Obama's False Virtue

Yesterday I wrote about the hypocrisy of the elite. Celebrities wearing trash cans at the Met, calling it fashion. Journalists stealing bottles of wine at the WHCD as many fled from an assassin’s bullets. Deranged activists pretending — in rallies funded by billionaires — that President Trump is a pedophile or rapist or even king.

But former President Obama threatens to eviscerate all of them with his stunning assertion to Stephen Colbert that an attorney general should never be a president’s wing man, that a DOJ should never be weaponized against political opponents.

If Obama’s comments were not so shameless, they would be laughable.

“The White House shouldn't be able to direct the AG to go around prosecuting whoever the president wants prosecuted. You can't have a situation where whoever is in charge of the government starts using that to go after their political enemies or reward their friends."

Hypocrisy thy name is Obama. Consider:

• Using the phony Steele dossier, dirt paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign, Team Obama undermined Trump’s first term by prosecuting his top aides, Mike Flynn and Carter Page, and vilifying him as a Russian asset. Then they unleashed a campaign to keep him from ever holding office again — stripping his name from state ballots, prosecuting him with four bogus indictments that could have imprisoned him for life. Meanwhile a complicit, Obama-adoring media stoked the fire with false reporting. In Charlottesville, Trump never said neo-Nazis were “fine people.” He said there were “fine people” on both sides of the debate over whether to retire Civil War statues. After that, it was open media warfare.

• There were lots of other crimes too, equally shameless. The Obama team used the IRS to target conservatives — harassing Tea Party groups who opposed Obamacare, weaponizing the tax code, and, under Biden, targeting nuns and pro-life activists who dared to challenge abortion. Feckless Congress did nothing — no new laws to protect to stop presidents from exploiting the IRS against their enemies, something that Richard Nixon was accused of in 1974 when he resigned in the face of an impeachment.

Obama has always treated himself as if he were untouchable — protected by his status as the first black to become US President and by his adoring media halo.

But he is a tenacious Meddler in Chief, who cannot seem to let go of the reigns of power, even 10 years after he left office.

There used to be a rule in politics. Once a president left office, he did not interfere with his successor’s policies. It was considered gauche. Oh sometimes there might be grumbling to an inner circle. And sometimes it would find its way into an op ed questioning the new president’s policies. For the most part, you left Washington DC, resumed your life as a private citizen, exiting the stage. It wasn’t written anywhere, but it was a tradition. You show grace to the next president, at least in public.

But then came Barack Obama. After eight years in the White House, he didn’t go home to Chicago — or Hawaii. Instead he bought a home in Washington’s DC’s tony Kalorama neighborhood and built a shadow government. Throughout Trump’s first term he waged a campaign of coordinating false intelligence and generating destructive rumors. Then during Biden’s term, many believe Obama pulled the strings on his vice president’s term, the soothing smile behind the AutoPen.

During Biden’s term, Obama often made the rounds of Capitol Hill, instructing Dems how to vote. Pennsylvania’s Sen. John Fetterman told him he votes for his constituents, not the ex president. Oh to have seen Obama’s face.

Commenting on Obama’s breathtaking “audacity” (as it were) in claiming his DOJ did not target political foes, Fox News’ Sean Hannity said that Obama “has lost touch with reality,” no long able to “tell a good lie.”

And yet, the CBS Late Night audience applauded, madly.