by James Bovard
The most memorable line in President Obama’s Oval Office Sunday
speech was his declaration that “freedom is more powerful than fear.”
That epigram might have made John F. Kennedy’s speechwriters beam. But
it is ludicrous to hear such a comment from a president who has spent
almost seven years fear-mongering to promote one federal power grab
after another.
Mr. Obama has done more than any other president to sway Americans to
perceive all gun owners as threats to public safety. The president
declared, “Congress should act to make sure no one on a no-fly list is
able to buy a gun.” But the no-fly list has long been a parody of due
process: Federal Judge Anna Smith ruled last year that it was
unconstitutional and recognized that “international travel is a
necessary aspect of liberties sacred to members of a free society.” Mr.
Obama’s proposal is especially perilous to freedom because his
administration is placing innocent Americans on the no-fly list based
solely on a hunch that they might someday commit violence. If Congress
enacts Mr. Obama’s proposal, then the absurd judgments of one government
agency would provide a license to ravage victims’ other constitutional
rights — and perhaps also to tacitly identify gun owners with
terrorists.
Mr. Obama perennially invokes the threat of terrorism to cloak
illegal government surveillance. When Edward Snowden exposed how the
National Security Agency was ravaging Americans’ privacy, the president
responded by portraying any threat to the federal data vacuum cleaners
as pre-emptive surrender to terrorist cabals. This past May, when
Congress dallied before renewing the Patriot Act, Mr. Obama issued an
apocalyptic warning: “Heaven forbid we’ve got a problem where we could
have prevented a terrorist attack … but we didn’t do so simply because
of inaction in the Senate.” Mr. Obama signaled on Sunday that he
believes that new threats justify government restrictions on the use of
private encryption of email: “I will urge high-tech and law enforcement
leaders to make it harder for terrorists to use technology to escape
from justice.”
...The president’s rhetoric on climate change is perhaps his most blunt
fear-mongering. In a September speech in Alaska, Mr. Obama warned that
without sweeping economic and environmental policy changes, “we will
condemn our children to a planet beyond their capacity to repair:
Submerged countries. Abandoned cities. Fields no longer growing.” But
while he talks as if climate change is a self-evident truth, the
administration is refusing to disclose key data from its top climate
research agency to House Republicans who suspect the administration is
fudging numbers to promote the president’s agenda. As the evidence for
global warming becomes shakier, he is castigating anyone who rejects his
iron-fisted, purported solutions.
Mr. Obama is correct that freedom is potentially more potent than
fear. But we must recognize how politicians profit from fear-mongering
more than any other group in our society. And if enough Americans can be
frightened, then all of us will be further subjugated.
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