Jack Niewold's Blog

Millions of Americans are and will remain unconcerned about the several scandals which have recently embroiled the presidency of Barack Obama. How can this be?

For many of them, plainly put, Barack Obama is the end of history. That is the defining truth of their lives. Their happiness is linked with his happiness; their troubles mirror his own. Ethical and moral considerations are unimportant except insofar as they promote Him, The One.

You and I find this outrageous and somewhat dreamlike, that there are those who consider themselves not subject to the laws and ethical imperatives that others of us, in our own imperfect way, attempt to observe.

This is not the ideal of Jesus, but of Lenin.

We should not kid ourselves by imagining these scandals will persuade the half of the country that voted for Barack Obama that he must go. Lying, cheating, stealing elections through bureaucratic intimidation–all with the blessing of a court media–are simply operational tactics to him, and increasingly for them. The cause is simply too important, too self-evidently righteous. Such matters of conscience are no better or worse than telling the truth or abiding by the laws of the land. They are what it is like to be beyond good and evil.

Getting caught is an occasion for anger, not repentance, as Jon Stewart has demonstrated with his obscenity-laced response to the IRS disclosures. Those who got caught or who revealed the sordid details of political favoritism in the IRS were stupid, and bad only insofar as they were stupid. Who let these useful idiots get out of line, anyway?

Letting four Americans die helplessly in Benghazi, followed by a web of lies to cover it up, are not acts of moral failure, cowardice or incompetence when doing so is part of a grand scheme to win a close election and retain power.

As one southern Democrat said in Congress, “death is a part of life.” This, unwittingly, represents the leitmotiv that threads through the most sacred tenets of progressivism.

Barack Obama is, in the thinking of the American bien pensant, the consummation of the historical process to date, and as such must be shielded from the Lilliputian slings and arrows of the older American way. He represents the summum bonum of the left-liberal-progressive-Democrat way of understanding time and place. He is the Nietzschean Übermensch.

All of this is poignantly frustrating to conservatives such as I, who imagine that the taint of scandal and ineptitude must bring this man and his minions to book. It will not. The breaking of our sacred institutions, the perversion of our heroic national myth, the harassment and prosecution of those who withstand the spirit of the times—all of this is but the necessary price you pay for the onward march of Progress.

In earlier instances of presidential megalomania, there were traditions, institutions and majorities that came into play to right the country. I fear these no longer exist in sufficient strength to pull the country back from the brink.

How it will end, I don’t pretend to know. But I am sure that, one way or another, we are not done with this.