Obama, the IRS and the Führerprinzip

By James Delingpole

Kill and eat a baby manatee live on television? Urinate on the Lincoln memorial? Torch the US flag? Fly Air Force One into the Empire State Building with a final cry of Allahu Akhbar?

Maybe you can help me. I’m trying to think of the things President Obama would have to do in order for the rest of the US to appreciate what a few of us have known for some time: that the man is an abomination – easily one of the most financially reckless, viciously partisan, damaging, dangerous, divisive and downright un-American presidents of all time, with a toxic, corrupt, bullying, incompetent, sleazy and mendacious administration to match.

But so far I’ve drawn a blank.

You’ll call me naïve – and perhaps I am – but I really thought America would have rumbled him by now.

A few examples:

Solyndra: $500 million of taxpayers’ money, spunked against the wall, just not to no useful purpose whatsoever but, worse, wasted on an out-and-out scam in which the beneficiaries were bloated corporatist vampires who had donated to his election campaign.

Benghazi: a US ambassador – and three of his staff – which his administration effectively permitted to be murdered in cold blood by Islamist terrorists in order to preserve the fiction that the Al Qaeda menace had been defeated.

Gibson guitars: two raids by Obama’s Department of Justice on an American icon. Why? Ostensibly because of an enviro-loon amendment to the Lacey Act (which bizarrely – and most un-Americanly – allows foreign-made environmental laws, in this case an Indian regulation designed to protect its domestic rosewood-finishing industry, to take precedence over US laws). But really, you can’t help suspecting, because the CEO of Gibson is a Republican donor, not a Democrat.

The US national public debt: Obama has increased it by more than all the previous 43 presidents combined.

Keystone XL – the pipeline which really, by now, should be transporting Canadian shale oil across America, generating jobs, bringing down the cost of energy, but which Obama is still resisting on dubious environmental grounds.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) which has become a law unto itself. Or rather, an ostensibly arm’s-length organisation which, through nefarious means, has carved out a niche for itself as the Obama administration’s black ops unit. Its job is to keep the hard-left and deep greens onside by rubber stamping all the viciously anti-business environmentalist measures which would never pass Congress if they were seen to have come from Obama himself. That’s why Obama’s handpicked appointee as the head of the EPA Lisa Jackson kept a secret email account under the name Richard Windsor: to frustrate any unhelpful FOIA requests.

Now, to add to all the above, we have IRSgate. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS), quite possibly the most feared institution in the US because of its power to make your life total hell if it chooses to investigate you, has apparently being used by the Obama administration as yet another political weapon to destroy its enemies. In this case, the target groups were tea party groups and other conservative organisations which had applied for tax-exempt charitable status. Three hundred of them were subjected to the third degree by the IRS, while left-wing organisations were given a free pass.

Not that President Obama himself has anything to do with this, of course. No sirree! As he said when the scandal broke “It’s inexcusable and Americans are right to be angry about it and I’m angry about it.” And to show just how serious he is he has sacked the acting IRS Commissioner Steven Miller who will leave his job in June. (The fact that Miller was due to leave at that time anyway, even if there’d never been a scandal, is entirely coincidental).

And if you believe that, I’ve got a very handsome bridge I’d like to sell you. Hardly used. One careful owner.

Did Obama personally order the IRS to persecute Tea Party and Conservative charities? I doubt it. No more than he directly ordered his Department of Justice to launch those two raids on Gibson; nor than he ordered the EPA to launch its various hit jobs on the coal industry.

But then, he didn’t need to. It’s called the Führerprinzip. 

You don’t need to get a direct order; you just need to anticipate the leader’s wishes and act accordingly. Get it right and much career success will follow. Get caught and the leader can plausibly deny that he didn’t know anything about this nefarious scheme which of course, had he known, he would have nixed.

It was precisely because they understood the corrupting tendencies of power that the Founding Fathers devised all those checks and balances which Obama and his cronies have been working 24/7 every day since they first took office to circumvent.

No wonder, now more than ever, Americans are placing such value on the Second Amendment: the right to bear arms.