As Brion McClanahan cogently pointed out, some observers are urging President Obama to be more Lincolnesque in his remaining two year term.
What would this entail?
It would mean that the White House languishing lame duck (distrusted and rejected by a majority of his countrymen) become even more of a vengeful ideologically driven partisan recklessly ignoring prudential compromise and diplomacy in order to appease his inner demons of narcissism, power-lust and hubris.
Will Obama engage in sociopathic belligerence and a willingness to choose divisive confrontation, leading the nation to the precipice of civil war? Will the equally sociopathic collection of belligerent narcissists in the GOP congressional leadership (McCain, McConnell, Graham, Boehner, McCarthy, Scalise, Cornyn, Crapo, etc.) engage in a reactionary and revanchist strategy to regain lost turf on Capitol Hill?
Don’t be fooled by the smoke and mirrors of the election last Tuesday and the hoary post-mortems by pundits and the mainstream elite media forecasting gridlock and divided government.
The real substance within the DC beltway has not changed. The Deep State will remain unaffected by Tuesday’s electoral results.
The American people at large still do not get it. The Deep State, driven by the imperial presidency, an acquiescent congress and a complacent federal judiciary, has destroyed the American Republic. Their parasitic welfare-warfare state, enabled by the Fed, fosters and promotes the profligacy and dependency which is at the root of this destructive process.
While the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe has moved over the past 25 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall towards building multiparty political systems, we in America have been suckered into a one-party government, rule by the incumbents and only by the incumbents.
In Tuesday’s congressional election the vast majority of incumbents were re-elected.
Politicians have but one firm goal — re-election. And robbing Peter to buy the vote of Paul is the surest way to this goal. It is the shared doctrine of nominal Republicans and Democrats alike.
Day by day, their meaningless stands on inflammatory and diversionary social issues such as gay marriage or marijuana legalization have merged until little distinction remains. They are now but factions in the one true political party in America — the incumbent party.
Despite all posturing and pretense, their only real dispute concerns whose clients will get the loot . . . and whose the bill.
Capitol Hill has become one vast congressional clip-joint, where members “service” their constituents the way a second-story man “services” a luxury condo. This lies at the root of every economic ill plaguing the country — Wall Street big bank bailouts, crony corporatism, Obamacare malfeasance, massive foreign and domestic debt, Pentagon plunder — the list could go on and on.
Because of this thievery, your income is 60 percent of what it should be. The other 40 percent is forcibly taken by politicians and given to tax-consuming special interests. The parasitical profiteers return some of the ill-gotten gains to their benefactors in the form of campaign contributions, gifts or fees.
Here is how the ruse works in detail: Politicians allocate (steal) taxpayer funds for programs under the guise of alleviating the plight of the poor, the homeless, the sick, the elderly and the unemployed, and serving the “public interest” or “national security.” Yet it is not the mother’s milk of human kindness and compassion which lubricates the intricate gears of political machinery. It is the snake oil of expediency.
The bureaucrats who administer this flim-flam provide taxpayer funds to political advocacy groups through massive grants and contracts, ostensibly intended to fulfill program objectives. However, much of the money received by the special interests is used to lobby, campaign and organize support for the mandarins to manage, additional funding for existing programs, and the re-election of their shills who favor the appropriations which play politics with human misery.
Farcical public hearings are staged to persuade the complacent and compliant news media that greater spending is essential to deal with these pressing problems. Incumbents then appropriate more funds for existing malevolence and initiate new mischief through legislative legerdemain. In turn, they mass their campaign contributions from clients and franking privileges for their re-election efforts.
The bureaucracy awards more pilfered taxpayers’ funds to the special interests, and the process begins all over again.
The losers are the hapless taxpayers who pay for this sophisticated protection racket and the truly unfortunate members of society who receive only a fraction of the promised benefits of the programs set up in their names.
The winners are those tax-consuming bunko artists and wirepullers who gorge themselves at the public trough. The looted tax monies are siphoned off by special interests to promote their schemes, by public employee unions who want to finance the expansion of their petty bureaucratic empires, and by grasping politicians who want hard cash for re-election kitties and for conversion to their own personal use.
Mike Lofgren is a former congressional staff member who served on both the House and Senate budget committees. As a bacterium within the bloated belly of the DC beast he has seen firsthand the rise of what analysts have described as the insidious and extra constitutional Deep State within the overt one found adjacent to the National Mall and in junior high Civics text books. Lofgren has some clinical observations which should be perused by dispassionate observers.
6:47 pm on November 8, 2014
