Third Manassas: Obama’s war on America

by Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 7/29/11

The greatest bungle in the debt crisis was on July 19 when as NPR reported: “Former President Bill Clinton said if faced with default, he would single-handedly raise the debt ceiling using the 14th Amendment and he’d do it ‘without hesitation . . . .’”

The boorishness and bluff of the language calls to mind Bull Connor in the Civil Rights days, but this from a laconic, Big Hair Southern governor with 50 gold watches and a string of mistresses who so wanted to be a New Yorker; a kind of Simon Legree in reverse. Since, a garden variety of prominent Democrats like House Majority Whip Steny Hoyer and Barbara Boxer have called for the 14th amendment and Obama himself preposterously said that he was “tempted” to solve the debt crisis himself. Dictatorship is always the temptation and should reveal the illusion of representative government with these people. Obama would be facing reelection under impeachment so it is not likely to happen.

And I would make the suggestion that Jefferson provided a defense against unconstitutional behavior by the president like this in the Kentucky Resolutions which would leave our collective relationship null and void. Wouldn’t be the first time. This defense was proposed here in New Hampshire and Vermont at the beginning of the war on Iraq. And New Hampshire state rep Dan Itse did just that with Obamacare two years ago and it started the Tea Party.

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner first broached the 14th amendment strategy. I proposed here that he should be released. Geithner sheepishly walked it back, but too late. Clinton picked up on it. Still Geithner should go.

Clinton’s random and irresponsible statement hit a cord that many no longer thought existed. It reminded people who had never thought of it themselves in their lives or even in their generations that they were not authentic Americans like Obama and Hillary and Rudy and Mitt. They were intruders in the dust. They were Southerners. Because the 14th Amendment was a post Civil War amendment specifically proposed to threaten and intimidate the South.

But Clinton had thought of it as anyone raised in Arkansas in public school in the 1950s would know that the date approaching, July 21, was the date of First Manassas, the battle called by the north, Bull Run. It was the battle that started the Civil War.

Perspective comes clear through a glass darkly: Those vast places between New York and its California annex where people work with their hands is considered to be a greater Confederacy, one governed by conquest when the means provided in which the conqueror still has territorial rights. It reveals the inner life and secret agenda of Geithner, Hoyer, Boxer and co. and without question, for President Obama as well.