Petraeus For President

March 31, 2009

General David Petraeus, the man who turned around the War in Iraq, might have one more country to save from a tyrannical dictator before he retires. I'm not speaking of Iran or Venezuela; I'm speaking of the United States. We're currently in the midst of what amounts to a bloodless leftist coup, and patriotic Americans, who have given Barack Obama the benefit of the doubt but are finally sensing what's really taking place, are beginning to look around for a leader capable of taking charge and reinstating courage, ballast, and sanity into our political situation.

At the end of a recent interview with General Petraeus, Fox News's Bret Baier pointedly asked his subject if he might consider running for the Presidency in 2012. Petraeus demurred, but Baier's question had been running through my mind from about two minutes into the interview. That was when it became obvious that General Petraeus had precisely the intelligence, the character, the experience, and the savvy to galvanize Americans to get rid of the dangerous thugs who are swarming Washington like ghetto gangsters, much as he did the jihadists who threatened to defeat our efforts to unify Iraq.

David Limbaugh summarizes our dilemma in this way: "President Barack Obama is multi-tasking the dismantling of the American system on so many fronts that not all of the outrages can be properly monitored," to which I would add "in much the same way Jihadists attempted to thwart our efforts to unify Iraq under a democratically elected government." For what is happening in Washington D.C. under the Obama administration is nothing less than a bloodless version of the attempted jihadist coup in Iraq, a takeover of our government by decidedly non-democratic political forces. And such a threat to democracy demands a true democratic champion.

As Limbaugh indicates, the coup is taking many forms. It's embodied in virtually every one of the President's political appointees, including, recently, Harold Koh, the former Yale Law School Dean and now presidential legal advisor who favors the overturn of American law based on our Constitution and its replacement with some version of "international" law.

But it's also taking the form of what is quickly being revealed to be mandatory acceptance of TARP funds by financial institutions. The bank "bailout" was never intended to be any such thing, it turns out. Rather, it was a way for the U.S. government to get its claws into the banks in such a way that the banks would never be able to remove them and the government would essentially have centralized control over the U.S. financial system. That's because the new "stress test" that Treasury Secretary Geithner is applying to banks is designed, not to enable them to pay back TARP funds, but to insure that they must accept even more TARP money, giving the government control over such trivial capitalist foundation principles as the freedom for companies to determine levels of executive compensation.

And it's also clear that Obama's nationalization of General Motors is very unlikely to result in that company's ever going into bankruptcy, despite the President's words to the contrary. The reason the bankruptcy option hasn't been implemented up to now is that it's Obama's intention to dictate, even more directly than so many of the legislative initiatives that have heretofore helped cripple the American auto industry have done, that GM create "green" automobiles. Never mind that there's no market for such cars in the U.S.; it's what you should be driving and, damn it, it's what you will be driving. The government is mandating it, and no bankruptcy judge is going to step in and make sensible decisions that might enable the U.S. auto giant to restructure and survive in anything resembling its current form.

Many people have bemoaned the lack of Republican leadership, and it has certainly been evident. Some have even seen it as a good thing, describing it as a normal part of the process after a resounding electoral defeat such as the ones the GOP suffered last fall. But as the radical shift our new President has in mind for this country begins to take shape, and as the resulting loss of freedom and prosperity it bodes begins to sink in, we're realizing that we've got to start now to reverse this dangerous leftward lurch. In addition to winning back enough seats in the Senate in 2010 to remove the threat of a bulletproof 60-vote Democratic majority, we've got to draft the one man who is capable of providing the caliber of leadership that can help us turn the tide of our domestic Democratic insurgency and restore democracy in the United States.