This past weekend, on Fox News Sunday, anchor Chris Wallace played a clip of President Obama displaying the hypocritical audacity that epitomizes Mr. Obama’s term in office.
“You don’t get to pick which rules you play by,” said the president, as he criticized some corporations for using what he admitted was the “totally legal” practice of what Fox Business Correspondent Peter Barnes described as “moving their headquarters overseas through mergers with foreign firms which can save them a boat load in corporate taxes.”
First, who is Mr. Obama to lecture anyone that “You don’t get to pick which rules you play by?”
A partial list of the ways President Obama has picked which rules he plays by—whether or not he is acting legally, Constitutionally, morally or in the best interests of the country include:
- His 24 unilateral changes to Obamacare.
- His directives granting amnesty to illegal immigrants.
- His administration’s spying on and intimidation of reporters, including Fox News’s James Rosen.
- His numerous defeats before the Supreme Court, which has unanimously ruled in many cases against the Obama administration for, among other infractions:
–Illegal “recess” appointments to the Consumer Financial
Protection Bureau and the National Labor Relations Board when
Congress wasn’t in recess.
-Attempts by the Justice Department to track and invade the privacy of citizens, which would have cast aside Fourth Amendment protections.
-Trying to restrict the religious freedom of businesses in the Hobby Lobby case.
Add to that a recent unprecedented letter from 47 (more than half) of the U.S. government’s inspectors general that blasts the Obama administration’s Justice Department, Peace Corps and Chemical Safety Board for “serious limitations on access to records” that have obstructed various investigations, including those regarding documented sexual assaults.
Even the sycophantic mainstream media are exasperated with “Obama rules.” Investor’s Business Daily reported that, “In a scathing letter to Obama this July, the Society of Professional Journalists decried the ‘politically driven suppression of news and information about federal agencies.’ Former New York Times editor Jill Abramson called Obama’s ‘the most secretive White House that I have ever been involved in covering.’”
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz has catalogued here 76 examples of the president and his administration abusing their powers or otherwise acting illegally and unethically.
In addition, returning to the issue of American businesses relocating or investing abroad, under President Obama’s high-tax, unfriendly-to-business regime, the U.S. corporate tax rate is the highest in the world. This creates a perverse incentive for both large and small businesses to invest overseas. This, in turn, stifles job creation and economic growth in the U.S., as demonstrated in study after study.
Bending or breaking the law. Creating perverse incentives. Putting choke holds on employment, economic development—and the freedom of citizens.
President Obama long ago picked these as the rules he plays by. Mr. Obama’s rules are the wrong game changers. His are not the right rules for a thriving society.
Communications consultant Jon Kraushar is at www.jonkraushar.net. He is a consultant to corporate and political leaders including Steve Forbes.
