The Smoking Gun in Plain Sight
By Herbert E. Meyer
June 3, 2013
American Thinker
As the Obama administration descends into a whirlpool of scandals, a race
has begun among Congressional committees and news organizations to find the
proverbial smoking gun - the document that will link President Obama
directly to the IRS's targeting of conservative groups, or to the Justice
Department's unprecedented legal actions against the Associated Press and
Fox News reporter James Rosen, or to the Pentagon's ghastly failure to
launch a rescue mission when our consulate in Benghazi came under attack
last September.
Study history, and you will understand why no such document is ever likely
to be found: That just isn't how these things work. Very few people are
aware of this, but there is no document - not one - linking Adolf Hitler to
the Holocaust. Why not? Because Hitler didn't need to sign a document
ordering the slaughter of six million Jews. All he needed to do was to
demonize his enemy in speeches at the Reichstag, on the radio, and from one
end of Germany to the other - then hire thugs like Herman Goering, Heinrich
Himmler, Adolf Eichmann, and Josef Goebbels. They knew what der Fuhrer
wanted, and der Fuhrer knew he could trust his henchman to get the job done
- no matter how, no matter what may be the law -- and to not bother him with
the gory details.
Reader, take a deep breath. Nowhere in this essay will I suggest, or even
imply, that President Obama plans the mass murder of his opponents the way
Hitler murdered his. That's absurd. I am merely pointing out that
President Obama has been going about the business of demonizing his
political enemies, and then hiring thugs to destroy them without regard to
the law, in precisely the same way that Hitler and his fascists did it in
Germany. This isn't an accusation; it's an observation.
Look at the record: From the moment he took office in January 2009,
President Obama has spoken before Congress, on television, and at countless
rallies across the country describing his political opponents in terms we
haven't seen before in the United States. Time and again he's insisted
that Republicans aren't merely wrong, but evil. Hardly a week goes by
without yet another sneering comment about "millionaires and billionaires" -
by which he means those men and women who actually built the businesses that
created jobs for all the rest of us, not the ones he and the First Lady
party with in Hollywood and on Martha's Vineyard.
Hatred for the Tea Party
His rhetoric heated up fast after the Tea Party movement gave the GOP enough
oomph to win back the House of Representatives in 2010, and as the president
geared up for the 2012 election. He urged Latino voters to help him "punish
our enemies and reward our friends." He told his supporters at one rally to
think of voting for him as "an act of revenge." Did you see the president
at that Georgetown University forum on the future of Medicare when he
trashed Paul Ryan's own plan, then went out of his way to publicly insult
Ryan, while the Congressman himself was sitting in the front row too stunned
- and too decent and respectful of the presidency - to respond in kind? Do
you remember that television campaign ad describing Mitt Romney - one of the
most capable, financially astute, thoroughly decent men who ever graced
public life - as "not one of us"?
And while demonizing his political enemies, what sort of people did the
president appoint to key jobs in his administration? His attorney general
is Eric Holder, a sleazy Democratic operative who not only called the
American people "cowards" for their approach to racial issues - this after
the majority of us elected a black president - but who played a crucial role
as deputy attorney general in the scandalous and still-uninvestigated pardon
of Marc Rich in the Clinton administration's dying hours. The national
security advisor is Thomas Donilon, another Democratic Party operative who
got rich while serving as executive vice president for law and policy at
Fannie Mae. And who was our secretary of state when the consulate in
Benghazi came under attack? The same Hillary Clinton who, as the wife of
Arkansas' up-and-coming governor, made an overnight $100,000 killing by
trading cattle futures - a feat no professional cattle-futures trader has
ever been able to explain, or duplicate.
No one who's spent time in our nation's capital comes away with a romantic
view of party politics and the people who do this for a living; the
Saint-Per-Square-Mile ratio in Washington has always been fairly low. But
David Axelrod? David Plouffe? Have you ever come across two Chicago-style,
hardball-playing creeps like these clowns? They make Richard Nixon's two
White House thugs, Bob Haldeman and John Erlichman, look like choir boys.
Demonize your political enemies, then hire people like these, and the result
is precisely what happened in Germany after 1933 and what's happening now to
us: a kind of bureaucratic coup d'etat in which the legitimately elected
government overturns the established relationship between the individual and
the State and replaces it with something very different; a relationship that
no one voted for, saw coming, or imagined could happen so quickly and so
quietly.
Forget About a Coup d'Etat
This is the United States in 2013, not Germany in 1933, and there's no real
possibility that President Obama will get away with his attempted coup
d'etat. There are members of Congress in both parties who are appalled by
what the president has been doing, and even a few liberal news organizations
are starting to wake up. But while the hunt for some document that would be
the smoking gun will be entertaining - and while it would be nice to see a
special prosecutor appointed who'd throw at least a few members of this
administration who've perjured themselves before Congress into prison - it
would also be a mistake.
Education is more important than prosecution. Right now, the best use of
their time and energy would be to expose the Obama administration's
wrongdoings; to illuminate for Americans just what's been going on in
Washington and to show voters - especially young voters - what sort of
country we'd be living in if the president had gotten away with this. Never
before have our politicians and our news organizations had a better
opportunity to demonstrate just what happens when we vote carelessly, elect
a zealot who appoints operatives with no sense of honor or comprehension of
right-and-wrong, then parties with rock stars while his coup d'etat unfolds.
Yes, I realize that throughout this essay I've used an analogy that some
people will find offensive or even repugnant. But I've done this
deliberately, because this is no time to hold back or to mince words. And
if the president doesn't like being compared to a Nazi - he should stop
acting like one.
Herbert E. Meyer served during the Reagan Administration as Special
Assistant to the Director of Central Intelligence and Vice Chairman of the
CIA's National Intelligence Council. He is the recipient of the National
Intelligence Distinguished Service Medal, the intelligence community's
highest honor.
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