OPINION:
CRIMES AGAINST LIBERTY: AN INDICTMENT OF PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA
By David Limbaugh
Regnery, $29.95, 503 pages
No, no, not quite an indictment, you understand - in the “Hear ye! Hear ye!” sense made familiar by the constant procession of lawyers across the television screen.
We might better call David Limbaugh’s book on “the One” a bill of particulars - very particular particulars, indeed - bearing not only on President Obama’s presidential means and methods, but on his ways of being Barack Obama. Neither Rahm Emanuel nor Robert Gibbs will wish to handle this book bare-handed. It’s that hot.
No political book, especially one published weeks before a crucial election, is likely ever to be called a model of rhetorical objectivity. It doesn’t do, in other words, to judge “Crimes Against Liberty” by the likelihood that Harvard will assign it to history graduate students 50 years hence. Mr. Limbaugh takes Mr. Obama apart limb by limb for defects of policy and personality alike, presenting him to us as - I am quoting - “liar,” “narcissist,” “bully,” “dictator,” “imperious” and “anti-American.”
It is what might be called, except by Democrats, fierce, tenacious engagement, in the manner vouchsafed political commentators by the First Amendment to the Constitution. Mr. Emanuel and Mr. Gibbs are entitled to surge back at the guy with their own accounts of how the president is, well, everything he says he is, if not a lot more, all of it admirable.
That possibility cuts very near the heart of Mr. Limbaugh’s argument that a lot of what Mr. Obama says is false, partisan and mean-spirited - a bill of goods, as it turns out. In the chapter he calls “The Liar,” Mr. Limbaugh writes that Mr. Obama’s “outright, habitual lies are a fundamental aspect of his governance.”
A few graybeards can recall how, when the Watergate investigation unmasked President Nixon’s involvement in the cover-up of the original break-in, commentators scrambled to find comparable instances of presidential deception - and came up mostly dry, save for some scattered prevarications by Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Systematic presidential lying isn’t what we’re used to, but that’s what Mr. Limbaugh implies we get from Mr. Obama, who, to judge by this account, lacks moral grounding of the most basic sort.
In policy terms, Mr. Obama comes off as “the most committed ideologue in American history,” with “a monomania for socialism.” That’s where, as Mr. Limbaugh sees it, this “crime” business comes in.
“[H]e is determined [via health care] to create a new entitlement to vastly expand the dependency class on whom he and other Democrats increasingly rely for their votes, their careers, and their resulting political power. What this is ultimately about is expanding government control - it’s about crimes against our liberties.”
Moreover: “He certainly does not want America to suffer another terrorist attack, but his slavish adherence to ideology results in policies that make that horrifying outcome much more likely,” through appeasement policies that surely make our country’s enemies giggle with glee. Meanwhile, he “seems to believe that [Israel] is just another Western imposition on noble, innocent Muslim societies.”
Well, OK. All that should stir up the steadily swelling anti-Obama legions - and actuate Democratic pushback, according to our country’s honorable, time-tested, etc., etc., tradition of free speech. I’m not sure how much else this book accomplishes or, in fact, was ever meant to accomplish.
Without doubting the basis for Mr. Limbaugh’s fury, I think many might concede that there’s much, much more we need to know about Mr. Obama and the political-cultural conditions that carried him unexpectedly to the political heights.
That’s to say, there’s much, much more we need to know about ourselves. We - in the “we the people” sense, I mean, of course - chose him as the grand leader of us all. “We” knew we had never heard of him until just a few years prior to our handing him the car keys (to borrow one of his favorite images).
No other major-party nominee since Wendell Willkie came upon us more suddenly, more unheralded - not even Jimmy Carter. We appeared not to care. We took our self-anointed savior at his own self-estimate - cut him endless slack when he delivered himself of grandiose promises, making claims about himself that were not, to say the least, grounded in our experience.
What, in other words, was the matter with us? That “what” deserves to be at the center of every Obama appraisal published for the next century or so.
If Mr. Limbaugh reports rightly - and his facts seem to me to be in pretty good order - the American people two years ago elected themselves a president most unlike the one many thought they were getting. The left, to be sure, was overjoyed and should have been. The most cursory investigation of Mr. Obama’s credentials showed him to be flesh of their flesh. That moderates and even some conservatives jumped ship to vote for him is the real oddity. Was he that formidable a campaigner, or had disgust with politics as usual sunk so deeply into the national fiber that we the people just wanted a fresh start?
Soon enough, analysts will commence to consider these and like questions against the backdrop of the deep disillusionment we take almost for granted when talking of Mr. Obama and his deeds. We will start at some point to get to the heart of the matter, no happier probably about ourselves and our capacity for rational choice than is the case is right now.
Barack Obama, it seems accurate and reasonable to say, put one over on us. With our help and encouragement. There’s the rub - with material enough for a veritable library on this extraordinary moment in American history.
William Murchison is a syndicated columnist.
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