Carol Platt Liebau @ Townhall:
During the Clinton scandals of the ’90’s, I learned about a whole new model of promoting corruption — through example and indirection. Most dramatically, I remember realizing that Bill Clinton had, indeed, urged those who worked under him to lie . . . just not explicitly. In other words, he had never said to Betty Currie or anyone else, “Please lie.” But it was clear that it’s what he wanted — and needed — them to do.
Somewhat less directly, it strikes me that the abuses committed by the IRS are pieces of the same set of cloth. Most everyone working under a leader has a pretty good idea of the kinds of actions that are permitted, welcomed, tolerated or encouraged — if not explicitly, through a wink and a smile and non-discouragement. To put it in terms that the perpetually-aggrieved on the left can understand, it’s like a boss tolerating a hostile workplace, not by actively harassing women himself, but by condoning that behavior by other employees, turning a blind eye to it, and subtly communicating through his own words and actions that all the EEOC signs and the rest aren’t really to be taken seriously.
President Obama has pretty much treated the truth — and in some sense the Constitution — a little bit like that boss with the EEOC signs. It’s all there for show. But clearly, through “jokes” and winks and nods and tolerating hitherto out-of-bounds behavior committed on his behalf, he signalled to potential partisan freelancers that little was really beyond the pale.
Last year, Kim Strassel wrote about thecase of Romney donor Frank VanderSloot, who was the recipient of a fiercely intrusive audit after he became a Romney contributor:
Did Mr. Obama pick up the phone and order the screws put to Mr. VanderSloot? Or—more likely—did a pro-Obama appointee or political hire or career staffer see that the boss had an issue with this donor, and decide to do the president an unasked-for election favor? Or did he or she simply think this was a duty, given that the president had declared Mr. VanderSloot and fellow donors “less than reputable”?
Around the same time, The New Times reported on Obama targeting the Koch brothers personally in a new ad. About a month later, as ABC News reported,
It is fairly rare that a ”radicalizing” imam, whose Friday sermons are unvarnished calls to jihad, gets directly implicated when one or more of his more impressionable attendees goes all ”lone wolf.”
So, too, with an Obama who has filled his syncophant’s empty heads with his ”us versus them,” speech.
Obama constantly calls Republicans ”enemies.”
He tells listeners to bring a gun to a knife fight.
He turns the other way when whites are intimidated at polling places by armed blacks in paramilitary costumes.
He covers when organizations pay to get imaginary voters registered.
He cannot be bothered when many counties in the US had more votes for him than registered voters, in a couple cases even more votes for him than adults over 18 in the precincts!
So, the empty-headed see these things.
And they are given gifts of ”ObamaPhones, ObamaCare, ObamaMoney(EBT) and more.
Those gifts reinforce the idea that ”we (them and Obama) are in this together.”
There is nothing more mysterious than the way a superior convinces an inferior that they are in this together.
Obama used the empty frame.
He allowed the empty-headed (low information voter) to fill that frame any way he saw fit.
He implied they saw the same picture in that empty frame.
And, if one or more of them had to go under the bus, he made them fell OK about it.
(I mean, where else are they going to go, vote-wise?)
What Obama actually has in store for these useful idiots is a nightmare.
And they will be in the cattle cars on their way to it still not realizing where they are being taken by him.