggling to make ends meet while working at part time jobs and losing their healthcare insurance.  Most will find it necessary to take a second part time job just to get by.

It’s what honest Democrats correctly refer to as a coming “train wreck,” and the only justice, if there is justice, lies in the fact that the vast majority of those so victimized by Obamacare will be those who voted to elect and reelect him.

After taking his final question from Ms. Cadiz, there was a shouted question regarding what many in the mainstream media see as the cutting edge issue of the 21^st century: the acceptance and normalization of homosexuality as a lifestyle equal in every respect to the heterosexual lifestyle.  A reporter shouted, “Jason Collins, do you want to say anything about him?”

Obama stopped dead in his tracks.  The man who would have ignored a shouted question about his administration’s failure to heed warnings about one of the Boston Marathon bombers, the man who would have ignored a shouted question about his foot-dragging on the Keystone XL Pipeline… took the time to confer role model status on a black athlete who has publicly “come out of the closet.”

Proving once again that, without a teleprompter and without being able to rely on the adolescent “you know” crutch, he would be barely able to communicate, he said, “Yeah… I had a chance to talk to him yesterday.  He seems like a terrific young man, and, you know, I told him I couldn’t be prouder of him… And, you know, given the importance of sports in our society, for an individual who’s excelled at the highest levels in one of (our) major sports (to) go ahead and say, this is who I am, I’m proud of it, I’m still a great competitor, I’m still seven feet tall and can bang with Shaq and, you know, deliver a hard foul… and for, you know, a lot of young people out there who, you know, are… are… are, you know, gay or lesbian, who are struggling with these issues, to see a role model like that who’s unafraid, I think it’s a great thing…  And so I’m very proud of him…”

This is the man who was so busy prepping for yet another high-dollar fundraiser in Las Vegas on September 11, 2012 that he couldn’t find the time to call his Secretary of State or his Secretary of Defense to find out whether or not his ambassador to Libya was dead or alive.  Yet, he found time to call a black professional basketball player to congratulate him on having the courage to admit that he is fond of dropping his knickers in the men’s locker room, hoping that a teammate will come along and see him as a “target of opportunity.”  Like it or not, Democrats, that’s who Barack Obama is.

The Obama tenure in the White House proves one thing, and one thing alone.  It proves that our economy is so big and so strong, and that our underlying principles of self-government are so timeless and so enduring, that even the most dedicated enemy of our country, working 24/7 from a desk in the Oval Office for eight years, can only slow it down temporarily.  Those who’ve studied physics understand the concept of kinetic energy, otherwise known as momentum, the product of mass times velocity.  In economic terms, the momentum of our national economy is a product of its size and its dynamism.

Obama may have arrived at the White House in January 2009 convinced that he could repeal the laws of economics.  He has done damage, but just as the laws of physics are not subject to repeal, neither are the basic laws of economics.  So, yes, Mr. Obama, you should take your own advice… just “pack up and go home.”  You have two daughters who will, for the rest of their lives, have to bear the burden of carrying your name, identifying them as daughters of the most corrupt president in history.  So why not do them a very big favor by cutting your losses now.  Pack up your childish petulance, take whatever positive legacy you have left, and go home to Chicago… or to Kenya… two places where you can’t possibly make things any worse than they already are.