"Soft Despotism"

Michael Barone on Obama and "Security vs. Liberty."

He quotes de Tocqueville:

Every measure which establishes legal charity on a permanent basis and gives to it an administrative form creates thereby a class unproductive and idle, living at the expense of the class which is industrious and given to work.

Barone goes on to say

The Obama administration is assiduous in the protection of this administrative class. It offers $6,800,000,000 to the state of California on one hand, and then threatens to take it back because the state cut the pay of public employee union members by $74,000,000. The government gives JPMorgan Chase $25,000,000,000, and then insists that it give up in the Chrysler deal what it would ordinarily receive in bankruptcy proceedings and turn it over to fund the health care benefits of United Auto Worker retirees.

The policy proposals of the Obama administration are portrayed by Brooks as addressing the concerns of middle-income people uneasy about the workings of capitalism. But they are not aimed at giving these people more control and choices over the course of their lives -- rather the contrary.

The medical treatment they would receive under a government health insurance plan would be determined by centralized experts making decisions based on "comparative effectiveness research," which tends to produce different results from month to month. Their pay and working conditions would be determined, under the unions' card check bill, by federal arbitrators. The cost of their electricity and the size of their cars could well be determined by officials at the Environmental Protection Agency.

Taken with Obama's appeal to empathy on the bench rather than a reliance on what the Constitution says, his and his minions' disregard for the Law altogether, bullying of share-holders looking for their due in bankruptcy proceedings, the Treasury bullying banks*, the inability of Obama's minions to find someone who will work for him that doesn't have skeletons in the closet that cause serious doubts as to their suitability, frankly, I am forced to revive a quip I first made on Billy Jeff Clinton's watch, and suggest that Obama is actually the result of a legacy KGB operation that they forgot to pull the plug on...


*This happened towards the end of George Bush's watch, alas, although the reproduced documents on the Powerline Blog's entry indicate that it was with the Obama campaigns active conivance, and the McCain campaigns knowledge, alhgough the later's approval is not mentioned.