[The] weird juxtaposition of the vacuous and often
law-breaking, but melodious, Obama administration next to boisterous and
rowdy Trump presidency has taught us a lesson about our own moral
blindness.
Both our media and popular culture, as well as our cultural elite,
value style far more than substance. Adroitly breaking the law is
preferable to obeying it in uncivilized fashion. Boorishly bragging
nonstop about 3 percent economic growth and below-4-percent unemployment
is deemed far worse than contextualizing in professorial tones a
stagnant economy that in eight years never achieved 3 percent annual
growth.
Credentials empower illegality; their mere absence is seen as almost illegal in itself.
Lawlessly “presidential” is a misdemeanor; lawfully unpresidential, a
felony. A bankrupt agenda delivered by experts is sanctified; an
effective one packaged by amateurs is heretical.
Having engaged in illegality during the Obama administration is better on a résumé than following the law in a Trump government.
And yet still, this one constant keeps reverberating throughout the
hysteria: Our elite always values the messenger over the message.
The façade of Camelot exempts empty lawlessness in a way that Queens-accented boosterism seems to nullify real achievement.
That is how
Victor Davis Hanson
concludes his National Review piece (thanks to
Ann Althouse and
Instapundit's
Glenn Reynolds).
Call the Trump paradox “crass lawfulness.” What drives Trump’s
critics nearly crazy is not any evidence that Trump has broken federal
laws per se. Instead, their rub is that there are somehow no criminal
statutes against a president boorishly acting “unpresidential” in his
loud quest to supercharge the economy, while undoing the entire agenda
of his predecessor, who was so dearly beloved by the media,
universities, Hollywood, and identity-politics groups.
Certainly, President Obama’s teleprompted speeches were mellifluous.
As some sort of postmodern preacher, Obama often sermonized to Americans
about the predetermined “arc of history” that purportedly bent all of
us inescapably toward his own just moral version of the universe.
In calm, ministerial tones, the progressive Obama sometimes slapped a
puerile America’s wrists, with frequent admonitions to behave and to
not act so illiberally. Or he frequently reminded us, with a frown,
“that is not who we are.” Recall that Obama came into office promising
that he would could lower the seas and cool the planet, with a
generation of young like-minded activists who, we were lectured, were
the ones we had all been waiting for. Now president emeritus Obama
worries that perhaps his messianic appearance came too soon for us to
fully appreciate his divinity.
Despite Obama’s recent projection that his eight-year tenure was
“scandal-free,” along with the reality that the media’s biased
compliance sought to make such a startling fantasy true, the Obama
administration was in many respects lawless. It will eventually rank as
the most scandal-ridden administration since Warren G. Harding’s.
Go to
the National Review link to read the full list of
The Scandals of the ‘Scandal-Free’ Obama Administration
But it was during the 2016 election cycle that the Obama
administration descended to a level of corruption not seen in a century.
Right in the middle of the FBI investigation of Hillary Clinton’s email
server, Obama, as judge and jury, announced that candidate Clinton had
violated no criminal law while secretary of state. Obama also lied when
he stated that he’d known nothing about such an unlawful server,
although emails prove that he himself had communicated over it on
several occasions.
His FBI director, James Comey, deliberately scrambled
the law and exonerated Hillary Clinton from wrongdoing, not because she
had not broken the law, but, according to Comey’s own invented
interpretations of the statute, because she had not intended to
violate the law. Comey also admitted to tailoring his circus-like
investigation of Clinton around the assumption that she would soon be
president.
We are slowly appreciating over the last year that lying under oath
was an Obama-administration requisite for a high position in the
intelligence community. FBI director Comey lied about the particular
sequences of his investigation of the Clinton email scandal. He lied by
omission to the president when, in his supposed Oval Office informative
dissection of the Steele dossier, he failed to include the fact that it
was a product of Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the DNC.
… In addition to such unethical and often illegal behavior, the Obama
administration institutionalized deception as a tool of government:
hiding from the American people all the side agreements to the so-called
Iran deal, itself a blatant effort to bypass the treaty-making
responsibilities of the U.S. Senate; fabricating yarns to sell the
disastrous Obamacare takeover of health care; using executive orders to
enact immigration amnesties after warning that doing just that would be
unconstitutional; lying repeatedly about the circumstances of the Bowe
Bergdahl prisoner swap.
Hillary Clinton has never been able to explain why huge gifts to her
family’s foundation from Russian interests coincided with the State
Department’s approval of uranium sales to Russia, or why anyone would
ever pay her husband $500,000 for a short speech in Moscow — and
certainly would not now once her political ambitions have at last
calcified.
We live in such strange times that the media ignored the most blatant
examples of presidential campaign-cycle collusion in memory, while
seeking to invent it where it never existed. Remember, Barack Obama on a
hot mic not only got caught reiterating to a Russian leader the
conditions of Putin-Obama election-cycle collusion, but he also spelled
out the exact quid pro quo: promised Russian quietude abroad during
Obama’s reelection campaign was in exchange for “flexibility” (i.e.,
cancellation) of U.S.-Eastern European missile-defense projects. Should
Trump ever be caught making the same “deal” in 2020, he would probably
be impeached.
Criminal Camelot vs. Crude Queens
Why was the Obama administration so corrupt?
Three reasons stand out.
One, it was the first administration in
modern history in which the media saw its role as a subordinate and
accomplice rather than an auditor; the media thereby empowered
corruption.
Two, it exuded a moral zealousness in its promise to
fundamentally transform the country and enact social justice; any means
of doing so were justified by its exalted ends.
Three, like the John F.
Kennedy administration, Obama and his team adroitly calculated that in
America’s celebrity culture, what’s hip and cool is often more highly
prized than what’s competent and lawful, much less crude and effective.
No one would suggest that Donald Trump obeys the law because he has
an inherent respect for the Constitution and the nation’s ethical
bearings, although that perhaps could prove to be so. Rather, Trump has
not broken the law the way that Obama routinely did quite simply because
he cannot. The media is so hostile to his every act, the popular
culture has so frequently written him off as crude, and his critics,
both progressive and conservative, have become so hysterical over his
person, that he lives in a singular 24/7 bubble that faults him for
everything from his choice of dessert to the manner in which his
daughter holds her child.
The news, both fake and real, is now all Trump, all the time. And
because Trump can enjoy baiting his opponents by deliberately being
uncouth and coarse, and since he has little respect for past
presidential protocol, almost everything is now transparent and nothing
is off-limits. …
