Well, the laugh is on me. Again.

The Democrats keep doing this to me. I joked back in March 2020 that Drag Queen Story Hour — meant to spread gender dysphoria among kids — was as crazy as … sending COVID patients to nursing homes.

“Hold my beer,” said Biden’s chief COVID advisor Ezekiel Emanuel — a euthanasia maniac who’d written that nobody ought to live past age 75.

Within two weeks, blue state governors were treating my satire as solid policy advice. Thousands of Korean War veterans, grandmas, and other Americans who’d built this country were gasping their last on useless ventilators — dying of the COVID they caught from highly contagious patients dumped in their nursing homes … while beds sat empty on hospital ships.

They died without visits from family members or clergy, and were incinerated in medical waste bags, like euthanized stray dogs or babies from abortion clinics. Better to let them die than let Trump take credit for saving them. Better still to stoke the death statistics, to justify the endless state of emergency, and the mail-in balloting needed to steal the 2020 election.

Barack Obama: Superstar

What am I whining about this time? How wrong I got Barack Obama. I published the following at The Stream three years ago:

The left put literal salvific, eschatological hope in Barack Obama. They depicted him with messianic words and imagery. He incarnated “Hope” (if not so much Faith and Love). His campaign rallies ran more like revival meetings, with everything but altar calls. When he arrived in D.C. in 2009 for his inauguration, the city pulsed with a Palm Sunday vibe. America’s cognitive elite greeted their savior as the crowds met Our Lord in Jesus Christ Superstar. Just watch the clip below, and plug in the 2009 lyrics:

O-Bama-Hey, Bama-Bama-Bama O

Bama-Hey Bamo-O-Bama

Hey B.O. B.O. Won’t You Cleanse Our Souls?

Bama-O, Bama-Hey Superstar!

In fact, back in 2008, when John McCain suited up in his Washington Generals uniform to lose gracefully to Obama, the Harlem Globetrotter, I was already making this point. When people would chant “Obama!” I’d chime in, adding, “President for Life!” And I did it in my best Ugandan accent, to sound like the mobs who lauded that country’s dictator: “Idi Amin, Dada!” Nobody complained. I think some liberals actually joined in.

One Man, One Vote, One Time

I didn’t do any of this because Obama is black, or even the son of a corrupt Kenyan politico, but because of the crackpot, messianic worship he evoked among guilt-plagued white liberals cringing for redemption. They didn’t want a guy to run the country. They craved a savior to change their lives, to “fundamentally transform” our country. Because it’s racist and evil, going right back to its founding.

So says The 1619 Project. That’s the academic conspiracy theory (now taught in your city’s public schools) which claims that the whole of U.S. history is a slaveowners’ scam — in much the same way that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion insists that both capitalism and communism were invented by a band of scheming rabbis. Seriously, the claim that Ben Franklin and John Adams sought U.S. independence to stop King George III from freeing the slaves is right up there with anything that Nazi brownshirts ever blabbed in a Munich beer hall.

I was also thinking of Obama’s academic obsessions. He boasted in his partly ghosted (by terrorist Bill Ayer) autobiographies that he’d spent his college years focused on “post-colonial theory.” That’s a really fancy, gussied up term for … Marxist excuses made on behalf of Third World strongmen who messed up their countries and filled their Swiss bank accounts … which pin the responsibility for all the famines, arrests, and chaos the strongman is causing on which ever European country once colonized the place decades before.

It takes a lot of German philosophy and French critical theory to justify “One Man, One Vote … One Time.”

From Gallows Humor to Cold, Hard Fact

The American version of post-colonial theory has arrived, and it’s called “Anti-Racism.” Like a sodden Boston Irishman on his tenth shot of Jameson’s tracing his dipsomania and wife-beating to the 1848 Potato Famine … Anti-Racism blames every aspect of social dysfunction in the black community on the legacy of slavery and segregation. Fatherless boys growing up to be gang members? That’s because 170 years ago, slave traders separated families. And so on.

But Obama came to save us, to wash us in his flop-sweat and raise us all from the grave. Why should he ever leave office? Just because a slaveowners’ Constitution says so? President for Life! Barack Obama Dada!

Anyway, I used to indulge in gallows humor about all of this. But I was wrong. Or maybe the Democrats listened to me, took my idea and ran with it — as they did with COVID at nursing homes. Because as it turns out, in the really crucial ways, Barack Obama really managed to pull it off. He became President for Life. And he is still in power today.

In fact, Obama ran much of the government even while Donald Trump was nominally president — no wonder the Left was so outraged that Orange Man was in the White House. It wasn’t a political reversal, but a kind of sacrilege. Of course, Trump’s election was “illegitimate,” a Russian coup, or whatever. Of course it was fine to manufacture ballots in 2020 and prosecute anyone who noticed.

Has Obama Been Running the Government Since 2009?

I’m not asking you to believe me, or even your lying eyes. Instead, I’d like you to read some excerpts from a fascinating interview with Obama’s best biographer, Pulitzer Prize-winner author David Garrow. (In fact, you should read the whole thing, especially if I’m correct, and Obama is still de facto in office.) As the interviewer David Samuels points out:

[T]he idea Obama was no longer concerned with power or involved with power was itself part of a new set of myths being woven by and around the ex-president. First, the Obamas never left town. Instead, they bought a large brick mansion in the center of Washington’s Kalorama neighborhood — violating a norm governing the transfer of presidential power which has been breached only once in post-Civil War American history, by Woodrow Wilson, who couldn’t physically be moved after suffering a series of debilitating strokes. …

[I]t was clear to any informed observer that the Obamas’ continuing presence in the nation’s capital was not purely a personal matter. To an extent that has never been meaningfully reported on, the Obamas served as both the symbolic and practical heads of the Democratic Party shadow government that “resisted” Trump—another phenomenon that defied prior norms. …

It seemed churlish to object to the Obamas’ quiet family life in Kalorama —or to report on the comings and goings of Democratic political operatives and office-seekers from their mansion, or to the swift substitution of Obama as party leader for Hillary Clinton, who after all was the person who had supposedly been cheated out of the presidency. Why even mention the strangeness of the overall setup, which surely paled next to the raw menace of Donald Trump, who lurched from one crisis to the next while lashing out at his enemies and probably selling out the country to Vladimir Putin?

In a normal country, the exhaustive report issued in April 2019 by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, which uncovered no evidence that the 2016 election had been decided by Russian actions, let alone that Trump was a Russian agent, might have been a cue for the Obamas to go home, to Chicago, or Hawaii, or Martha’s Vineyard. The moment of crisis was over. Russiagate turned out to have been a politically motivated hoax, just as Trump had long insisted.

But while the attention of Republicans in Washington turned to questioning the FBI, more careful observers could not fail to notice that the FBI had hardly acted alone. After all, Russiagate had not originated with the Bureau, but with the Clinton campaign, which having failed to get even sympathetic mainstream media outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post to bite on its fantastical allegations, was reduced to handing off the story to campaign press apparatchiks like Slate’s Franklin Foer and Mother Jones’ David Corn. The fact that the story only got bigger after Clinton lost the election was due to Obama’s CIA director, John Brennan, who in November and December of 2016 helped elevate Russiagate from a failed Clinton campaign ploy to a priority of the American national security apparatus, using a hand-picked team of CIA analysts under his direct control to validate his thesis. If Brennan was the instrument, the person who signed the executive order that turned Brennan’s thesis into a time bomb under Trump’s desk was Barack Obama.

The election of Joe Biden in 2020 gave the Obamas even more reasons to stay in town. The whispers about Biden’s cognitive decline, which began during his bizarre COVID-sheltered basement campaign, were mostly dismissed as partisan attacks on a politician who had always been gaffe-ridden. Yet as President Biden continued to fall off bicycles, misremember basic names and facts, and mix long and increasingly weird passages of Dada-edque nonsense with autobiographical whoppers during his public appearances, it became hard not to wonder how poor the president’s capacities really were and who was actually making decisions in a White House staffed top to bottom with core Obama loyalists. When Obama turned up at the White House, staffers and the press crowded around him, leaving President Biden talking to the drapes — which is not a metaphor but a real thing that happened.

That Obama might enjoy serving as a third-term president in all but name, running the government from his iPhone, was a thought expressed in public by Obama himself, both before and after he left office.

That Obama might enjoy serving as a third-term president in all but name, running the government from his iPhone, was a thought expressed in public by Obama himself, both before and after he left office. “I used to say if I can make an arrangement where I had a stand-in or front man or front woman, and they had an earpiece in, and I was just in my basement in my sweats looking through the stuff, and I could sort of deliver the lines while someone was doing all the talking and ceremony,” he told Steven Colbert in 2015, “I’d be fine with that because I found the work fascinating.” Even with all these clues, the Washington press corps — fresh off their years of broadcasting fantasies about secret communications links between Trump Tower and the Kremlin — seemed unable to imagine, let alone report on, Obama’s role in government. [emphasis added]

The Deep State: The Fourth and Highest Branch of Government

Okay, okay, I can hear you saying. Maybe Obama is running the show at the moment, while the Former Joe Biden mutters into his ice cream cone in between his ever-lengthening naps. But while Trump was in office?

Well, Trump didn’t have control of the Department of Justice, with Jeff Sessions recused and career bureaucrats running most of the show. (Bill Barr came along later, and made matters even worse.) Nor could he control the FBI. In fact, as we’ve documented here, Obama had used the Patriot Act to politicize and make permanently partisan the entire intelligence wing of the U.S. government. He elevated it to the level of a fourth branch of government, able to defy Congress, the courts, and even a sitting president.

Obama’s men, whom he left in place, spent four years undermining and defying the people’s choice for president. Then they helped steal the next election—by certifying that Hunter Biden’s laptop was “Russian disinformation” and getting social media to censor the facts of the matter. Now they are still in place, and running things while Joe Biden sleeps.

Hats off to Barack Obama. The man pulled it off. He deserves to sit on a jewel-studded throne in the Oval Office surrounded by peacock feathers.

Dang! I’ve got to stop giving the Democrats ideas … . When that throne in fact appears, I’ll only have myself to blame.

 

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or co-author of ten books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. He is co-author with Jason Jones of “God, Guns, & the Government.”