• Spent money like drunken sailors

               • Failed to adequately protect our border

               • Protected illegal aliens

               • Compromised our guaranteed rights and freedoms

               • Restricted business and industry in ways detrimental to our economy

               • Crippled the healthy operation of the free market 

Precious little difference exists between the two men, though speed does come to mind.  Barack Obama unquestionably has a lead foot…

Can we all just be honest now about President Obama’s definition of change at this point?  Not what people told us it was during the campaign, not what many wanted to imagine, not what his propaganda machine continues to crank out, but what it actually is…?

The sum total?  President Obama wants to overcome our Constitution. He does not see it as a precious document that keeps us safe from government tyranny.  He sees it as precisely the opposite: a hindrance to government expansion.  He is busily redefining or bypassing every one of the protections the Constitution affords us, transforming this country from a tried and true republic into something quite other.  While the last century has certainly demonstrated the growing presence of a political elite, the Progressive machine Barack Obama is expanding and cementing is alarming in its scope.  The politics of corruption—the Chicago Way—being employed to install it is robbing the power of the legislative and judicial branches of government and even the president’s own cabinet members.  All authority is quickly being vested in the president himself and those cronies whom he imbues with a measure of sub-authority.  If the number of “tsars” he has appointed does not in and of itself point clearly to this fact, I don’t know what does. 

That the power-hungry Congress is not shocked into action at the theft of its own power is nothing short of shocking.  You’d think they would at least care enough about their ability to control…but apparently not.  They are either asleep at the wheel or they are every bit as committed to a Progressive transformation of our nation as Obama himself.

I give you President Obama’s own words concerning the Constitution:

"The Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth, and of more basic issues such as political and economic justice in society.  To that extent, as radical as I think people try to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn’t that radical.  It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution, at least as it’s been interpreted, and the Warren Court interpreted in the same way, that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties.”            (Barack Obama, radio interview, 2001)

President Obama consistently distances himself from the label “radical” and disavows the seriousness of his associations with self-acknowledged radicals.  Here, though, he makes his true nature plain.  The Warren Court, whose rulings were in many ways injurious to our Constitution, were not nearly radical enough from the president’s perspective.  He exposes his radical agenda in taking such a low view of the document that has kept this country uniquely free for more than two centuries.  He thinks we should unmoor from it. 

This is the man to whom we have handed power and who is grabbing larger and larger tracts of it at every opportunity, including but not limited to the nationalization of banks, big business, and manufacturing.  President Obama does not advocate a politics of true liberty but one of dependence upon government.  He will not be content until we are, all of us—Democrat, Republican, Independent, African-American, Asian-American, Caucasion, Hispanic, rich, middle-income, poor, gay, straight, bi-sexual, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, agnostic, atheist—under the full power and control of the federal government.  Because, you see, he believes the government is ultimately far more equipped to provide and determine what is best for us than we are as individuals.

I certainly hope, dear reader, that you have quite a different opinion on the matter.

The founding fathers were wise—far wiser than most people give them credit for.  Yes, call it a “charter of negative liberties” if you will, but the purpose of our Constitution remains clear: to keep government from overtaking and dominating the people of the United States of America.  Yes!  It tells government what it can’t do. Hallelujah!  President Obama wants instead a document that tells you what Government will—even must—do for you, even if you don’t want it to do so. Dear reader, consider the following:

                • Social Security

                • Medicare

                • Medicaid

                • The U.S. Postal Service (USPS)

                • The Internal Revenue Service (IRS)

                • Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP)

                • The latest stimulus package 

The first three, each designed to foster dependence (though Social Security was disingenuously billed as a temporary measure), are enormous, legalized Ponzi schemes, rife with mismanagement and outright fraud.  

USPS delivers less and less mail, now threatens to eliminate Saturday delivery, but costs us more and more.  This year, the Postmaster General is making over $850,000 for running this incredibly inefficient operation.

The IRS has become perhaps the most intrusive organization in the entire country.  The tax code that it is tasked to oversee and enforce is 17,000 pages long—an extremely effective instrument of frequently Mafia-like intimidation.  These volumes and volumes of code are not designed to clarify but to confuse and control.

TARP…?  Forced through at the speed of lightening. Otherwise, it was said, our economy, and perhaps that of the entire world, would collapse.  It’s funds were intended to buy up—at great taxpayer expense—toxic assets infecting our banking system.  Instead, the Treasury Secretary has used TARP largely as a discretionary fund for whatever causes or programs strike his fancy.

The latest stimulus? Every day we discover in greater detail the superfluous, dubious, and often criminally irresponsible nature of the “shovel-ready projects” it was supposed to fund—again at huge cost to the taxpayer.

These examples prove but a very a few in the long line of credentials that makes up the government’s abysmal resume.  Not one of them inspires trust in the government’s competence or honesty.  In fact, strong evidence exists in the case of most of these programs and/or agencies that they were intended to facilitate federal control and a large-scale redistribution of wealth—not truly to provide services and benefits.  Don't even get me started on the abuses of privacy and freedom for which the problematic Patriot Act signed by President Bush has opened the way. That's for another day.

Now President Obama is leading an effort to acquire control over our health care... Mark my words:  If the federal government is allowed to lay one more finger on our health care (Medicare and Medicaid are bad enough), we are all doomed—physically, financially, and constitutionally.  The federal government has not demonstrated the ability to manage anything without excessive cost and gross mismanagement at best and the theft of liberty at worst.  Why would we now trust them with our private health records and our very lives?  Why would we place the most precious thing we have—our health and our ability privately to choose how to safeguard it—into the dangerous realm of overwhelming government bureaucracy and control?  No one, including the disadvantaged, whom Progressive government health care reform is supposedly meant most to help, will benefit.  I will spend more time on this matter in future entries.  But seriously, alarm bells and flashing warning lights should be going off in the head of every American with a brain—including the disadvantaged.  There is a way to reform health care, but government involvement should have nothing to do with it.

The tentacles of government are creeping around the throat of the Constitution.  As they do they threaten to choke us all to death through limitation of rights, restriction of choice, obliteration of opportunity, destruction of self-determination, and appropriation and redistribution of hard-earned personal finances—never mind the freedoms and finances of those not even yet born.

George Washington, in his great wisdom, once remarked:

"Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master."

He was right. 

So was Benjamin Franklin, who noted:

“Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.”

It is time for us finally to realize that government is not our friend.  It is indeed a necessary evil that should be curtailed to the greatest degree possible.  When government smiles, cozies up, and tells us what it wants to do FOR us we need consistently to raise our eyebrow and ask what it actually wants to do TO us.

It is time to remind President Obama and our legislators, regardless of party, that we have an extraordinary Constitution, an inspired document that has made the United States a place to which the oppressed of the world have flocked in order to enjoy freedom and opportunity—not guaranteed success, but priceless opportunity.

It is time to understand that if we unmoor from our Constitution, we will quickly become the oppressed. It is already happening.

It is time to stand and raise our diverse voices in unified, unwavering, civil dissent.

Time is running out.