Evidence Trails

First, a video from the very bowels of the controversy:

And from more recently:

“I just heard about this.” “Some advisor.” From the man who met with Jonathan Gruber, both while Obama was a United States Senator and in the Oval Office as President, specifically because Gruber had played the major role in crafting Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts health care bill. Credible? Or not?

As they like to say on C.S.I., people lie; evidence doesn’t. In this case, the evidence seems incontrovertible: Barack Hussein Obama, a known liar whose contempt for ordinary Americans is well documented, has made two statements that contradict one another. What are we to believe?

This doesn’t appear to be a case in which Obama’s statements could be simultaneously true.

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Perhaps the only good thing about politicians’ predilection for shoving their mugs at the cameras and microphones is the profusion of evidence they provide us to their intentions thereby. In Barack Hussein Obama we might have the pinnacle of the species of self-indicting liar. The evidence trail of his deceits is likely to be the best-remembered feature of his eight years in the White House.

Quite a lot of Americans have become so terminally weary of self-serving political bloviation that they eschew all news sources and avoid all occasions on which a pol might appear and shoot off his mouth. It’s a special case of the general inclination of the private American citizen: the man who asks nothing of others except to be left alone. Politicians, of course, live to inflict themselves on others, whether through the actions of the media or the actions of the State; their lives have no other significance. The disjunction between those motives is absolute.

Yet as greatly as we yearn for peace from the political elite, it might just be that we can only have it on conditions, and that the requirement is exactly the opposite of what we might think.

Given the evidence trail he’s already created against himself, consider how ardently Obama must wish, in the slightly paraphrased words of Hillary Clinton, that the Internet had a delete button. Doesn’t that suggest a course just a little contrary to our intuitive impulses?

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Imagine if, upon entry to public office at any level, a politician were legally compelled to wear:

• A tracking anklet;
• A digital video camera;
• And a cell-phone-like device that continuously broadcasts the data from the above to YouTube.

...with the additional proviso that removing, disabling, or otherwise impeding the operation of any of the above would immediately expel him from office and permanently disqualify him from ever again being a government official. Given the typically low characters of its members, how do you think the political class would respond? Would it strike them as the answer to their prayers, or as the nightmare that quenches their desire for power?

Yes, it would mean that we’d be barraged with even more political talk and events...but only from men who believe their characters to be equal to the challenge, plus those hardy souls who believe themselves capable of “keeping up the act” despite continuous public scrutiny. I’d surmise that the members of that latter group would wear tar and feathers more often than they’d expect.

In our never-ending quest for a countermeasure to political deceit, peculation, and oppression, perhaps this is a path to be considered, as irritating as the short-term consequences might be. Besides, consider how much laugh material the recordings would undoubtedly provide us.

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The obvious dynamics of power-seeking, coupled to the total deterioration of the character of the “public man,” can only lead to one conclusion: He who seeks power over you cannot and must not be trusted. If he must be allowed such power, whatever the rationale, he must be watched continuously, for there is never a moment in which a man’s baser impulses are absolutely prevented from expressing themselves.

Indeed, it was ever thus. The second of our Constitutional presidents, John Adams, one of the moving forces of the American Revolution, gave us the Alien and Sedition Acts. The third, Thomas Jefferson, a high genius and possibly the best man ever to occupy the presidency, claimed a power nowhere authorized in the Constitution to execute the Louisiana Purchase. If these men could transgress so easily, what should we assume about the products of two centuries of ethical devolution in the quest for power: the politicians of today?

Isn’t this is the Information Age? Aren’t we likely to fare better and be freer for having more information about our public scoundrels, rather than less? Besides, think of the marketing possibilities, both for the gadgets and for the documentaries they’d make possible. Everybody loves to see a villain brought low, especially when it’s by his own actions.

Normally, I’m repelled by collectivism of any sort. This is an exception. Making visible the sort of fiend who aspires to power in our time by albatrossing all such persons with continuous recording equipment appeals to my baser impulses, specifically my desire to see the thing the power-seeker most desires – publicity – turned into a cross he must bear until he removes himself from public life. Indeed, let’s not wait until he’s elected; let’s equip him the moment he declares himself a candidate.

Think of all the wives, interns, and Congressional pages who’ll thank us from the bottoms of their hearts.