The Great Mistake

"Never interrupt your enemy while he's making a mistake. That's bad manners." -- Attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte, possibly apocryphal

Brace yourselves, freedom lovers and enemies of the Omnipotent State. We're winning. I'm here to tell you -- and more important, to tell you why.

The old Roman politico-military prescription, Divide et Impera -- "Divide and conquer" -- is the essence of smart warfighting. War is a means, a technique for imposing one's will upon the enemy. The first and by far the most imperative implication of that truth is that dividing the enemy's will gives you a huge and enduring advantage.

Divide et Impera isn't solely a general's maxim. Politicians of every land and clime have known this for centuries. It's the foundation of the Washington Monument Defense. In a political environment in which the State hands out favors to various groups, when the State's most recent decree causes resistance to swell, "cutting off the water" normally induces fratricide among those groups. Each group struggles to get the State to reopen the spigots that favor it specifically. Abandoning any agreement to "stand fast" with the other groups against State tyranny is the usual price.

Thanks to the impenetrable narcissistic arrogance of Barack Hussein Obama and the inability of anyone in his cadre of advisers to open his eyes to the realities around him, the inverse of this stratagem is now in play: Avoid doing anything that will cause your enemies to unite against you. Barack Hussein Obama has disregarded that bit of wisdom...and it's swiftly uniting Americans with spines against him and his schemes.

I haven't collected links. Why bother? If you can't find a zillion stories about irrationally closed war memorials, privately operated and funded parks, and other facilities that cost Washington nothing at all, your Google Fu needs some work. The National Park Service has allowed us to learn that it's under direction to inflict as much pain on the public during the "government shutdown" as possible. And as I've said more than once about other, equally ugly phenomena, word gets around.

Word has most certainly gotten around, particularly about the use of armed Park Police to prevent elderly veterans from visiting the memorials to the wars in which they fought...in which their brothers in arms suffered and died. The level of public offense over these tactics has gone stratospheric. Here's just one all too predictable reaction to this ham-fisted federal fascism. Others are massing as you read this.

"Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall." You've seen that proverb innumerable times, at least if you're an American Christian. But did you ever expect to see it applied to the petulance of an American president?

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Drunk with power and convinced of his own invincibility, Barack Hussein Obama has concluded that he need not concern himself with the reactions of his subjects. He has committed the classic mistake of imagining himself incapable of mistakes. But then, this is the man who openly said that "I actually believe my own bullshit" -- who believes he "could probably do every job on the campaign better than the people I'll hire to do it."

Obama had always had a high estimation of his ability to cast and run his operation. When David Plouffe, his campaign manager, first interviewed for a job with him in 2006, the senator gave him a warning: "I think I could probably do every job on the campaign better than the people I'll hire to do it," he said. "It's hard to give up control when that's all I've known." Obama said nearly the same thing to Patrick Gaspard, whom he hired to be the campaign's political director. "I think I'm a better speechwriter than my speechwriters," Obama told him. "I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I'll tell you right now that I'm gonna think I'm a better political director than my political director."

[From Jodi Kantor's biography The Obamas ]

"He that diggeth a pit shall fall into it," saith Ecclesiastes. Obama has dug his own pit lovingly, shovelful by carefully selected and meticulously measured shovelful. With his current campaign to make the shutdown hurt as many Americans in as many ways as possible and as badly as possible, he has taken the Big Leap. It would be a crime against freedom, and against the worldly justice all too few tyrants get to experience in this life, to rescue him in mid-flight.

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Somewhere in my vast humor files, which are packed away in several of about a thousand unlabeled cardboard boxes in my voluminous attic, is a cartoon clipped from some periodical whose name I no longer recall. It depicts two convicts in a prison cell staring up at the barred window of their cell. They're watching a little bird perched at that window. The bird's beak is shaped exactly like a hacksaw blade, he's rubbing it against the bars, and the bars are gradually giving way. It's the caption that makes the cartoon, of course:

"No, I don't know what it is, but for God's sake don't frighten it!"

Verbum sat sapienti.