Victor Davis Hanson ponders for National Review Online readers why multiple scandals seem to have little impact on the Obama administration’s approach to government.
Was the Associated Press monitoring a scandal or a warning of what Obama is willing to do to get the media to cool it? Were the lies that helped sell Obamacare a scandal or also the necessary means to reach the desired ends? What will history remember, Obama wonders: that the president of the United States lied about keeping your doctor and your insurance plan under Obamacare, or that the Affordable Care Act was finally enacted?
Law professors will fight in journals over whether Obama had the right to pick and choose which elements of his own law he would enforce in any given political cycle. But that mini-controversy is less important than the fact there were indeed Obama laws to pick and choose from.
In sum, what many Americans see as scandals are not scandals to the Obama administration. Our president believes instead that the law is fluid. Statutes are mere constructs dressed up by those with inordinate power to paper over race, class, and gender biases.
For the nobly progressive, the desired equality of result at home and greater fairness toward nations abroad require a sort of deconstruction of “settled law.” Liberal elites may be forced to emasculate their enemies, if need be, by politicizing the IRS, or by ignoring the law through executive orders, or by sending out officials to peddle untruths, or by doing almost anything necessary to enact social justice here and abroad. Some call it scandalous, but others see it as empowering and long overdue.
The more such scandals occur in the next two years, the more they will not be seen as scandals, but as mere bothersome hurdles to fundamentally changing America.
