It seems as though the political plans of the Obama Administration have been put on hold as the BP rig explosion and subsequent oil spewage gums up both the Gulf of Mexico and perhaps the presidential agenda. Political pundits observe that try as he might, President Obama does not seem able to break away for long from the constant national concern over the oil crisis now stretching into its second month, in order to change the subject to something he prefers. As the Los Angeles Times commented on Wednesday, June 2:
This was supposed to be the season when Obama could make jobs and the economy his central focus — working to convince a skeptical public that he and his allies in Congress are addressing what polls show to be voters’ No. 1 concern.?? But the gulf oil spill has intruded on the administration’s plans.
The president’s experience Wednesday drove home the unwelcome point: Appearing in Pittsburgh for a speech at Carnegie Mellon University that was designed to focus on the economy, Obama found himself compelled to turn again to the growing disaster. ??”The catastrophe unfolding in the gulf right now may prove to be a result of human error, or corporations taking dangerous shortcuts that compromised safety,” Obama said. “But we have to acknowledge that there are inherent risks to drilling four miles beneath the surface of the Earth, risks that are bound to increase the harder oil extraction becomes.”
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Neil Newhouse, a Republican pollster, added, “His initiatives have been overtaken by current events. He’s no longer driving an agenda, he’s responding to it. So unless he gets control, he’s going to have a tough time driving up his approval ratings, which is what Democrats across the country are hoping for.
And yet with all the crisis management seemingly taking up the President’s attention, so much so that it is speculated he may actually cancel a planned trip to Australia and Indonesia, CNN was announcing that, ”President Barack Obama on Wednesday ordered executive-branch agencies to extend to employees’ same-sex partners the same benefits provided to their opposite-sex partners, to the extent allowed by law.”
And last week, the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” U.S. military policy regarding gay and lesbian service members was further pushed through and presented to the House of Representatives, even before the requested study period for it had been completed and ensuing recommendations made. The Joint Chiefs were all but speechless.
Suspicions about the real intentions of President Obama have followed him from his candidacy right into the White House. Is he a politician? Is he an idealogue? Is he a Marxist — or even a citizen? From the very week of his inauguration, he has hit the ground running to implement what he could of various liberal, if not radical, policies. This is not an original procedure in this age of “New World Order” politicians. It can be recalled, for example, how the Mexican border crisis of President Bush’s later years, and lack of correct response/support of border patrol agents at that time, morphed into the $4.00 a gallon gasoline crisis, which then segued into the banking and Wall Street crisis — one thing taking American minds off the other.
Is the handling of the BP spill an example of inept human error, stupidity, uncoordinated government response? Or is it an intentional mishandling in order that the results bring about a further erosion of freedom, a greater energy crisis, crippling of Gulf businesses, a further breaking down of the common American taxpayers’ financial stability — overtaxed and overburdened by inflation as it is already? What took place on 9/11 gave rise to the Department of Homeland Security (though we already had a Department of Defense) and the resulting less freedom and more restriction on Americans and their movements, travel, and privacy. It was only a few weeks ago that Obama was speaking in terms of continuing off-shore drilling; now he has a crisis excuse for backing off from that.
Stirring this pot further, the American Thinker published an article by James Simpson, who examined the “theory of deliberate crisis.” He says in part:
One of two things must be true. Either the Democrats are unfathomable idiots, who ignorantly pursue ever more destructive policies despite decades of contrary evidence, or they understand the consequences of their actions and relentlessly carry on anyway because they somehow benefit.
I submit to you they understand the consequences. For many it is simply a practical matter of eliciting votes from a targeted constituency at taxpayer expense; we lose a little, they gain a lot, and the politician keeps his job. But for others, the goal is more malevolent — the failure is deliberate. Don’t laugh. This method not only has its proponents, it has a name: the Cloward-Piven Strategy. It describes their agenda, tactics, and long-term strategy.
The Strategy was first elucidated in the May 2, 1966 issue of The Nation magazine by a pair of radical socialist Columbia University professors, Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven. David Horowitz summarizes it as:
The strategy of forcing political change through orchestrated crisis. The “Cloward-Piven Strategy” seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse.
Cloward and Piven were inspired by radical organizer [and Hillary Clinton mentor] Saul Alinsky:
“Make the enemy live up to their (sic) own book of rules,” Alinsky wrote in his 1989 book Rules for Radicals. When pressed to honor every word of every law and statute, every Judeo-Christian moral tenet, and every implicit promise of the liberal social contract, human agencies inevitably fall short. The system’s failure to “live up” to its rule book can then be used to discredit it altogether, and to replace the capitalist “rule book” with a socialist one. (Courtesy: “Discover the Network.org)
We know Alinsky mentored Barack Obama as well.
The radical agenda knows no partisan boundary — Republican radicals play their part as well as the Democrat ones. All this begs the question: Are crises the result of government ineptitude? Very often, yes. It’s what happens with big government. But how deliberate are these continuing major events, security lapses, mistakes, and catastrophes, with their resulting tyrannical bureaucratic — even police state — responses? Freedom-loving Americans have not failed to notice that the gamut of socialist-agenda policies moves forward in the ensuing confusion that stems from these crises. How much more damage will take place before November, or the elections of 2012? And how much can be undone?
Americans are suspicious. And they are asking questions rarely asked before.
Photo: President Barack Obama and LaFourche Parish President Charlotte Randolph show small amounts of oil washed up as “tar balls” on May 28, in Port Fourchon, La.: AP Images
