Posted on April 22, 2014
Vocabulary
Fraud
Obama
denies by redefinition
by
Daniel Clark
While speaking to Al Sharpton’s National Action Network, President Obama stated his opposition to state voter identification laws, a position for which no innocent motive exists. It wouldn’t have sounded good if he’d admitted he was defending voter fraud, so instead he redefined the term, so that he could pretend to oppose it instead.
“The real voter fraud is those that try to deny our rights by making arguments about voter fraud,” he said, apparently meaning that those who try to prevent voter fraud by requiring identification are themselves the frauds. Let’s think about that for a second, in English. Fraud is an exercise in deceit. Where’s the deception in requiring someone to produce a photo ID in order to vote? When you need a photo ID in order to cash a check, nobody calls that banking fraud.
Such
a characterization would be a transparent attempt to enable genuinely fraudulent
transactions. Obama’s attempt to shield
voter fraud is just as thinly disguised.
Symptomatic of his Big Brother complex, his redefinition is a direct contradiction:
verification is fraud, and vice versa.
As long as he’s pinching ideas from 1984, he might as well redefine “freedom,” too. “As Democrats, we’ve let the other side define ‘freedom’ for too long,” he told this year’s Winter Meeting of the Democratic National Committee. “Freedom doesn’t mean the ability to ask ‘what’s in it for me.’” If the ability to act in one’s own interest isn’t “freedom,” then what is?
“Freedom is the knowledge that your future in this country is secure,” he said, adding that a secure future can only be provided by an omnipotent federal government. Freedom, he went on to explain, is having your health insurance provided by a central authority. Freedom is the ability to keep your house despite having no intention of paying your mortgage. It also turns out, absurdly, that freedom is the power to force a baker to produce a gay wedding cake against his will.
Although Obama categorizes amnesty for illegal aliens under
the heading of “freedom,” he boasts a record of more deportations than any
other administration. He justifies this
claim by redefining the word “deport” so that it applies to people who have
never taken up residence here. The
“deported” now include many of those apprehended at the border, who are never
really in the U.S. other than while in custody.
These are offenders who previously would have been immediately returned to
Mexico as part of the widely criticized “catch and release” policy. After 9-11, the Bush administration began
charging and fingerprinting them before sending them back. Bush did not count these 
cases
as deportations. Obama, by doing so, has
superficially tripled his total.
Throughout the pre-Obama era, the federal deficit has been the difference between federal outlays and revenues for a particular year. The deficit has always been an annual measurement, to show how much is being added to the national debt from one year to the next. Now that we’re speaking Obamese, the deficit is a 10-year cumulative projection. If he can produce a new projection that comes in at $100 billion a year less than the last projection, then he can gloat that he’s reduced the deficit by $1 trillion, even though the results haven’t happened yet, and even though he is inflating that hypothetical outcome tenfold.
Contrary to liberal academic theory, you can’t change reality just by talking about it differently. Fraudulent votes, and not voter ID laws, threaten the integrity of our electoral process. Millions of illegal aliens continue to mock our country with their presence, abetted by an administration even less serious about the problem than its predecessors. Obama has already increased our national debt by 58 percent, despite his tall tales of having slain the fire-breathing deficit.
Most importantly, being subject to an authoritarian government is not freedom. Bureaucrats now aim to dictate every facet of our behavior, right down to our eating habits. Free expression of religion has become a right reserved for liberal-approved minorities, while Christians are increasingly prohibited from living in accordance with their beliefs. Obama himself routinely chooses to nullify certain laws through non-enforcement, thereby treating the will of the people as merely an unsolicited opinion.
Obama thinks he can take the infamously pungent “corpse flower” and call it a rose, and then have his regulatory wonks issue a report about how sweet it smells. If you disagree with that conclusion, then you are a racist.
Well? Why wouldn’t he also redefine you, while he’s at it?
The
Shinbone: The Frontier of the Free Press