Not Playing By the Rules

You can’t play the game unless you follow the rules. You can’t play the game if you are following your whims or you bliss. You definitely can’t play it if you believe that you have the right to impose your will on others.

Some people get impatient with the game. Convinced that they possess a higher truth they arrogate to themselves the right to force it on other people.

In the past they would justify their exercise of a will-to-power by claiming that theirs was God’s truth. In today’s world of behavioral economics they rationalize their activities by saing that, once people see that the new order is for their best, they will happily accede to it and will forgive those who broke the rules to accomplish it.

Thus, President Obama lied about his health care plan, lied brazenly and without the least whimper of conscience about the fact that Obamacare will allow you to keep your plan and your doctor if you like it. Those who have been trying to defend it have adopting the patronizing notion that it’s really for your own good.

Where Obama said that you can keep your plan and your doctor if you like, those who have rushed to defend him are saying that even if you cannot keep your old plan, the new plan is really much better. It might be more expensive, it might have higher copays, it might make it impossible for you to see your doctor or go to the best hospital, but still… once you see what it offers you are going to like it so much that you will forgive the lie.

After all, you are a crass materialist who does not have enough self-respect to care about being lied to.

Then they add that you should console yourself with the thought that the extra expense is really your contribution to the common good. Your higher premium and higher deductible is allowing Sandra Fluke to have free birth control and will be paying for Bradley Manning’s sex change surgery.

Feel better?

Obviously, they do not justify their power grab by saying that they are attuned to God’s will. They rely on the new science of behavioral economics. If you think that this science is perfectly objective and anodyne, you should think again.

And then there’s the United States Senate. Last week Senate Democrats decided that they no longer needed to respect the rules of that august body. They decided that the rules can be changed at the whim of the majority.

Led by Harry Reid Democrats outlawed the filibuster over executive appointments. This is hardly trivial. An imperial presidency makes up the rules as it goes along. And it does so by bureaucratic regulation. So, it’s important that the Democrats be able to stack the courts and the federal bureaucracy.

When Franklin Roosevelt wanted to pack the Supreme Court he did not try to do it by executive fiat. We’ve come a long way, baby.

Mark Steyn explains it:

As a “continuing body” the Senate’s procedures are supposed to remain in force unless a two-thirds supermajority votes to change them. In this case, a 52–48 all-Democrat majority voted to change the rules, and so the rules have been changed. After all, who’s gonna stop Harry Reid? The Senate pageboys? Legislative majorities are here today and gone tomorrow, but legislative mechanisms are supposed to be here today and here tomorrow and here next year. If a transient party majority can change the rules on a single, sudden, party-line vote, then there are no rules. The rules are simply what today’s rulers say they are. After all, banana republics and dictatorships pass their own rules, too — to deny opposition politicians access to airtime, or extend their terms by another two or three years, or whatever takes their fancy.

For those who have been consoling themselves with the fact that this rule change will work to the advantage of Republicans and for those who have regaled themselves with evidence of the rank hypocrisy, not merely on the part of Democrats but on the part of their media enablers, I promise you that once the Republicans regain power in the White House and the Senate these same Democrats and these same media types boards will suddenly have a Come-to-Jesus moment and discover that mad Harry was wrong all along and that the filibuster must be reinstated in order to perverse American constitutional governance.

How much would you wager that John McCain and Lindsey Graham will be hopping on the bandwagon?

Obviously, President Obama does not play by the rules. He plays by his will-to-power, his will to impose his truth on America. When the game is not played by the rules, it becomes a raw struggle for power. It is no surprise that the nation has descended into rank partisanship.

Aside from Obama’s lawless suspension of immigration law before the last election, he has delayed the full implementation of his signature Obamacare in the interest of Democrats’ political fortunes. And of course, Obamacare itself was passed with a legislative sleight of hand in the Senate.

Steyn explained:

From unilaterally suspending the laws of others (such as immigration), he has advanced to unilaterally suspending his own. So, for passing political convenience, he issued his proclamation of temporary amnesty for the millions of health plans he himself rendered illegal. The law is applied according to whim, which means there is no law. Four years ago, polls showed no popular support for anything as transformative as Obamacare. But, through procedural flimflam, lameduck-session legerdemain, threats to “deem” it to have already passed, and votes for a law whose final version was not only unread by legislators but was literally unreadable (in the sense that it had not yet rolled off the photocopier), through all that and more, the Democrats rammed it down the throats of the American people anyway: Yes, we can! Brazen and unrestrained, Obama and Reid are also, in Lewis’s phrase, “men without chests.” Cleverness, unmoored from Lewis’s chestly virtue of honor, has reduced them to mere tricksters and deceivers. So the president lied about his law for four years, and now lies about his lies.