by Victor Davis Hanson, American Greatness:

Barack Obama’s eight-year tenure was detrimental to the United States, but like most of his nonbelievers, I harbor no animosity for his person.

Few critics that I know advocated that Obama be impeached, much less removed from office, before his reelection bid—even amid his worst scandals and dangerous policies. But we are now in a new age, whose protocols might have made it impossible for the Obama Administration to have finished two terms.

Remember, his administration ran some 2,000 guns to Mexican cartels in some hare-brained scheme to monitor violence spilling into the United States. Under the new customs, he should have been impeached for instructing Attorney General Eric Holder to refuse to testify to Congress about Fast and Furious, or at least for not handing over subpoenaed documents. Imagine a Trump gun-walking scheme in Mexico.

It was bad enough that Holder was the first attorney general to be held in contempt of Congress, well aside from the embarrassment of his unhinged outbursts about “my people” (hint: his “my” did not mean Americans of all races and creeds). We all remember Holder’s lunatic dismissals of his own country as “a nation of cowards.” (Imagine Bill Barr referring to “my people” or calling Americans cowards)

Fine—politicians and bureaucrats misspeak. It is no surprise that radical progressives like Holder are both partisans and tribalists or that they don’t always have positive thoughts about America, past or present. But Obama won the election. So voters had ample warning from his past that he would likely put as many leftists as he wished into government. He had the legal right and political rationale to do so, without his opponents inventing crimes to remove them.

Criminalizing Politics

I once served briefly on the nonpartisan presidentially appointed American Battlefield Monuments Commission that oversees the cemeteries and graves of Americans who died and were buried overseas. The fellow commissioners, dedicated professionals with far longer tenures on the commission than my own, were never political but shared a common commitment to protect and enhance the integrity of one of America’s most hallowed institutions. Yet all of us were summarily fired, shortly after Obama was elected in 2008, and told to surrender immediately our official passports and vacate the commission. As a result, the board went inert until belated new Obama appointments were made.

Again, fine, I thought at the time. Such is the way of all politics when another party takes the White House. I most certainly did not think Obama was creating a “climate of fear” or was “paranoid” in weeding out, even from nonpartisan, unpaid honorific posts, any non-supporters.

Nor did I think it was so odd when Obama went much further, and fired dozens of U.S. attorney holdovers from the Bush Administration. “Elections matter,” I remember Eric Holder saying of the mass firings at the time. He was right; they do. Clinton fired far more prosecutors than did Trump—as was his perfect right as well. So, who was to say that Obama was “paranoid” in “eliminating” potential critics, whether attorneys, government appointees, or ambassadors?

Who knows? If I were president, I might well have fired myself from even such a nonpartisan commission. Who knows? Had Obama left in office a Bush holdover federal attorney, the partisan might have become a Viva la résistance“Resister”, or invoked the Logan Act to hound one of the president’s own liberal appointees, or impeded his administration, or refused to carry out a presidential executive order, or helped to surveil Obama appointees, or even leaked confidential presidential conversations to the media, or called up the New York Times and Washington Post to give a rendition of an Obama phone call to the president of Mexico, or might have written an anonymous op-ed for the New York Times?

For that matter, I certainly did not join any “Resistance” in 2009—on the sick rationale that Obama might be a Nazi-like interloper who had occupied the United States as Hitler did France, and sent us true patriots into the Maquis to “resist.”

Obama was elected for four years. We critics lost the 2008 election, and would have to wait four years to send him home, or, as it turned out in 2012, eight years to find relief. That is the American way. Obama’s clever campaign made both McCain’s and Romney’s amateurish in comparison, and so there was a logic in his victory over two inept candidates, even if both would have made better presidents.

We don’t recall either the media or critics suggesting that Obama was crazy in his often repeated “elections matter” and “I won” hyper-partisanship, or that he should have been removed under the 25th Amendment for silly apologies tours or riffs on the Crusades or Americans not being exceptional or his adolescent furtive duck-outs to have a smoke.

No mainstream pundit claimed Obama was a pathological liar for making up most of his “autobiography” or flat-out lying about Obamacare. When Reggie Love claimed he and a bored Obama played spades during the Bin Laden raid, few paid much attention. Nor did Obama do anything impeachable for stupidly and frequently weighing in during ongoing arrests and criminal proceedings—such as those of the Skip Gates Cambridge psychodrama or the Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin shootings.

h/t Tim

Read More @ AMGreatness.com