Barack Obama has a problem. Know what it is? He's the ultimate manifestation of the Peter Principle. He rose to the most powerful position on the planet, which was his lifelong goal, with the intention of simultaneously reducing the power and prestige of his country while somehow even further enhancing that of his position, also his lifelong goal. What he didn't figure into that ambitious equation was (1) all his ideas would fail catastrophically, (2) the public he dazzled and bamboozled with his soaring rhetorical fecality would blame him for his failures, and (3) he would have nowhere to hide from that accountability.
As POTUS, you begin the job more overexposed than Paris Hilton. And B.O. has made the real-life Material Girl look like she's spent the past decade in a nunery.
So what do you do if you're The One, and the second Great Crisis you need to secure yourself in total power for life has yet to materialize (even if the Russians will be doing their part), and the GOP's circular firing squad of a nomination race is finally drawing to a close, and the economy is still in the waste extractor, and the SCOTUS has your Wrenchingly Transformational crown jewel in its sights like a Bengal Tiger eyeing a straggling zebra? What else? You gin up every risible distraction you can invent: "The War On Women," cooking the economic books even more, pretending to have approved a portion of the Keystone XL pipeline that you had nothing to do with, framing likely Romney running mate and House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan as the real-life Azazel.
And now to that list you can add a full-scale frontal assault on Olympus itself:
President Barack Obama is laying groundwork to make the majority-conservative Supreme Court a campaign issue this fall, taking a political page from Republicans who have long railed against liberal judges who don't vote their way.
The emerging Democratic strategy to paint the court as extreme was little noted in this week's hubbub over Obama's assertion that overturning his healthcare law would be "unprecedented."
His statement Monday wasn't completely accurate, and the White House backtracked. But Obama was making a political case, not a legal one, and he appears ready to keep making it if the high court's five-member majority strikes down or cuts the heart out of his signature policy initiative.
The court also is likely to consider several other issues before the November election that could stir up Obama's core Democratic supporters and draw crucial independent voters as well. Among those are immigration, voting rights and a revisit of a campaign finance ruling that Obama has already criticized as an outrage.
"We haven't seen the end of this," said longtime Supreme Court practitioner Tom Goldstein, who teaches at Stanford and Harvard universities. "The administration seems to be positioning itself to be able to run against the Supreme Court if it needs to or wants to."
The underlying premise of this gambit isn't anything new. The Left politicizes everything, after all, and the courts have been one of their primary avenues of forcing their extremist agenda on the public against its will. What's novel is that they have heretofore never, in the modern era, at least, been in a position of dominant power to be able to do so through the ostensibly democratic process. In the 2009-10 biennium they were, and they did, and now the judicial tables are turned. Now it isn't the courts writing leftism into the law, it's the courts examining leftism already in the law and finding it partly or wholly constitutionally wanting. This is a front on which the Dark Side simply has no experience playing defense. Remember one of the universal tenets of socialism: History can only unfold in one direction. It cannot reverse direction or change course. Anyone or anything that attempts to affect such a course correction is, by definition, a heretic, an infidel, and must be destroyed for, as Emperor Palpatine told Luke Skywalker, "their lack of vision."
I think this sums it up quite nicely:
University of Texas Law School professor and Supreme Court scholar Lucas Powe said Obama's original statement suggests he probably knows the law is in trouble and is seeking political high ground.
"My instinct is that he was laying predicate for a campaign statement," Powe said. "People said he was threatening the court. You can't threaten the Supreme Court."
Well, Red Barry did. For all the good it'll do him.
OTOH, maybe the idea was, indeed, to alienate Justice Kennedy into joining with the Constitionalist block to expunge ObamaCare like the tyrannical cancer it is. Maybe False Messiah has finally reached the point where maintaining his hold on power has become more important to him than even the blessed, righteous Cause to which he's dedicated his life. Almost as if when on his knees in the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus had prayed, "My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from Me; yet not as I will, but....aw, screw it, I'm gonna go genetically resequence those blind guide Pharisees into lobotomized three-toed sloths and then fly to Rome for My appointment with destiny!"
Hey, that's what Barry doubtless thinks Christ SHOULD have done. But then he IS the "Third Adam," y'know.
At it's black, cynical heart, though, this is just one more whip with which to lash his lunatic fringe base into turning out this year - and for a helluva lot more than just voting, if you know what I mean. If you think the Occupy [ahem] "movement" was bad before, you ain't seen NOTHING yet.
I hope Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Scalia, Thomas, and Alito and their families have round-the-clock security. I fear the attacks coming their way may well not be limited to the "campaign" variety.
[cross-posted @ Hard Starboard]
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