Obama administration exploits fear
We all know that the Obama administration, through statements by Rahm, Hillary and the Obamunist, views America’s economic woes as an opportunity to advance its agenda. Never waste a good crisis, they say, and what better thing to do than to create the crisis that they then intended not to waste. Jonah Goldberg, in one of the most impassioned columns he’s ever written, spells out the fundamental evil in this view:
Recall that not long ago, the first item on the bill of indictment against the Bush administration was that it was “exploiting” 9/11 to enact its agenda. Al Gore shrieked that President Bush “played on our fears” to get his way. In response to nearly every Bush initiative, from the Patriot Act to the toppling of Saddam Hussein, critics would caterwaul that Bush was taking advantage of the country’s fear of terrorism.
The Bush administration always denied this, and rightly so. If the president had admitted that he was using a national calamity for narrow partisan or ideological advantage, it would have been outrageous. Indeed, every time Karl Rove or some other administration official said anything that could be even remotely interpreted as using the war or 9/11 for partisan or ideological gain, the editorial pages and Democratic news-release factories went into overdrive with righteous indignation.
Well, now we have the president, along with his chief aides, admitting — boasting! — that they want to exploit a national emergency to further their preexisting agenda, and there’s no scandal. No one even calls it a gaffe. No, they call it leadership.
It’s not leadership. It’s fear mongering.
Franklin Roosevelt said that all we have to fear is fear itself. Now, Barack Obama tacitly admits that all he has to fear is the loss of fear itself.
In other realms of life, exploiting a crisis for your own purposes is an outrage. If a business uses a hurricane warning to price-gouge on vital supplies, it is a crime. When a liberal administration does it, it’s taking advantage of a historic opportunity.
