Scorched Earth

Sometimes a nation’s leader finds himself in a position of having to destroy his own people’s resources to keep them from being of use to an advancing enemy army.  He must order crops burned, weapons smashed, and especially, fuel burned in the mechanized age.  Josef Stalin did this against Hitler’s army at the beginning of Operation Barbarossa.  This is the scorched earth policy.

Sometimes the attacking army uses the scorched earth to deny resources to the defenders to support a siege or, in the case of General William T. Sherman, to weaken the enemy’s ability to sustain their war effort.

Then there is the third type of destruction; the punitive program.  A leader under pressure from his own people orders military or police force against the population and damages the economy and possibly destroys critical resources.  This is an angry, bitter person—a narcissist would does not think the people deserve to live without his or her leadership.

President Barack Obama is such a person.  He has shown a tendency to throw anyone and everyone under the bus to avoid even the slightest taint of failure attaching to him.  No one is sacred to him, no one worthy of his persona loss.  If Obama feels rejected by the proletariat he will unleash hell on America in the final weeks he is in office.

What kind of damage can a lame duck president do?

That question requires considering another question; what does a sitting president have access too?  Almost everything important to the safety and security of the United States is tied to the Oval Office.  The president is chief law enforcer and head of the military.  He is the caretaker of the nation.  Up until now, we have not had a president willing to purposefully hurt the nation.  Up until now, we have never had such a man as Barack Obama.

If the elections go as predicted, Obama will have full presidential power from early November until mid-January.  He has shown no shyness about using executive orders to alter the legal balance in the country.  He has refused to enforce laws he doesn’t like and created laws out of thin air to do his own will despite the voters and Congress.  He single-handedly shut down oil production in the Gulf of Mexico – American drilling, that is.  He is fine with Chinese and Brazilian oil rig pumping out of these same sensitive waters.

Nothing will stop him from exercising full authority for spite or personal gain in his last days.  A few of the most damaging efforts he might well do are:

·         Issue blanket pardons to cronies he has placed in key government offices who will be actively undermining their departments – mostly collecting secret files and destroying vital documents.

·         Sell pardons to whatever person is willing to shell out big payoffs to him personally; no crime would be off limits for a pardon if the money is right.

·         Create favorable regulations for any big donor to give them an unfair competitive edge.

·         Issue blanket amnesty to all illegal aliens currently residing in the United States. Since no one knows who is here now or where they are, it will create an open-ended floodgate for a long time.

·         America’s covert operations, military units and security programs can all go up for sale. The Chinese and Russians would pay him billions for the stuff he has in his iPad. He will make Wikileaks seem like amateur hour at the Ritz.

·         He doesn’t even have to sell secrets directly. He can give away passwords and access codes, even our procedures for just as much money.

We could be looking at instant economic and security chaos.  The new president will be busy for weeks or months trying to find all the leaks and compromised data.  Meanwhile the economy might already be in a tailspin because of the new regulations, taxes and executive orders kicking in.  Add in the sudden influx of millions of new and unemployed citizens (and their families) and the Recession could become a Depression almost overnight.

There is not much we can do to prevent these actions.  The Founding Fathers never envisioned we would have a man like this one, a man who seems to genuinely hate the American people, the American way of life and their Constitution, serving as chief executive.  The powers Obama is so fond of misusing were intended to let the president do important things while Congress was out of session and the members weeks or months away in their home states.  They had no idea about jet flights or instant communication via the Internet or telephone.  There is almost no need for him to sign “out of session” orders anymore.

The only reason Obama does it is because he can.  He is acting within the letter of the Constitution but not in the spirit as it was intended.  Like the true lawyer he is, Obama is stretching the law to fit his purposes.  All we can hope for is a staff of bureaucrats who will not be a party to the destruction of the country.  And do something Obama hates more than this country; get down on our collective knees and pray to the LORD above that his efforts fail – that One Nation Under GOD shall not perish from the Earth.

Obama image courtesy of: Kathy Willens, AP

Lincoln image courtesy of: http://www.quotecollection.com/image-view.php?img=abraham-lincoln-2.gif