Barry, Barry, Who the Heck is Barry?

With our good friend, Lou Sharp, my wife and I spent more than a few Friday or Saturday evenings at Kate's Irish Pub in Springfield.  Those were nights when the music was live and "professional" (as opposed to open mike nights earlier in the week when the music was live and often just as good).

One staple performer, Dave Berry, would presage his transition from the family portion of his show to the bluer, adult portion with his rendition of "Alice, Who the Heck is Alice."  Some of you would recognize the song if I changed the word "Heck" to something that rhymed with "duck."

As I read the news, day after day, now some seven years into Obama's public campaigning for President and subsequent election to that office, I hear Dave Berry, leading the crowd over and over again, only in my head, an enraged crowd is yelling, "Barry, Barry, Who the Heck is Barry?"

Well, let's see:

He's the President whose administrtion praised the Oklahoma mosque that sheltered and taught a black man whose moment of fame came in beheading a grandmorther whose apparent crime was not to express submission to Islam.

He's the President that leaves open the borders to those traveling from Ebola-plagued corners of Africa, resulting for the first time, in American history, in the presence of Ebola-infected patients in American communities and hospitals.

He's the President that can erect a second, interior fence to insure that he's protected from would-be invaders, but REFUSES to erect the authorized border fence to protect us from actually-are invaders.

He's the President with the erasable red crayon for drawing lines on the world stage, whose word is not a bond, not even a post-it note kind of bond that will stick unless it gets wet or a good wind comes along.

He's the President who figured out how to turn 3,000 American military casualties in Iraq into proof of a wasted venture by preferring immediate disentanglement to appease home supporters over stabilizing that nation.

He's the President that allows Federal law enforcement agents to export guns to Mexico in a hare-brained scheme allegedly to track their re-importation to the USA, but which resulted in those weapons being used to murder more than 100 people, including American federal law enforcement officials.

He's the President that sides with al-Qaeda affiliated terrorist groups ... in Libya, in Egypt, in Syria, and elsewhere.

He's the President whose rocket-running in Libya was covered up with the blood and death rattles of America's first openly gay US Ambassador and three other Americans.

He's the President whose administration called the murder of Americans aboard a stateside military base "workplace violence, not terrorism," despite the cries of Alluah Ahkbar by the murderer during his rampage.

He's the President that led the USA apology tour, bowing and scraping before tin-pot potentates and has been leftists around the world.

He's the President that promised you could keep your healthcare insurance and your doctor, then signed a law that took away your healthcare insurance and your doctor, then signed an executive order to protect some of you from immediately losing your healthcare insurance and your doctor to prevent an election annihilation of the Democratic Party in 2012 and again this year, but who will allow that healthcare law to have full effect and take away your healthcare insurance and your doctor after the November 2014 election.

He's the President without a record of accomplishments to which he could point when seeking office, having no record of private accomplishments in business, industry, science, research, education, philosophy, or any other field.

He's the President without a paper trail, setting aside one sophomoric editorial from his college days, he is that wonderment of wonderment, the man without evidence of a college transcript, a law school transcript, an employment record.

He's the President who lied about his origins to get a scholarship for foreign students (after all, Obama is a native-born American, right? so how does he qualify for foreign student assistance?)

He is not a cipher, as in a zero.  Because, while a zero adds no positive value to anything to which it is added, Obama brings NEGATIVE value to everything he touches:  he is the hair in your soup, the odd smell of sulpher in your tap water, the dent on the hood of your new car, the flat tire on your way to work, the unsettling call in the middle of the night bearing terrible news, the drop in your stocks, the theft of your identity.

He is the autocrat de fe.  He is a veritable dictator whose targeting of political opponents and uncooperative military officers and private industry makes Richard Milhouse Nixon look like a playground piker.  No mere tosser of taunts, the Machiavellian Obama turns loose the dogs of the IRS and the DOJ on those who express opposition to his ideology and his policy.

He tends the American garden the way rabbits tend your garden, eating what is not his, trampling what he does not own, leaving ruin in his wake.

Under his liar's tenancy in the White House, the number of permanently despairing unemployed Americans has breached 92 millions -- including 55 million American women, the numbers of hungry Americans dependent of Supplemental Nutritional Assistance from the fedgov has past 45 million on its way to 50 million, and the number of uninsured Americans has grown, not declined, as the abomination of Obamacare forces private employers to discontinue private health plans because what was a perfectly fine plan as far as employer and employee were concerned does not satisfy the standards set by a law that Obama had to sign into law to discover what was in the law.

Obama is the light at the end of the tunnel.  No.  Not daylight.  The train heading toward you at seventy miles an hour with a drunk in charge.

Now you understand why I have dreams of a nation rising to its feet and thundering its refrain, "Barry, Barry, who the heck is Barry?"

Sadly for America, Barry is the President.  Barry is the man who should realize that Speaker John Boehner is "his best friend."  Of course, as Barry's friend, Boehner proves himself no FRIEND of America or its People. The President of the United States is worse than a cancer. A cancer will kill you. But Barry will kill you, your family, your future, your hopes, dreams and aspirations as he works like mold, like termites, like disease, to destroy everything with which he has concourse.

All the while, Republicans in the US House of Representatives leave this disease, this whirling dervish of destruction, in power.  They have the power to stop the government until Barry submits. They have the power to put the asterisk of impeachment next to Barry's name in the history books as a testament to THEIR rejection of his decidedly incompetent, decidedly evil, and decidedly destructive policies, yet, with Barry's best friend Boehner at the helm, THEY DO NOTHING.

I hope you're getting the rhythm of this song.   I want it pounding in your brain.  I hope that before too awful long, you'll join in and sing that refrain:

Barry, Barry, Who the Heck is Barry.

Not in a drowsy drunken slur, but in the indignant, demanding and revolutionary tones of those who drove a wedge between the English Crown and our prized liberties.  The time is coming when what can be tolerated from that useless defecation in the White House will be surpassed.  In the absence of concise Congressional action to TERMINATE the Obama presidency, it may fall to the hands of good people, you, your families, your friends to POUND away at the tyranny until it falls to the floor.

Then, with derision, and slight remembrance, but soothed anger, we can go back to a more desultory refrain of

Barry, Barry, Who the Heck was Barry?

An Apology for Tyranny: How One Evangelical Conservative Legal Group Contributed to Liberty's Loss

As I mentioned the other day, there is responsibility to be assigned for the massive constitutional violations of privacy and liberty uncloaked this week, the logging of billions and billions of phone records, the PRISM program and related adventures in domestic surveillance.  And there is responsibility that flows back to Bush/Ashcroft and the Patriot Act.  And there is responsibility that flows back to the leadership of conservative and evangelical Christian groups that should have opposed the surrender, in 2001, of liberty in the name of obtaining security.

But now I want to back up my assertion by directing you to the October 2001 "Open Letter" of Jay Sekulow, Chief Counsel of the ACLJ.  There, Sekulow baptizes the maiden voyage of this government intrusion, giving my former employer's blessing to what became the Patriot Act.

In the "Open Letter," Sekulow stakes the claim that the legislation is constitutional, and asserts that the conclusion was supported by Senior Staff.

This was not true at the time that it was promoted to the conservative and evangelical community in October 2001.  "Senior Staff," of which I was one, raised serious questions and objections to the legislative proposal at the time that it was discussed with us.  Truth be told, the ACLJ's support for the act was a fait accompli by the time that consultation was had.

It was unsound -- then -- to support the arrogation of power by the Executive Branch, and to support the derogation of individual liberties.

To my own shame, I kept silence with the notion of keeping my job.  Even when the deleterious impact was reflected in greater and greater encroachments on the exercise of well-established constitutional rights (such as through the creation and maintenance of speech free zones in the name of providing security to "protected persons"), and I should have criticized the security crazed and liberty loathing sense of the Bush administration's policies, I kept silent within the ACLJ, while strenuously litigating for the rights of clients, such as Reverend Patrick Mahoney, to conduct prayer vigils and demonstrations in close proximity to events involving the President, Supreme Court justices, etc.

Now those policies have grown up under the nurture and care of the Kenyan, but the seeds should never have been planted by Bush and Ashcroft, nor watered with the praise of the ACLJ.

Accountability and Uncomfortability

I guess, unless you are a true stooge of the Obama administration, you are shocked and angered at the collection of Verizon network records, being conducted on the grand scale by Obama's Department of Justice under the thin skin of a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act order.

If you are angered, welcome to the club.

The National Journal is angered.

The New York Times is angered.

The Atlantic is angered.

Piers Morgan is angered.

Get the point?

Except stooges -- Lindsey "Light in the Loafers of Liberty" Graham and his ilk -- we all know that Obama's sweeping sweep sweeps too far.

Maybe, finally, the Republican led House of Representatives will exhibit the manly firmness of a resolute legislature by investigating the Administration via select committees ... it asks too much to hope that Boehner & Co. will craft articles of impeachment in response to the Administration's tyrannical excess.

But, and this is an important but, do not think the job is done by searching out Obama's toadies and seeking to affix all responsibility on them for the rape of the Fourth Amendment.  To fully excise the tumor against liberty, we have to follow the cancer back to its birth in the fear generated by the September 11 terror attacks.  In that long view, an honest appraisal indicts then-President Bush, that Congress and its paramours for making this all so easy with the Patriot Act and the sacrifices of liberties then in the name of providing security for which so many desperately craved.

When I served as Senior Counsel with the ACLJ, I was thunderstruck when none of the organization's senior attorneys -- seasoned counsel with decades of constitutional law practice between them -- were NOT consulted before the organization loaned its name and support to the Patriot Act.

Thus began the rape and pillage of our rights to privacy, respect for constitutional rights and liberties, with the blessing of America's leading religious liberties nonprofit.

Today, if you are thunderstruck with the present administration's excesses, you should not only hold it accountable, but should seek out those that stood this monster up and welcomed it to the table. When you do, you will ask my former employer whether the security it craved was worth the liberty we lost.

Governor Cuomo Solves School Bullying With New Normal Technique

Governor Cuomo has offered a new proposal for dealing with school ground bullies.  "Given recent events, we have to confront the reality of the 'new normal' in so many facets of our lives," the Governor announced during a press conference the day following the Boston Marathon bombing.

"So, today, I am announcing a 'new normal' pro-active defense strategy for those targeted by bullies on school playgrounds." 

At that point, the Governor reached underneath the podium, and lifted a large rock.  "When a bully is approaching," he intoned, "we have concluded that the surest way to avoid being beat up for your lunch money is, first, empty your wallet on the ground in front of you, step back, and then, as the bully is bending to retrieve the funds, STRIKE YOURSELF with the rock.  This blow has to be convincing.  It won't do simply to brush the rock against some extraneous body part.  Damage must be done and it must be seen to be done." 

Referring to the latest in progressive thought, King Andrew explained, "all indications are that, presented by a simpering coward, surrendering his money to him and then engaging in self-destructive physical self-harm, most bullies will simply walk over to the cafeteria and purchase a chocolate milk, chuckling as they go!"