The Presidency of Because I Said So...

Remember when you were a child, and you asked your parents a question they didn't want to answer, or maybe you were forbidden to do something, and this circumstance confused your tiny little brain to the extent that you were actually motivated to ask that most-innocent and eternal of questions:

Why?

And your parents, flummoxed, perhaps impatient, could not bother to give you a reasonable facsimile of a definitive, logical, coherent answer, and would simply retort in a brusque tone:

Because I said so....

The subject, at that point, was assumed to be closed.

As you got older, you got another version of this dodge, this inability to answer a direct question with a measured argument, and it went something like this:

You'll understand when you grow up...

And this dialectic, more than anything else, I believe, describes the last four years of the Obama Administration to a tee.


We're children to him. The President and his coterie of advisers and hanger's-on are the Adults who want their children to stop doing something -- most likely all this demanding of results and honesty -- or who are dead-set for reasons known only to themselves against giving into their children's whims -- like when the children demand to know what the logic behind such a peremptory response is  -- are the exasperated Parents who don't want to give an answer that might require more explanation than they're capable of making, or even motivated to give.

Everything this administration does has that "Because I Said So..." quality to it.

Mostly because if Obama explained it in plain terms, stripped of it's bare-knuckle political and ideological qualities, and delivered it in terms simple enough to allow even Joe Scarborough and Chris Matthews to understand it, there's be a fifty-mile-long line of people outside 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue with tar and feathers.. At the very least.

So, we're treated to this revolving sort of argument. Obama says something will happen, it doesn't, he gets called on it, and insists it did, simply because He Said It Will/Would/Could/Might. Obama tells the most outrageous lies, and when caught in them, denies, denies, denies, and says his denials are in fact the truth, because He Says They Are.

He uttered the words, he crafted the policies, he made the stump speeches, therefore, they are all true. To argue, to contradict, is to insist that up is down, in is out, and black is white, because...everybody join in and use your outside voice, now ...Obama Says So.

I submit:

ObamaCare will lower premiums, cost less, and not require that Americans give up their medical rights, or have the government interfere with their medical care decisions, nor turn doctors into unmotivated factory workers like the old Soviet System did, because Barack Obama Said So.

A (wasted) trillion dollar stimulus to fund the fantasies of the rabid Left, to pay for everything from 'investments' in the Green Energy shell companies of Obama donors, to paying off politically-useful unions, to  tunnels for wildlife to pass safely under the interstates, all to be paid for with money borrowed from the Chinese is a veritable economic cornucopia of Prosperity because Barack Obama Said So.

Usama Bin Laden is dead, thus, terrorism is vanquished despite the fact that Americans are still being killed by Al'Qaeda, The Taliban, and other terrorists, while still others plan to attack us every goddamned day. Libya is now pacified because Qaddafi is dead. Mubarak is gone in Egypt, and now democracy is taking root all over the Muslim world, even if they are voting for even worse despots and killer fundamentalists. They've merely switched a dictatorship of the strong for the right to vote on who gets to stomp on their rights and drive them to murder, and this is an indication that the world is getting ever more peaceful by the minute under the enlightened guidance of the Savior Obama, because He Said So.

Twenty-three million Americans are out of work, or given up hope of finding any. Unemployment numbers are routinely cooked for political ends, as are most economic numbers originating within government, these days. The country is now $16 trillion in debt, whereas 4 years ago it as only (only?) $10 trillion in debt. Gasoline costs three to four times what it used to. Economic growth is nearly non-existent. The price of energy, food, education, all goes up, and Obama talks about taxing or regulating everything within an inch of it's life, sucking what little vitality this economy has left. But, somehow we're in the midst of the greatest economic recovery and expansion since the Great Depression, because Obama Said So.

Georgetown-educated 17th-year law students, the scions of the patrician upper middle class, must get free birth control, on demand, even from traditionally anti-birth control institutions or they'll otherwise have to suffer the indignity of the dreaded back-alley-coat-hanger abortion which, nowadays, seems such a Dickensian kind of thing. Planned Parenthood must keep getting federal funding, or women will be dying by the millions in America's streets because they'll otherwise be unable to get 'reproductive healthcare', because Barack Obama Said So.

(Come to think of it, they actually might; for ObamaCare promises to drive OB/GYN's and Gynecologists right out of business, cause thousands of hospitals, clinics and doctor's offices to close for lack of profit, and result in women having to resort to the tried-and-failed methods of birth control of the Early 20th Century. You know, like the Lysol Douche, or the Knitting Needle, or maybe having your drunken boyfriend/husband/baby daddy kick you in the gut until you miscarry. All because of the combination of a legion of Sandra Flukes who won't part with $7.99 for a box of Trojans (or just say no once in a while) and the destructive force of government-rationed...ahem...healthcare.)

We're alternately told that we haven't seen the concrete, lead-pipe-cinch benefits of all of these enlightened policies just yet because, alternately, either 'things take time', or we simply refuse to see what should be glaringly self-obvious, misguided as we are by Evil Republicans -- that under Obama, everybody has more of everything, at least on government-generated paper -- because we just haven't understood his galactic awesomeness, or grasped the subtleties of his ingenious policies. Or because we're racists. take your pick. Mostly because Obama has said these things on and off for four years.

It doesn't matter: Barack Obama insists, lifts his chin in that trademark Mussolini fashion, and insists that things are not what they appear, because he says so.

I guess we'll just mystically understand when we finally grow up.

I have never liked the "Because I said so/You'll understand when you grow up..." dialectic. I resented it as a child because even then, even to my underdeveloped little 7-year-old brain, it seemed a flabby, unsatisfying excuse. An evasion. A moral surrender.If it's so goddamned important that I do exactly as you wish me to, Mother, then please have the courtesy to explain why.

And perhaps the analogy of the Children and the Parent is apt here, for much like children, much of the American electorate is stumbling around in a childlike, confused state, seeking input, praying for guidance, wishing for some sign that someone at least cares enough to give us an honest, well-thought-out answer. And all our figurative Father can say is "Because I said So, and You'll understand when you grow up..."

In a way, this is child abuse, for it is the duty, the responsibility, of a parent -- even if we consider Obama such in a merely symbolic sense  -- to provide more than a deficient non sequitur which seems slapdash and careless, and leaves one side of the discussion shaking it's head in disbelief, and the other looking stupid. Barack Obama then, is, metaphorically at least, a child abuser. He refuses to perform the primary functions of the parent, which are to teach, to inform, to protect and to provide, and then he refuses to explain his lack of attention to detail when he's called out on it, as if he has some cosmic right to be a douche.

President Obama (and her husband, too!) must be defeated in 12 days. Why? Because WE said so.His continued presence on the national and international stage is an embarrassment, and the longer he refuses to answer questions, provide a logical framework for his actions, and even half-way explain why he is still entitled to the trust and respect generally afforded his office, the more urgent the need for his exit.

The petulance, the condescension, the blatant disregard that is contained in the "Because I said So" attitude is toxic to the children of a constitutional republic, not to mention sickening as all hell.

And to the Obama supporters who would disagree with me, often violently, and with the most colorful and hateful language one might imagine, I can only say this:

You'll understand when you grow up.