“Generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow.” That far-fetched personal ambition, articulated in Barack Obama’s grandiloquent acceptance speech for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008, is chicken feed compared with his latest directive to the oceans. Yesterday, he ordered them to “shut down.”
That was the instruction conveyed to charter boat captains who depend on Florida’s Biscayne Bay for their livelihood. Breitbart reports that rangers with the National Park Service delivered the bad news that the bay was “closed” due to the partial government shutdown — that until government funding is restored, fishing boats are prohibited from taking anglers into 1,100 square-miles of open sea.
If it sounds loony or delusional or vindictive or small-minded, that’s because it is. The move is just the latest belligerent act of a self-important man gone mad, a president so drunk with his own imagined power that he believes he can control nature and is lord and master over all he surveys. Yesterday he sent park rangers to close the parking lot at Mount Vernon, the home of the country’s first president. Never mind that the estate is privately owned. Lord Obama decreed it so.
Earlier in the week he dispatched guards to cordon off the World War II monument in D.C., to block access by veterans of the second Great War, many of them wheelchair-bound, so that he could make a statement of defiance to Republicans with whom he refuses to negotiate over the shutdown. On Friday, the target was the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, his goal being apparently to demonstrate that he is an equal opportunity tyrant, capable of showing the same disdain to all veterans, regardless of generation or foreign war.
The wonderful irony is that Obama believes that Republicans are being petty and obstinate as he delivers edict after edict, not out of necessity but out of caprice. In the words of Breitbart’s Mike Flynn, “this is governing by temper-tantrum.”
Naturally, capitulating to his every whim comes with a price tag. The bills for those park rangers, which are passed along to the American taxpayer, are adding up. By the time his reign of spite has ended, the federal budget he claims to care so much about will have grown that much more bloated. And for what reason other than massaging his massive ego?
Flynn concludes memorably. “Centuries ago,” he writes,
King Canute famously failed to command the ocean tide to stop. His display was actually a means to educate his subjects on the limits of royal power. Today, however, our President actually believes he has the power to control the oceans.
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