President Barack Obama speaks on the Internal Revenue Service's targeting of conservative groups for extra tax scrutiny in the East Room of the White House in Washington.In one of the most chilling, fretful and historically confused speeches in recent memory, President Barack Obama told graduates of The Ohio State University to reject voices claiming that "tyranny is always lurking just around the corner."
That commencement address was on May 5. In the two weeks since, Obama's administration has been implicated in no fewer than four scandals resulting from cover-ups and abuses of power -- making it seem that tyranny has gone from lurking just around the corner to bursting through the front door.
Speaking to the class of 2013 at Ohio Stadium in Columbus, Obama lamented that students have "grown up hearing voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity that's at the root of all of our problems. Some of these same voices do their best to gum up the works. They'll warn that tyranny is always lurking just around the corner. You should reject these voices. Because what they suggest is that our brave and creative and unique experiment in self rule is somehow just a sham with which we can't be trusted."
Perhaps it slipped the president's mind that "our brave and creative and unique experiment in self rule" came as a direct result of our founders' attempts to resist tyranny.
As a matter of fact, America's original founding document, the Declaration of Independence, clearly states that the country was created because King George III established "tyranny over these states."
Of course, good ol' George was probably begging the colonists to reject the voices of those who warn that tyranny is always lurking just around the corner, too.
In the Declaration of Independence Thomas Jefferson listed 27 abuses the king directed at the colonies for the purpose of establishing a tyrannical government. If the federal government's list of recent tyrannical abuses hasn't yet reached 27, it is well on its way.
On May 10, for example, it was revealed that the IRS targeted conservative organizations, including tea party and 9/12 groups, when they applied for their tax-exempt status. The groups faced improper questions, excessive document requests and intentional slow walking that turned what is usually a six-month process into a four-year ordeal for some organizations.
In the days since the improper IRS behavior toward conservative and center-right organizations was made public, three other acts of tyranny by the federal government have been exposed:
• It was revealed that the Obama administration modified its talking points about the Benghazi attack at least a dozen times. While the White House previously denied making anything other than small cosmetic changes to the documents, it was proven that the administration extensively edited the talking points, deleting CIA warnings about terrorist threats and scrubbing information depicting the administration in an unflattering light.
• The Associated Press discovered that the Justice Department secretly monitored two months of telephone records of more than 20 AP reporters and editors in what the news organization called a "massive and unprecedented intrusion" into how the media gathers the news.
• The Washington Post reported that "Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has gone, hat in hand, to health industry officials, asking them to make large financial donations to help with the effort to implement President Obama's landmark health-care law." The HHS' act of shaking down health care companies over which it wields enormous power is a potential violation of the law.
President Obama, if you worry that Americans grow up "hearing voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister" tyrannical entity, than perhaps you should take steps to make government less sinister and less tyrannical.
After all, you can hardly blame young Americans for feeling that government is tyrannical when, under your leadership, the government constantly engages in despicable acts of oppressive power -- which is, by the way, the definition of the word "tyranny."