It’s tough to comment on the various interconnected scandals. The main reason is it’s so tough to keep up.
The MSM media experts are having the same problem: Still, very few Democrats are in complete denial about how bad this might be. If I were to combine several little lectures I heard on the networks over the last half hour, it would be something like this: When Watergate first started, I couldn’t believe how stupid it was. When I first heard about auditing small-time TEA PARTIERS, I thought the same thing. The president better not fall further into Nixon’s hole but come clean and take full responsibility right now. Blaming and firing this or that small-timer isn’t fooling anyone. Obama had a skilled and savvy team that got him reelected, maybe he needs a new team to get him to man up or “get out of the passive voice” and do what’s required to really govern. That includes taking real responsibility for the politicized bullying by his bureaucrats and admitting that he himself had gone way beyond the bounds of our constitutional system by creating the perception that it was somehow being “on the dark side” or outside the law to be his political opponent.
That’s the voice, more or less, of the people who really hope he can save himself. Well, I hope he can too.
Several comedians have used this line. Two words on why the president won’t be impeached: President Biden. And nobody really thinks it would be good for our first African American president to end up having to resign.
Pete’s irony below really should hit home. The power of the government had been turned against small-time community organizers, such as TEA PARTIERS, pro-lifers, and so forth. Nobody was going after Rove and his CROSSROADS. And, as we read in THE NEW REPUBLIC, nobody was going after the probably illegal evildoing of the giants on WALL STREET.
A problem with the IRS and our complicated and confusing tax code is that it makes it easy for very rich guys to weasel out of paying much at all. The government accountants and lawyers aren’t anywhere near the cognitive pay grade of the guns they can hire to find and defend their loopholes. The theory behind the TEA PARTY preference for the “fair tax” (a mistake on their part) or the “flat tax” is that the really rich will finally pay their fair share, or something like the percentage of their real income that I pay of mine.
So it shouldn’t be so hard to explain why the condescending “social welfare corporatism” of Obama’s government is waging war on the middle class. It wouldn’t be hard it our Republicans listened to Pete.
Dear Reader,
Can I be direct with you?
War abroad. Socialists on the rise. AI upending human life. Endless uproar online. The modern attention economy doesn’t want readers — it wants users enslaved to the tyranny of the present.
First Things is the antidote: literary excellence, timeless truths, and a fixed point of reference in a culture that has lost its bearings.
But we can’t do it without readers like you.
Our goal: Raise $150,000 by November 1 to sustain First Things in the year ahead.
Your gift anchors readers in the permanent things.
Make your Fall Campaign gift now using the button below.
If you have any questions or would like more information, please contact Giovanni Del Piero, Director of the Editor’s Circle, at gdelpiero@firstthings.com or 212-627-1985.
YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE
The Church in the Age of Therapy
In 1966, Philip Rieff wrote in The Triumph of the Therapeutic that “Religious man was born to…
Canada’s Deadliest Blind Spot
On September 20, the Daily Mail ran a story with the provocative headline, “Our 83-year-old Christian grandmother…
The Faithful Joy of Dolly Parton and Fulton Sheen
Dolly Parton and Fulton Sheen seem to have had little in common. She favored rhinestones; he wore…
