Obama: A 21st Century Nero?

By David L. Hunter

Myth has it that Roman Emperor Nero (15 December 37 AD—9 June 68 AD), fiddled while Rome burned. Historians tell us this story isn’t 100 percent true. Violins didn’t technically exist in 64 AD, but Nero—and the six-day Great Fire of Rome that destroyed approximately three-quarters of the city—were real enough. At the time, Nero blamed Christian scapegoats (then an obscure sect) for all the trouble. Sounds a lot like our current Islam-inclined U.S. president, and a political landscape where history is repeating itself.

Another telling parallel, like every opportunistic fascist, Nero happily used the crisis to clear land for his planned palatial complex—the Golden House—the Domus Aurea. You read that correctly: the buildings and ornamental gardens werealready planned. This disruptive circumstance—which made half of Rome’s residents homeless—makes for nice symbolism for Mr. Obama’s own corrosive philosophy, the “Fundamental Transformation of America.” That too is burn, baby burn, metaphorically-speaking, of course.

In Nero’s time, his understandably skeptical citizenry suspected he caused the calamity to promote his personal agenda, but nothing was ever proven. Mr. Obama is no different in this regard. For example, his longstanding, well publicized attitude of ‘stupidly-acting cops’ and ‘if I had a son he’d look like Trayvon’ similarly exploit misfortune to advance his own anti-law and order mind-set. In this same vein, using televised speeches to figuratively ‘crack a few police noggins together’ foments crises that force the vague “change” of Mr. Obama’s 2008 campaign slogan.

As a result of the last more than seven chaotic years of his Constitution-violating overreach, the political needle has swung violently hard left. He has accomplished this with an imperialist’s disregard for established law. Moreover, he has also ignored custom by jerry-rigging the reassuring presidential podium into a rabble-rousing bully pulpit. His aforementioned publicly uttered racial pronouncements have encouraged the vigilantism of the Black Lives Mattermob. However, the Obama clan has no skin in the game. Unlike the rest of us, they enjoy armed 24-hour Secret Service protection.