Enemies of the State

obama

 

The relentless sabotage of President Obama’s policies and the insulting personal attacks against him have provoked fury even among the normally unflappable members of the New York Times editorial board. To me this fury is long overdue.

The anti-Obama crusade is not just personal. It is not just political. It is an assault on the country’s national security.

The Times concludes that one unmistakable motive is racism. And I have expressed similar suspicions in past blogs.

We will never be sure of the attackers’ motives because none of us can see into the heart of another person. But one result of their evil crusade is plain. Their attacks have compromised the President’s foreign policy and put Americans in grave danger.

The attackers are – beyond argument – enemies of the state.

President Obama singled out one recent instance of these dangerous attacks on Saturday.  According to an AP report, fthe President complained that “partisan wrangling over the emerging nuclear agreement with Iran and on other foreign policy matters has gone beyond the pale.”

“It needs to stop,” the article quoted President Obama as saying. According to the AP report:

Obama complained that Sen. John McCain of Arizona had suggested that U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s explanations of the framework agreement with Iran were “somehow less trustworthy” than those of Iran’s supreme leader. “That’s an indication of the degree to which partisanship has crossed all boundaries,” an exercised Obama said in a news conference at the end of the two-day Summit of the Americas. “And we’re seeing this again and again.”

The AP report quoted the President as also singling out Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell for criticism. The President was quoted as saying McConnell had been “telling the world” not to have confidence that the U.S. can meet its own climate change goals.”

The Senate majority leader  has been urging American states not to comply with Obama’s power plant rules, and arguing that the U.S. could never meet Obama’s target even if those rules do survive.

These are just the most recent in an increasingly vicious campaign to undermine the President’s policies – at the people’s expense. The Times cites “a series of actions by Republicans attacking the president’s authority in areas that most Americans thought had been settled by the Civil War.” One example:

Arizona legislators, for example, have been working on a bill that “prohibits this state or any of its political subdivisions from using any personnel or financial resources to enforce, administer or cooperate with an executive order issued by the president of the United States that has not been affirmed by a vote of Congress and signed into law as prescribed by the United States Constitution.”

The Times observes that:

The bill sounds an awful lot like John C. Calhoun’s secessionist screed of 1828, the South Carolina Exposition and Protest.

I’m sure you know the tragic consequences of that proclamation. Pray that’s not where America is heading today.

Click for the Times editorial.

Click for the AP report.