For those who are not fans of the “Superman” comic book series (or of “Seinfeld”), the Bizarro World is a planet where everything is the opposite of here on Earth. The Bizarro Code states, “Us do opposite of all Earthly things! Us hate beauty! Us love ugliness! Is big crime to make anything perfect on Bizarro World!” (Grammar in the Bizarro World also stinks for reasons never explained, but that’s a matter for another day.)
As of Wednesday of this week, it became clear that the man occupying the White House is not the Barack Obama born on planet Earth and raised mostly in Hawaii. It is Bizarro Barack Obama. At a town hall event, he said the following:
So in the short term, if Mr. McConnell, the leader of the Senate, and the Speaker of the House, John Boehner, want to have a vote on whether what I’m doing is legal or not, they can have that vote. I will veto that vote, because I’m absolutely confident that what we’re doing is the right thing to do.
What we’ve done is we’ve expanded my authorities under executive action and prosecutorial discretion as far as we can legally under the existing statute, the existing law. And so now the question is, how can we get a law passed. [Emphasis added]
These comments are at distinct odds with what the Earth version of Barack Obama said on numerous occasions about executive authority and prosecutorial discretion. Here is the real Obama as a presidential candidate in 2007:
These last few years we’ve seen an unacceptable abuse of power at home. We’ve paid a heavy price for having a president whose priority is expanding his own power.
At the beginning of Obama’s second year in office, Gene Healy, vice president of the Cato Institute and author of “The Cult of the Presidency: America’s Dangerous Devotion to Executive Power,” remarked that “Obama has amazingly enough gone even further than President Bush in the use, or abuse rather, of executive power.”
We now know of course that the target of Healy’s criticism was really Bizarro Obama.
The real Earth Obama also spoke of changing the way Washington worked, of ending partisanship and introducing a new era of collegiality. In early 2009, he said, “On this day, we come to proclaim an end the petty grievances” that have divided us. He resolved to end gridlock.
What has followed since those uplifting words has been a nonstop hissy fit and stubborn refusal to meet — much less work — with lawmakers across the aisle. The result has been unparalleled gridlock. Even after the American public made it clear in 2014 that they craved a divided government, placing Obama’s self-avowed enemies in control of both chambers of Congress, he doubled down on his executive power, granting amnesty to 5 million illegal aliens. Just yesterday, Obama brazenly signed an executive order that imposes a ban on the sale of the ammunition popularly used with AR-15 style semi-automatic rifles.
But this wasn’t the real Obama but, rather, his Bizarro “mirror.”
