The Sprawling, Dimming Age of Obama

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Daily Beast:
The Sprawling, Dimming Age of Obama

by Lloyd Green

 

Jun 30, 2013 4:45 AM EDT
The Age of Obama, writes Lloyd Green, is mandated healthcare, crony capitalism, and First Family TV spots as modern iteration of bread and circuses.

In Barack Obama, America elected a chief executive whose Department of Justice has repeatedly targeted the press, whose Internal Revenue Service has gone gunning for conservatives, and whose government has elevated secrecy into a cardinal virtue. The Obama administration’s data grab is not just about national security, or Edward Snowden. It is also an epilogue befitting a candidate who delivered his 2008 convention acceptance speech in front of a temple façade dedicated to himself, and whose faith in government and the state is at the center of his presidency.

Forget Obama’s paeans to civil liberties. The Age of Obama is a celebration of ever-growing and ever-more intrusive government, with mandated healthcare, crony capitalism, and First Family daytime and late-night television appearances as the modern iterations of bread and circuses.

 

For the record, spending $2.4 million on an Olympics-themed confab, complete with an open bar while America’s housing market was crashing, is not prudent. Using credit cards to buy bottles of wine and $140 dinners is not what we want from the IRS’s green-eyeshade brigade. Trust, what’s that?