Obama's Killing the Left: Let's Help Him
I have enormous respect for Victor Davis Hanson and read with great interest his account this week that the people are getting fed up with the liberal elites.
Amid all this leftish high-fiving about court decisions and executive orders, we forget political and electoral reality. Barack Obama has done more to destroy liberal political power in the Congress and in the statehouses than any Democratic politician since the 1920s. His executive orders and neglect of enforcing existing law have green-lighted the executive power of the next Republican president in a way that Richard Nixon could hardly imagine. He has discredited the idea of a disinterested media to such a degree that its biased audits of the next future Republican administration will be seen as laughable.
Europe and the United States are seeing glimpses of the ultimate leftist trajectory -- a mixture of Greece and Detroit, de facto non-enforcement of the law, the Iranian nuke deal, a new McCarthyism, and race, class, and gender hatred -- and are becoming afraid and perhaps appalled. A growing number of people sense that 21st century leftist elites are not pragmatic working people, but a privileged sect that callously experiments with other people's lives on the understanding that they are insulated and immune from the inevitable disasters that follow from their own ideas.
A great pushback is awakening here and abroad, but its timing, nature, and future remain mysterious.
And there is plenty of evidence to support his view. For example, 70% of the people who voted for Obama's re-election now regret doing so, according to a YouGov poll, and the astounding response Donald Trump is getting suggests that it is not just name recognition and "nativism" in play.
Indeed, if you're of a conspiratorial mindset you might conclude that Obama's a deep undercover conservative who decided that making crystal clear the idiocies of the liberal elite would force people to finally reject them for good. Here are just a few of this week's epic fails by Obama and his fellow travelers and supporters which evince a deliberate plan to disaffect us from the left.
Diversity Over Competence
From the outset of this administration it has been clear that "diversity" (which to Obama means advancing the careers of every one of his cronies at the expense of non-Hispanic whites and males) over competence has been a major goal. And each week we see how much that harms national needs and shatters national unity.
This week's big domestic fail, amusingly spun as "data exfiltration" of the over 21 million personnel files at the OPM, reveals the utter incompetence of Obama's select OPM (Office of Personnel Management) head, Katherine Achuleta, who finally was axed.
It's hard to top the Office of Personnel Management when it comes to government incompetence. The agency -- which houses data on millions of current and former government workers, including security clearance files -- had been repeatedly warned that its network was vulnerable and that it was not in compliance with federal information security requirements. And it did next to nothing.
In May 2009, OPM's inspector general issued a "flash audit alert" noting its "security policies and procedures continue to remain severely outdated" and this was "compromising the confidentiality, integrity and/or availability of information."
By 2012, the IG was still complaining that OPM "does not have the ability to detect unauthorized devices connected to the OPM network."
Last year, it said OPM lacked "a comprehensive inventory of servers, databases and network devices," didn't do routine scans of its network for trouble and had substandard authentication requirements.
In the weeks since OPM revealed the latest attacks, it has managed to look even more incompetent. First, it downplayed the attack, then repeatedly revised the numbers upward, and even now laughably calls the attack an "incident" that involved "data exfiltration."
How significant was the incompetence?
Contractors in Argentina and China were given "direct access to every row of data in every database" when they were hired by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) to manage the personnel records of more than 14 million federal employees, a federal consultant told ArsTechnica.
The massive breach of OPM's database -- made public by the Obama administration this month -- prompted speculation over why the agency hadn't encrypted its systems, which contain the sensitive security clearance and background information for intelligence and military personnel.
Encryption, however, according to Ars, would not have helped in this case because administrators responsible for managing these records had root access to the system, Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary for Cybersecurity Dr. Andy Ozment testified yesterday at a two-hour hearing before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
And it turns out that a systems administrator responsible for handling the agency's records "was in Argentina and his co-worker was physically located in the [People's Republic of China]," a consultant who worked with an OPM-contracted company told ArsTechnica.
"Both had direct access to every row of data in every database: they were root."[snip] The OPM IT team frequently outsources its work to foreign contractors working in their home country. Those holding Chinese passports are no exception.
"Another team that worked with these databases had at its head two team members with [People's Republic of China] passports," the consultant told Ars. "I know that because I challenged them personally and revoked their privileges."
The War On (Heterosexual) Sex
The bizarre inconsistencies involving sexual education and conduct must be creating a generation of celibate nutters.
At the same time that children are being exposed in the classrooms to the sort of sex education only sailors on leave in major ports once had, we are making heterosexual conduct by young people fraught with criminal consequences. In tony Fairfax, Virginia, for example, elementary students will be taught about oral, anal sex, and incest from which lessons parents cannot opt out. This sexualization of the young in our schoolsis not unique.
Federal tax dollars are being withheld from school systems that do not conduct gender identity classes and educators are taking this to be an order to sexualize our children already bombarded by twerking, rap culture, and other execrable behavior.
Oregon, home of the multimillion dollar ObamaCare state healthcare fail, is now allowing 15-year-olds to get state-subsidized sex change operations without parental notification.
The list of things 15-year-olds are not legally allowed to do in Oregon is long: Drive, smoke, donate blood, get a tattoo -- even go to a tanning bed.
But, under a first-in-the-nation policy quietly enacted in January that many parents are only now finding out about, 15-year-olds are now allowed to get a sex-change operation. Many residents are stunned to learn they can do it without parental notification -- and the state will even pay for it through its Medicaid program, the Oregon Health Plan.
My online friend "Ignatz Ratzkvwatzkv" asks if Oregon will provide name tags:
"so when the parents get home they know who the strange girl on the couch staring vacantly at the TV is instead of the strange boy that was there when they left?"
At the same time, teenagers and young adults are facing criminal charges and college expulsion for engaging in sexual relations.
California legislators are doing their part to kill passion in a society where the young have been sexualized from kindergarten on:
The California legislature has passed a bill requiring colleges and universities that receive state funds to adopt policies on sexual assault, including a first-of-its-kind mandate that students engaging in sexual activity obtain "affirmative consent" -- commonly referred to as the "yes means yes" requirement.
[snip]
Those would include a standard of "affirmative, conscious and voluntary agreement to engage in sexual activity" that is "ongoing throughout a sexual activity and can be revoked at any time."[snip] The move comes amid increased federal scrutiny of U.S. colleges and universities over their handling of sexual-assault claims and a growing movement of sexual-assault victims sharing their stories and filing federal complaints against their schools.
The bill also calls for "victim-centered policies" that ensure victims' and witnesses' privacy as well as other support during an investigation.
Recall, if you will, the effect of "victim centered policies" in the Duke Lacrosse Case and the University of Virginia made-up rape story. These policies uniformly deprive young males of any reasonable due process protections. Eventually, claims by these young men will foster a new source of law firm revenue and bankrupt those colleges that comply with these misbegotten policies.
Aside from the federal mandates on sex education and federal and state mandates on Star Chamber sex tribunals on campus, there is the awful overreach of the sex offender statutes.
First came the story of Elkhart, Indiana's Zach Anderson, which hit the front page of the The New York Times on Sunday (you read it here first). Zach, 19, had sex with a girl who told him she was 17 but turned out to be 14, and a judge decided that makes Zach a sex offender for life. Learning about his case, another family in Elkhart couldn't believe it.
Their son was living out the exact same story.
As Fox28 reports, Darian Yoder, also a 19-year-old, met a girl on the same app Zach used, "Hot or Not." The girl said she was 17 but turned out to be 13 -- a fact Darian learned months after the encounter, when he was arrested for sexual misconduct.
Judge Dennis Wiley, the same judge who sneeringly told Zach, "That seems to be part of our culture now: meet, hook up, have sex, sayonara. Totally inappropriate behavior," presided over Darian's trial and sentenced him to the same draconian fate. Darian, like Zach, is now officially a sex offender, for life. As such, he cannot be around anyone under the age 18, as if he were some insatiable child molester. That includes his younger brother and sister, whom he has not seen since he was sentenced. His devastated family has been torn apart.
[snip]
The young man can't go to church, a park, or even a mall.
"It's just far too much," said Yoder. "I have no life. I can't do anything."
[snip]
Darian says he can't be near anyone under age 18, including his younger brother and sister, whom he hasn't seen since his arrest.
"I mean we can't have Christmas," said Messick. "He can't see them on his birthday, he can't... anything"
[snip]
That is the power we give judges and prosecutors with our all-encompassing definition of what constitutes a sex offender. [snip] Of the 800,000 registered sex offenders, roughly a quarter of them were added as minors, because young people have sex with other young people.
The sex offender list is a dungeon we can throw people in on the slightest pretext. Politicians and grandstanders exhort us to fear those on it. But it's a lot scarier to think about how easy it is for our sons to end up on that list themselves.
Illegal Immigrants
On the other hand, as we criminalize normal adolescent behavior which in fact we encourage in elementary-school classrooms, if you live in one of the left-wing enclaves which claim the high moral mantle of "sanctuary cities" and commit a crime you will not be held accountable and deported. And if you do this in the super left-wing city of San Francisco, the sheriff will even connive to spring you so you can take a privately-owned gun stolen from a Federal Bureau of Land Managemnet agent who carelessly left it in his car and use it to shoot dead a beautiful young woman walking with her father.
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