Playground Rhetoric, Dangerous Precedents

Andrew Napolitano and George Will together show just how intellectually lazy our President is. Will likens him to an adolescent, aptly summarizing and illustrating with examples four pillars of his oratorical approach:

• The invocation of straw men,
• The proclamation that any given debate is already "settled" and "over",
• The declaration that there is nothing to discuss because everything is going well, and
• The assertion that there can be no intelligent or honorable disagreement with him.

Will is astute, but even he misses one. Napolitano finds it for us, though:

• My reasons are a secret.

To be clear, the President is not defending the legitimacy of witholding from America's enemies of information that they could use to harm her citizens. Rather, President Obama is claiming that the legal reasoning for something he is doing against the letter of the Constitution is a state secret. That "something" is killing American citizens without due process of law. Napolitano elaborates:

Welcome to the strange new world of Barack Obama's war on terror, in which there are no declarations of war against countries that foment or harbor enemy activities, as the Constitution authorizes, and in which the president claims the powers of a king by killing whomever he wishes under a rationale that his lawyers wrote for him and that he has desperately tried to keep secret.

The Obama administration is probably right to fear the revelation of this so-called legal way to kill. The appellate court decision is a profound and sweeping rejection of the Obama administration's passion for hiding behind a veil of secrecy...

This does not itself prove that Ayn Rand was correct to base her arguments in favor of individual rights, limited government, and capitalism on man's nature as a rational animal. Nevertheless, it is instructive to see this man's ignorance or contempt of our minds going hand-in glove with a complete disregard for our liberty and indeed our very lives. If we aren't entitled to our own lives, why trifle with explanations? if our consent isn't really important, why waste time arguing with us that could be spent further aggrandizing one's power?

It is a cultural low point that this country has twice elected a man who routinely shows us such blatant and limitless contempt for our intelligence.

-- CAV