President for life Obama

Bruce Walker, writing on American Thinker, doesn't think that there is much danger of Obama attempting to stage some kind of coup:

Some conservatives have begun to openly wonder if Obama is going to seize power in America. Would he want to do this? Perhaps so (a scary thought, but he has promised change.) No one dreamed that Carter, the worst president of the last century, wanted or planned to seize power. Clinton wanted to win power, but the worst anyone expected of Clinton was Huey Long bossism.

Obama rose in politics through the thoroughly corrupt one-party government of Chicago. His spiritual advisor sounds like a rabble-rousing storm trooper. His intellectual mentor, Saul Alinksy, like the Bolsheviks and Nazis, believed in state terrorism. If Obama wanted to follow their leads, could he? I believe not.

Once it became clear that Obama was acting without any pretense of constitutionality, he would need muscle to back him up. Yet the greatest source of that muscle, the United States Military, loathes Obama as much as he loathes them. He would need intelligence, yet his maltreatment of the CIA ensures that those operatives would toss more bananas peels in front of him than real information should he make an extraconstitutional move.

Obama would also need the police, yet the President’s comments about a Cambridge policeman, a member of what has to be among the most politically correct force in America, shows the natural antipathy between Obama and law enforcement officers. The police, “pigs,” to the crowd that Obama belonged to as a community organizer, cannot be a solid support of any seizure of power.

What about the civilian national security force promised by Obama during the campaign? Conservatives are much more likely to be veterans and own guns than leftists. The creation and coordination of a real civilian army would also profoundly antagonize all state and local police forces.

You can go and read the rest, but this is the meat of his argument.

I don't put the threat of some kind of attempted seizure of power by Obama very high on my list of things to worry about, but I don't discount it either. What Mr. Walker doesn't understand is that the military and police would cooperate with an Obama dictatorship if it were legally enacted by a lawful act of congress.

All it would take is something like a major terrorist incident, especially one involving nuclear terrorism, to cause congress to declare martial law.

You will remember that right after 9/11 Chris Matthews wrote an op-ed piece in which he lamented the fact that Bill Clinton had never been given a chance to lead by a 9/11-type incident during his presidency. Left-liberals would love nothing more than to have one of "their guys" in charge during a massive crisis and would load him down with as much power as possible in order to let him shine with his inspired leadership.

Imagine this scenario. Terrorists manage to construct a couple of gun style (like the Hiroshima bomb) nuclear bombs using the nuclear material from four Soviet era warheads. They set them off in widely separate areas like Manhattan and San Francisco at 12:30 EST on a weekday when there would be plenty of people in the downtown area of both cities. The dead and injured would run into the hundreds of thousands - if not a million or more - and the property damage would be in the hundreds of billions.

The nation would panic.

If someone wrote Obama a good speech and if his teleprompter functioned correctly when he addressed the joint session of congress (which would be meeting in a virtual session as the actual members would be in various safe locations around the country while Obama was flying around at 33000 feet in Air Force One) they would quickly sign off on a declaration of martial law and the suspension of constitutional protections.

Gone for the duration would be the First, Second, Fourth, Fifth, Ninth and Tenth Amendments.

The armed services would follow their orders because they are sworn to do so and because the American military culture is built from the ground up on the principle of civilian control.

Police would follow their orders to avoid being stripped of their badges, guns, pensions and benefits.

The key would be that the declaration of martial law would have to come up for congressional review periodically. At first it would probably be every six months. As long as the illusion of the whole thing being temporary was allowed to stand the majority of people would hunker down and try to wait it out.

As for elections there would be no need for Obama to worry. With the only operational media being under his control and with the votes being counted by federal officials there would be little danger of enough of his political enemies being elected to hamper his plans.

Of course there would come a point when it became impossible to even pretend that he was anything but a despot, but by the time we reached that place how much effective resistance could be mounted by a disarmed and demoralized population or by a military whose leadership had been packed with handpicked Obama loyalists?

Do I believe that this is likely? No. But I don't think that it is impossible either.

After all this is the kind of thing that Obama's political heroes did.