NIXON'S DREAMS ARE NOW OBAMA'S REALITY

There is an unintentionally hilarious article at CNN.com — written by a religion professor at Boston University — saying there were "echoes of President Ronald Reagan" in President Obama's speech at the interfaith service at Boston's Catholic cathedral on Thursday.

After the 2012 election, and particularly after Obama's second inauguration, many pundits started to refer to him as the "Liberal Reagan." Just as Reagan made it OK to be conservative in the 1980s, Obama now seemed poised to make it OK to be liberal. He seemed less worried about failure and more comfortable with his convictions. I see this "Liberal Reagan" in Obama’s outrage at the Senate's rejection on Wednesday of even the most milquetoast gun control legislation.

But I heard Reagan himself in Obama's speech at the interfaith prayer service.

Reagan's success as a president turned on his optimism and his resolve. In a sense, these two rhetorical notes are at odds. Optimism can be seen as soft, even wishy-washy. Who but a fool (or a liberal) can be optimistic in the face of communism or terrorism or a difficult Congress? The other is hard and unbending: the resolve to face up to communists or terrorists or Democrats at home whose policies seem designed to drive American society to the brink of extinction.

Yet together optimism and resolve served Reagan well, transforming him into one of our most popular presidents, despite the often polarizing positions he took on domestic and foreign policies alike.

Was Reagan polarizing?  Not at all.  He ran against Jimmy Carter's poor record and carried 44 states in the 1980 presidential election.  He followed up in 1984 by running on his own accomplishments in office and captured 49 states.  Only by carrying his home state of Minnesota did Mondale narrowly avoid a humiliating clean-sweep.  That's what we like to call a mandate - a real mandate, not the phony "mandate" that the Obama Media Group likes to imply from time to time.

No, Reagan wasn't "polarizing."  He was simply loathed by liberals.  Contrary to what liberals tell themselves, they were (and still are) the ones with the problem, not Reagan.  While I can certainly understand the psychic need of liberals to associate Obama with a popular and successful president like Ronald Reagan, the comparison is ridiculous.  Reagan gave us "morning in America" while Obama has us mourning for America.

As it turns out, a much more appropriate comparison for Obama would be another Republican president, Richard Nixon.   

In February I joined those making the comparison between Obama and Nixon regarding hostility to journalists, particularly [former] liberal icon, Bob Woodward.  Naturally the Obama Media Group swung into action to destroy Woodward on behalf of Dear Leader.  But the obvious comparisons persist - and they're not just coming from political opponents.

Jonathan Turley is a left-leaning civil libertarian lawyer.  He's certainly no right-winger or Fox News personality.  But last month he unloaded on Obama with a laundry list of complaints in an article with the headline "Nixon Has Won Watergate."  The secondary headline read "Barack Obama's imperial presidency is just what his predecessor wanted."

This month, I spoke at an event commemorating the 40th anniversary of the Watergate scandal with some of its survivors at the National Press Club. While much of the discussion looked back at the historic clash with President Nixon, I was struck by a different question: Who actually won? From unilateral military actions to warrantless surveillance that were key parts of the basis for Nixon's impending impeachment, the painful fact is that Barack Obama is the president that Nixon always wanted to be.

Four decades ago, Nixon was halted in his determined effort to create an "imperial presidency" with unilateral powers and privileges. In 2013, Obama wields those very same powers openly and without serious opposition. The success of Obama in acquiring the long-denied powers of Nixon is one of his most remarkable, if ignoble, accomplishments.

Statements like that coming from a Limbaugh or a Beck would be blasted immediately and repeatedly by the Establishment Media, no matter how factually correct the statements might be.  But a man like Turley, who used to appear on MSNBC all the time, is an entirely different matter. He goes on to state:

Nixon was known for his attacks on whistle-blowers. He used the Espionage Act of 1917 to bring a rare criminal case against Ellsberg. Nixon was vilified for the abuse of the law. Obama has brought twice as many such prosecutions as all prior presidents combined. While refusing to prosecute anyone for actual torture, the Obama administration has prosecuted former CIA employee John Kiriakou for disclosing the torture program.

Other Nixonesque areas include Obama's overuse of classification laws and withholding material from Congress. There are even missing tapes. In the torture scandal, CIA officials admitted to destroying tapes that they feared could be used against them in criminal cases. Of course, Nixon had missing tapes, but Rose Mary Woods claimed to have erased them by mistake, as opposed to current officials who openly admit to intentional destruction.

Obama has not only openly asserted powers that were the grounds for Nixon's impeachment, but he has made many love him for it. More than any figure in history, Obama has been a disaster for the U.S. civil liberties movement. By coming out of the Democratic Party and assuming an iconic position, Obama has ripped the movement in half. Many Democrats and progressive activists find themselves unable to oppose Obama for the authoritarian powers he has assumed. It is not simply a case of personality trumping principle; it is a cult of personality.

Let me be clear.  I don't necessarily agree with much of Turley's views on these issues.  I do not, for instance, think that the Bush-era CIA should have been prosecuted for "war crimes."  That's just silly.  But Turley's point is that Obama is a hypocrite.  That I might agree with some of the results of that hypocrisy doesn't change the fact that Obama cannot be trusted.  It's a conclusion that Turley and I definitely share.

It's not just in matters of policy that Obama so closely resembles Nixon.  Like Nixon, Obama is notoriously aloof and disengaged.  Like Nixon, he relies heavily on the counsel of his wife and a tiny handful of loyalists for his perspective.  Arrogant, aloof, and unprepared is how Bob Woodward portrays Obama in his latest book The Price of Politics.

The book portrays Obama as a man of paradoxical impulses, able to charm an audience with his folksy manner but less adept and less interested in cultivating his relationships with Reid and Pelosi. While the president worries that he can’t rely on the two leaders, they are portrayed as impatient with him. As the final details of the 2009 stimulus package were being worked out on Capitol Hill, Obama phoned the speaker’s office to exhort the troops. Pelosi put the president on speakerphone so everyone could hear.

"Warming to his subject, he continued with an uplifting speech," Woodward writes. "Pelosi reached over and pressed the mute button. They could hear Obama, but now he couldn't hear them. The president continued speaking, his disembodied voice filling the room, and the two leaders got back to the hard numbers."

In the same vein, Woodward portrays Obama's attempts to woo business leaders as ham-handed and governed by stereotype. At a White House dinner with a select group of business executives in early 2010, Obama gets off on the wrong foot by saying, "I know you guys are Republicans." Ivan Seidenberg, the chief executive of Verizon, who "considers himself a progressive independent," retorted, "How do you know that?"

Nonetheless, Seidenberg was later pleased to receive an invitation to the president's 2010 Super Bowl party. But he changed his mind after Obama did little more than say hello, spending about 15 seconds with him. "Seidenberg felt he had been used as window dressing," Woodward writes. "He complained to Valerie Jarrett, a close Obama aide. . . . Her response: Hey, you're in the room with him. You should be happy."

He is vindictive.  He has always been obsessed with leaks, except when he's doing the leaking for his own benefit.  He delights in using dirty tricks - including getting sealed court documents mysteriously unsealed by friendly judges - to advance his career.  

He maintains a manipulative, co-dependent relationship with the media which, for several years, has exhibited symptoms of Stockholm Syndrome.  Like Patricia Hearst morphing into Tania, the Fourth Estate has turned into the Obama Media Group. The Establishment Media acts as a PR firm for Obama, not a watchdog for the people.  We need the media to closely examine what Obama is doing, not collude with him.

Back in February, during the controversy surrounding White House treatment of Woodward, another professional Democrat, Pat Caddell, wrote an article with the headline "Obama is the closest thing to Nixon we've seen in 40 years."  A remarkable public statement about a Democrat incumbent coming from a former Jimmy Carter adviser!

While Barack Obama may not share the Nixon pedigree, he and his White House are the closest thing to the Nixon regime of any that we have seen since then -- both in the extent of their paranoia and their willingness to suppress the truth and push the boundaries of law.

In my lifetime, in over 40 years in national politics, Mr. Obama is the only president who comes close to rivaling Richard Nixon for fundamental disingenuousness.

As the youngest person on Nixon's enemies list in 1972, I am particularly sensitive to a White House where they have utter disregard for trampling on dissent and on the rights of individuals.

Since Benghazi, when I raised the alarm about a media that was not only willing to blatantly support one political party or one political a candidate but for the first time seemed willing to suppress or ignore the facts and truth as related to a disaster of American foreign policy, my fear has been that we are now on a slippery slope. Almost everything since then has helped to realize that fear. Chuck Hagel, the sequester, Mr. Obama's speeches -- all of these have revealed a mainstream press that has absolutely decided to wear its bias openly as outriders of the Obama administration. Except for one issue -- when the president refused to allow reporters to cover him and Tiger Woods playing golf together. Now that's something they can get riled up about.

Nixon became public enemy No. 1 for the Left because of his "secret" bombing campaign against Cambodia.  We know how vilified George W. Bush was by the Left ("war criminal" and all...).  But as the New York Times pointed out a year ago, Obama has become just as bloodthirsty as his predecessors.

He overthrew the Libyan dictator. He ramped up drone attacks in Pakistan, waged effective covert wars in Yemen and Somalia and authorized a threefold increase in the number of American troops in Afghanistan. He became the first president to authorize the assassination of a United States citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, who was born in New Mexico and played an operational role in Al Qaeda, and was killed in an American drone strike in Yemen. And, of course, Mr. Obama ordered and oversaw the Navy SEAL raid that killed Osama bin Laden.

The left, which had loudly condemned George W. Bush for waterboarding and due process violations at Guantánamo, was relatively quiet when the Obama administration, acting as judge and executioner, ordered more than 250 drone strikes in Pakistan since 2009, during which at least 1,400 lives were lost.

Compare Mr. Obama's use of drone strikes with that of his predecessor. During the Bush administration, there was an American drone attack in Pakistan every 43 days; during the first two years of the Obama administration, there was a drone strike there every four days. And two years into his presidency, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning president was engaged in conflicts in six Muslim countries: Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen and Libya. The man who went to Washington as an "antiwar" president was more Teddy Roosevelt than Jimmy Carter.

While Nixon was eventually brought down by the Watergate scandal, Obama has managed to avoid the same fate, despite serious (and deadly) scandals of his own, primarily the Fast and Furious gun-running fiasco and the death of four Americans in Benghazi. 

Just as Nixon had his John Mitchell, so Obama has his Eric Holder.  As a result of a dispute over the release of Justice Department documents related to Fast and Furious, Attorney General Holder became the first sitting member of the Cabinet of the United States to be held in contempt of Congress on June 28, 2012. Earlier that month, Obama had invoked executive privilege for the first time in his presidency over the same documents. Hiding behind executive privilege?  Nothing Nixonian about that, right?

A Coptic Christian filmmaker is languishing in prison because a video he made was deliberately and erroneously blamed by Obama officials as inciting the riots in Cairo and Benghazi.  Even though we now know this was totally false, the plight of the wrongly-accused filmmaker persists.  Why won't the government make the Benghazi survivors available for interviews or Congressional hearings?  Why is the White House intimidating them into silence?  

It's clear that Obama is hiding things from the American people.  But since most of the media these days is in the business of protecting the president rather than investigating him with all means at their disposal (as they did in Nixon's day), the former is still getting away with his coverups.

And, by the way, just like Nixon had Spiro Agnew, Obama has his own loud-talking, obnoxious, gaffe-prone buffoon in Joe Biden.  I rest my case.