The president’s boundless hypocrisy is always a source of wonderment to me. This is one of his most salient traits, along with narcissism, arrogance, and contempt for all who disagree with him.
His hypocrisy was apparent from the first. The moment he took office, he killed the voucher program that gave an opportunity to 2,500 poor minority children to escape the wretched school system of the District of Columbia. He did this at the very moment when he and his wife were putting their own kids in the swankiest, spendiest private school in the city.
Then there has been his endless bashing of the rich — while he and his wife were collecting millions from rich donors, many of whom got prominent roles in the administration, or taxpayer-subsidized loans and grants from it.
The latest illustrations are equally . . . rich. The first is the news that Obama, even while campaigning strenuously to limit everyone else’s gun rights, has just signed into law a bill that will give him Secret Service protection for life — that is, protection by armed guards, furnished by the government. He thus reversed a law from the 1990s that put a 10-year limit on the coverage.
Yes, even while the administration is ghoulishly exploiting dead children in its calls for an assault weapons ban, making all federal buildings “gun-free” zones, and limiting the size of bullet clips, Obama himself will be protected in perpetuity by men carrying those evil guns.
In this respect, it must be noted, Obama simply joined the ranks of other famous people who oppose guns for everybody but themselves or their bodyguards. It upsets me to do so, but I think of Rosie O’Donnell, Dianne Feinstein, Michael Bloomberg, and Michael Moore, all of whom have sought or employed armed guards or have their own conceal-carry permits, while waging war against the Second Amendment.
None of them, however, can manifest hypocrisy on such a grand scale as we have seen in the Great Obama Sequester Scare. Honestly, I cannot fathom how anybody could be silly enough to think that a 2% cut in the budget — which is slated to grow by an even greater amount than that, so that net spending by the federal government will in fact go up, but by a slightly smaller amount than planned — will cause catastrophic consequences. Yet Obama, ever the demagogue, used every scare tactic in the book to arouse opposition to the plan that he himself devised, suggesting that planes would crash, thousands (or was it millions?) of teachers would lose their jobs, billions of people would die from eating uninspected food, floods of biblical proportion would ravage the landscape, and all manner of other hysterical hoohah.
For once the Republicans called his bluff. They allowed the sequester to happen. So Obama is now cutting expenditures in ways that are clearly intended to punish both Republican politicians and all taxpayers vicious enough to support any schemes of fiscal restraint. His most daring attempt to curb expenditures (so far, at least) has been to stop White House tours — right about Spring Break time. The intent is obviously to make the vacationing little ones cry out to their parents, who will then be filled with outrage against the enemies of government spending. The savings from these omitted tours? A gargantuan $18,000 a week. For larger savings, the administration released a horde of alleged lawbreakers, formerly held for deportation proceedings. Undoubtedly, these people will report to the proper authorities, whenever requested to do so. No security problems there.
But where security really matters, the administration is careful not to cut at all. For example, Department of Homeland Security chief Janet (“Big Sister”) Napolitano announced that while the Secret Service’s budget will be cut, the president’s own security team won’t be reduced a penny. And don’t worry — there are apparently no plans to cut the White House calligraphers, who (as noted by Kimberley Strassel) collectively earn $277,000 a year. They’re worth as much as four months of White House tours — and apparently cheap at the price. Otherwise, I’m sure, they would have been laid off.
It’s too bad that the president doesn’t have more time to stay at home and watch them do their work. He has golfed more than any other president, and when he isn’t golfing (with those horrid rich people, by the way), he is usually on vacation. (I’m counting his speaking tours as vacation time, because after all, listening to his own voice is one of the president’s most valued forms of recreation.) But this stuff can get pricey. As Strassel observes, cutting the White House tours created savings equal to about two hours of Air Force One flying time.
I won’t even mention Michelle Obama’s upcoming 50th birthday bash, with Adele and Beyonce performing. That should cost about a thousand weeks of White House tours.
Faced with the necessity, the grim, unnatural, and wholly unforeseen necessity of cutting any government expenditures whatever, Obama will always do his best to make the cuts hurt the ordinary people whom he purports to champion, while maintaining his own life among the rich and special, spending freely on himself and friends.
What a guy!
