How far have we fallen when the president of the United States is intentionally sabotaging operations of the federal government for the purpose of putting the hurt on the American people – and he’s not being roundly condemned for it?
That’s what President Obama and his administration did with their decision to furlough air traffic controllers and create havoc for travelers this past week. The furlough and its resulting air traffic snarls were a manufactured crisis, through and through. Democrats are upset because the federal budget sequester – which Obama proposed back in 2011, by the way – forced them to cut $85 billion in otherwise scheduled spending.
As I’ve written in this space before, a competent executive forced to deal with a budget cut would look for ways to make the cuts that had the least impact on operations and on customer satisfaction. That’s what a good president would do as well. While $85 billion is a lot of money, it represents a mere 2.5 percent of the federal budget – and that’s after previously planned increases. A halfway decent manager would have no problem administering such a cut in a relatively painless way.
But that’s not the president we have. Obama wanted the public to feel the “pain” of the sequester because the political class is having a conniption fit over being forced to make the tiniest of reductions in its runaway spending. He wants the public to believe there is no waste in the federal budget and that every penny of the $3.7 trillion he wants to spend in this upcoming year is absolutely essential. Force even the smallest cut, he wails, and it will bring disaster down on our heads.
Perhaps the worst thing is that Obama’s refusal to manage the cuts responsibly is not even a surprise. We always knew he would do this. It’s what he does. Every decision Obama makes is political, to equate any conceivable notion of spending restraint with the downfall of the republic.
Congress actually had to pass legislation to give Obama “flexibility,” which he falsely claimed he did not already have, to put the controllers back to work. And when they did, he condemned them for it because the bill only addressed this particular government operation that Obama had chosen to sabotage for show – and did not simply do away with the entire sequester.
If there is good news in all this, it’s that it appears Obama may have gone too far this time in his manipulation of the public. People aren’t buying it. They weren’t buying it when he released detained illegal aliens and claimed the sequester forced him to do it. They weren’t buying it when he cancelled White House tours, which cost the federal government a mere $18,000 a week, but kept right on funding studies on snail sex.
We learned this week that Congress is still struggling to eliminate a 1930s-era program designed to maintain federal helium reserves. It was created at a time when we thought zeppelins would be the wave of the future. Now we just keep it going, and a Democrat congressman from my state (who once worried that Guam might tip over) demanded that the program continue or we would face “a world without balloons” if “this Tea Party Congress” finally gets rid of it.
And these are the people who refuse to keep air traffic controllers on the job. The public is not that stupid! The political class has insulted the nation’s intelligence a bit too egregiously this time. And they’re making a mistake if they think the resulting uprising will come only from the Tea Party. What they’re setting the stage for with a stunt like this is the broader public’s realization that the Tea Party isn’t so extreme after all.
There’s a reason we the people don’t trust they the government, and will take matters into our own hands. Trust is something you have to earn, and they haven’t.
