Today We Are All Jack Ryan

Now that we know the government has been spying on all of us for years under the direction of Barack Obama (accessing our email, keeping track of our telephone calls, and probably doing a lot of things most of us don’t even want to imagine), the administration and their allies are doing their best to assure us that all of this is for our own good and Obama would never exploit this power for political gain.
 
Tell that to Jack Ryan or Blair Hull.
 
Most people have completely forgotten that before Obama was ever talked about as a presidential candidate, he nearly lost the 2004 Illinois senate race to Republican Jack Ryan.  Ryan was positioned to defeat Obama handily until Obama used The Chicago Tribune to convince a California judge to release the sealed details of a particularly nasty custody battle between Ryan and his ex-wife which had taken place five years earlier.  No illegalities were revealed in the court records, but the information was of an embarrassing nature, which was all that was necessary.  The media hyped the story and Ryan dropped out of the race, allowing Obama an easy victory.
 
Democrats might be quick to cheer this Machiavellian maneuver, but most of them are also unaware that Obama used the exact same strategy to defeat Blair Hull in the senate primary before going up again Ryan.  Obama was also trailing Hull until he lobbied the Tribune to print allegations implying that Hull’s marriage to his ex-wife had led her to seek an order of protection against him in 1998.  The records came out and Obama trounced Hull at the polls to secure the nomination.
 
Both of these instances reveal Obama’s willingness to exploit the secret and sensitive information of his political enemies, be they Republican or Democrat, and this was before he even had the power of the presidency and the resources of the federal government at his disposal.
 
The question isn’t whether or not Obama has obtained secret data on other citizens and used it to achieve his goals; the question is how often has he done this?
 
Consider the Supreme Court’s ruling last year on Obamacare, when George Bush’s conservative Chief Justice John Roberts surprisingly sacrificed every shred of his credibility by bending over backward to rule the Affordable Care Act constitutional.  The immediate knee-jerk reaction of many on the right was that Obama somehow “got to” Roberts and forced the justice to side with him.  What might have seemed a conspiracy theory at the time now carries some weight.  Remember that Obama also publicly threatened the Court prior to the ruling.  Who knows what information the administration might have obtained on a man in Roberts’ position?
 
No matter how good and clean a person might appear, everyone has some sort of information they would prefer to remain private, or at the least a loved one they might seek to protect.  In this digital era, that information is more accessible than ever, and we now know for a fact that the federal government is compiling it for future reference.
 
By contrast, the American people still know relatively little about Barack Obama’s past.  For reasons which remain unclear, he fought the release of his birth certificate for years.  His college records are unavailable to us.  His interviews, and even his press conferences, are tightly scripted.  He is now in a position to know everything about every one of us, and yet the public remains largely in the dark about who he is.
 
Just as we do not yet have physical evidence or a public admission from the president that he directed the IRS to target his political adversaries, we do not have evidence of what the government intends to use our private data for.  But we do have insight into a definite pattern of behavior.  Barack Obama’s senate campaign showed us what kind of man he is and how far he is willing to go to achieve his ends.  Experience guided by common sense should tell us all we need to know.
 
Private citizen, politician, journalist, Supreme Court justice, Republican or Democrat; none of us are safe.  All the president needs is a reason.  In a country governed by Barack Obama, we are all a Jack Ryan just waiting to happen.

Original article: Today We Are All Jack Ryan

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