Stop Giving Obama Radicals the Benefit of the Doubt

J. Christian Adams:

In the Spring of 2011, National Security Council staffer Samantha Power sent emails to top Pentagon officials. Her emails contained GPS coordinates in Libya. She demanded that the Pentagon launch immediate air strikes on top of these coordinates, no questions asked. Power, you see, had friends in NGOs on the ground in Libya looking to borrow American might for a moment or two.

Her emails were ignored at the Pentagon. But her cavalier and hasty email demand that American airmen be launched on a dangerous mission to benefit her friends might seem incompetent and reckless.

But like so much about the age of Obama, Republicans mistake leftist ideology for incompetence. In the five decades-old orthodoxy of the foreign affairs left, pilots in supersonic jets with laser guided missiles are most appropriately used in small ways, and to serve small causes. To radicals like Power, American might should be used for their political ends, and the old conventions on target selection, chains of command and strategic aims are obsolete.

So admit it Republicans: you’re confused. You can’t understand why President Obama’s policies and his nominations are so radical. It doesn’t make sense, you think, for him to pick extremist nominees who would have radical skeletons that would have disqualified them in any other administration.

You also can’t understand why he continues to lurch left on almost every foreign and domestic issue.

Get over it. It isn’t 1990 anymore, and leftist radicalism is a prerequisite for jobs in this administration, not a disqualifier. Leftist radicalism is the administration’s reason for existence.

This is why Obama chose John Kerry as Secretary of State. Kerry first distinguished himself as a stooge for America’s enemies. In his first campaign for Congress, Kerry said, “I’m an internationalist. I’d like to see our troops dispersed through the world only at the directive of the United Nations.” He even travelled to Europe to hold talks with North Vietnamese Communists while American soldiers were dying in Vietnam. His views about American power didn’t moderate over the years, as he continued to aid America’s enemies. Now he is Secretary of State.

Until the Republican Party understands that these extreme leftist policies and personnel choices are core deliberate features of the Obama era, they will never learn to combat them.

It isn’t enough to express shock that someone like Tom Perez would be nominated as Labor Secretary with his extremist history. The Obama administration isn’t afraid of your shock and strongly worded letters. The administration is instead marching forward into a bold future without you. When they march right over you, they assume you will complain.

What the Obamites are really afraid of, and haven’t seen from most in the Republican Party, are effective counter-attacks to their radicalism. They are afraid of the most radical policy units inside their government being defunded by the House. They are afraid of the impeachment of lower-level federal officials who abuse power, such as IRS or DOJ employees, by the House. They are afraid of rough power being met with rough power.

But the Obamites don’t have much to worry about. One can’t stop what one can’t even recognize.

Many won’t even attach a name to what we are all witnessing: leftist radicalism. So step one to effectively stopping Obama is to stop giving his radical nominees and radical policies the benefit of the doubt.

How?

First, purge the word “incompetence” from your lexicon. Never use it on another Fox News hit. Never write it again. The Obama administration policies, ranging from Fast and Furious, to the New Black Panther dismissal, to the debacle of Obamacare, are not incompetent follies. They are instead representative of ideological desires deliberately implemented through the mechanisms of power available to this administration.

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