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“A Roadmap for American Renewal,” a column posted in Townhall.com, by Star Parker is a promotional treatise for a new book, “The Blueprint: Obama’s Plan to Subvert the Constitution and Build an Imperial Presidency”, by Ken Blackwell and Ken Klukowski, a tome written in yellow journalistic style.
Blackwell and Klukowski have based their book on the 2008 University of Missouri proclamation by then candidate Barack Obama, “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” Blackwell says, as President, Obama is consistently pursuing his vision of fundamentally transforming our country, and he must be stopped. Ostensibly, “The Blueprint” tells how.
I could not find a transcript of that speech. I found a 10-second video on YouTube of candidate Obama reciting only that quote. It is out of context, and for one to discern its meaning, it would have to be understood in the greater context of the speech. However, I am certain that he used it in the context of his campaign message slogan “Change You Can Believe In.” To use this small piece of video to promote the notion that Obama is stealthily subverting the Constitution is disingenuous.
Blackwell writes, “He’s building an imperial presidency, wielding powers far beyond those granted to him by the Constitution and seizing power that the Constitution denies the government from ever possessing, trampling on the liberty of Americans in the process.”
An “Imperial Presidency” has the following characteristics: A disregard for the Constitution regarding the power of the Congress to declare war and its funding; excessive reliance on so-called “Czars”; secrecy and the use of executive privilege to circumvent inquiry; and converting politics into a form of political warfare.
Presidents Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and George W. Bush expansively used their war and budget powers. Secrecy and executive privilege have been relied on by several Presidents, including Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan. George. W. Bush accumulated 35 and Obama 32 Czars.
Star Parker says there is a “… national renewal movement - a search and discovery mission by Americans to restate and restore those first principles that define us.” She says, “part of what is bothering so many is a sense that now in our current mess because of wholesale loss of appreciation that we even have first principles that uniquely define us, let alone understanding what they are.”
Of course, she describes those first principles as life, liberty, and property (favoring the Locke’s trilogy of natural rights rather than what the founders intended, “the pursuit of happiness) as the role of government to protect.
It’s true, there is not an appreciation for those “first principles,” but that’s because there was never an understanding of their genesis in the first place. If one is a realist, they understand that the framers of our nation were affluent white men. Their purpose in forming a new government was not to be altruistic or founded in a belief that human beings are born free with equal dignity and rights, but rather it was to make certain that folks like themselves enjoyed life, liberty, and that there was no interference in their pursuit of happiness. The Constitution did not apply to the indigent, Native Americans, or women, nor did it embrace the abolishment of slavery.
Parker writes, “Blackwell and Klukowski show that the departure point defining American exceptionalism is a nation rooted in God-given first truths and our constitution that defines a federal government, with limited and enumerated powers, that preserves and secures those truths.”
“American Exceptionalism” has not served America to its betterment. The Bible and anything claimed to be God-given has been devised by man. Man, not God, has determined what the natural rights are and how they should be applied. Declarations made in the name of God are always exploited to serve the self-interest of the man or system who employees that designation.
President Obama said, “Before I was even inaugurated congressional leaders of the other party got together and made a calculation that if I failed, they’d win.” A strategy of promoting a hostile environment for a failed presidency is what Townhall.com and this book attempts to do.
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