Here it is. You ready? Because this is Obama, thus the insidious cancer of Progressivism, explained with the most sparkling clarity & brevity as I have ever seen. Via Kevin D. Williamson at NRO, from whom I always learn something (the highest praise I can offer any writer) Bold text is my addition:
“Barack Obama isn’t a policy guy; he’s a personnel guy. An underappreciated aspect of Barack Obama’s politics is that he has been trying to convert the Democratic party from a party that lives in Congress to a party that lives in the White House. The Democrats owned Congress, and especially the House of Representatives, in the postwar era, with unbroken control of the speakership from 1955 to 1995. Until Newt Gingrich came in with the 1994 tsunami, the last Republican speaker had been a man born in 1884 who rode into office on the coattails of Calvin Coolidge. Except for a few brief interludes (January 3, 1947 to January 3, 1949; January 3, 1953 to January 3, 1955; January 3, 1981 to January 3, 1987), the Democrats ran the Senate, too, from the Great Depression until the Gingrich years. That version of the Democratic party was a lawmaking party. (It made a lot of bad laws.) Barack Obama’s Democratic party, the one he is giving birth to, is a different animal. He didn’t give a hoot what was in his signature health-care law — just so long as it empowered him to start putting his people in positions to make health-care decisions. His patron saint is Roy Cohn, who proclaimed the gospel ‘Don’t tell me what the law is. Tell me who the judge is.’ Barack Obama doesn’t want to write laws — he wants to appoint judges. He doesn’t want finely crafted legislation — he wants ‘The secretary shall issue.'”
Parenthetically, Mr. Williamson also illuminates why we are $18 trillion in debt. Democrats had the purse at the dawn of the Great Society and did not let go until 1996. That’s not to say Republicans don’t own some of this disaster; they most certainly do. But it wasn’t conservatives who ushered in the welfare state and support it to this day. That’s on progressives. And that’s why we’re $18 trillion in the hole. Every social welfare program they have supported from the New Deal through the Great Society to Obamacare is not just broke, it’s breaking the back of the Republic. Everything they touch turns to sh*t.
Everything.
I heartily recommend your read the entire thing, here.