Elections Have Consequences

Greetings from the Left Coast, where we here at Left Coast Blues do the heavy thinking for those who just can’t be bothered.

“Elections have consequences” – thus opined Senator John McCain in the third Presidential debate back on October 15. At the time, he was explaining why he had voted to confirm Supreme Court Justices Breyer and Ginsberg, even though he didn’t agree with their ideology. He reasoned that the Constitution gives the President the authority to nominate Supreme Court Justices, the President nominated these two individuals, and he didn’t believe that he should oppose them on ideological grounds if they were otherwise qualified. After all, if the American people didn’t want Justices of that ideology on the Supreme Court, they shouldn’t have elected the President who nominated them. (Needless to say, this is a rare position for any Senator to take – and absolutely unheard of among those on the Democratic side of the aisle, as Clarence Thomas and Robert Bork can attest.)

A few weeks after that debate, 52% of the American people chose the most liberal Senator in the United States Senate to be their next President. Not because they particularly liked where he stood on the issues – I can state that with assurance, because he went out of his way not to state where he stood on the issues – but because he was a charismatic public figure and an excellent public speaker who had the media so far in the tank for him that he was able to sell “hope,” “change,” and “yes, we can,” without ever being required to explain exactly what that meant.

We are just beginning to see the consequences:

• As Chief of Staff, we have Rahm Emmanuel, another product of the Chicago political machine, who stated, at a mid-November Wall Street Journal conference, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.” If you keep this comment in mind, it’s much easier to understand why the “economic stimulus” bill looks the way it does. I’ve got more to say on that, but I’ll save it for a future post.
  
• We have a Secretary of State whose primary qualification for the job appears to be that it makes it unlikely she will challenge Obama’s re-election bid in 2012. No one seems bothered by the millions of dollars her husband has received from speaking and consulting engagements with Middle Eastern nations with which she will be dealing. But then New York is not a community property state, so, technically, it’s not her money…
  
• We have two cabinet nominees who have “tax issues.” By “tax issues,” I mean that they somehow overlooked their obligations to pay tens of thousands of dollars to the IRS. But that’s OK, because they said they were sorry and paid up as soon as they got caught. One of these men will be the new Secretary of the United States Treasury. Oh, and it turns out that he hired a housekeeper who may have been in the country illegally.
  
• We have an Attorney General who was involved up to his ears in the most egregious last-minute pardons of the Clinton Administration, including that of Marc Rich.
  
• We have a “global warming czar” who was listed on Socialist International’s Web site as one of the leaders of their “Commission for a Sustainable World Society” – until her selection by Obama was announced, whereupon her name and bio mysteriously disappeared from the Web site. This is a newly created, non-Cabinet-level position, and not subject to Senate confirmation, so you and your elected representatives have nothing to say about it until November, 2012. Elections have consequences.
  
• We have an executive order that mandates the closing of the terrorist detention center at Guantanamo Bay within a year. I’ll have more to say on this as well.
  
• We have a “Presidential memorandum” that removes the restriction on “nongovernmental organizations” who receive Federal funds through the United States Agency for International Development from using those funds “to pay for the performance of abortions as a method of family planning, or to motivate or coerce any person to practice abortions.” Don’t want your tax dollars going to support or promote abortions in other countries? Tough. Elections have consequences.
  
• We have a national news media that no longer even pretends to be impartial. If you have any doubts about that, just read through the above bullet points again, and ask yourself what the media reaction would have been had, say, George Bush made cabinet appointments like these.

Personally, I’m still hoping for change…specifically, I’m hoping that President Obama changes course and decides to govern from the center rather than from the left. But based on what I’ve seen so far, I’m not holding my breath. In the meantime, I’m trying to live by the inspiring words of our new Secretary of State: “We need to stand up and say we’re Americans, and we have the right to debate and disagree with any administration.”

Thanks for listening.