And now we know

(Via the Drudge Report)

Well, our darling President said he would take matters into his own hands in order to force action on gun control.  And with a name like “Operation Choke Point”, it hardly seems like there is any doubt as to intent or purpose.

Gun retailers say the Obama administration is trying to put them out of business with regulations and investigations that bypass Congress and choke off their lines of credit, freeze their assets and prohibit online sales.

Since 2011, regulators have increased scrutiny on banks’ customers. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. in 2011 urged banks to better manage the risks of their merchant customers who employ payment processors, such as PayPal, for credit card transactions. The FDIC listed gun retailers as “high risk” along with porn stores and drug paraphernalia shops.

I’ve heard it said that the United States has survived bad presidents before, and we have.  Just in my lifetime, we handily survived Johnson, Nixon and Carter.  Hell, I could make an argument to add in the remainder of them as well.  But this one?  I don’t know.  The SOB has 18 months in which to do further damage, and no one seems ready to hold him to answer for his extra-Constitutional actions so far, or to attempt to reigh in in further depredations.  Of course, given my opinion that the Democrats and the Republicans are but different sides of the same coin, I don’t find this a big surprise.  Statists gonna state.

Bear in mind that none of the things that are being done will be undone.  Obamacare is a done deal–it will be with us in some form for the rest of our days.  The damage to our economy will not be repaired–oligarchy is now The Way Things Work.  The erosions to our civil liberties will remain and the eroded areas will continue to grow.  Our corrupted education system will continue to be repaired with large doses of money and fail.

I anxiously await the construction of coliseums in our major cities.  Oh, wait….

Feel free to mourn the Republic.  But I think our time might be better spent hoping for a competent empire to arise from the ashes.  (Apologies to Jerry Pournelle, from whom I’ve stolen the concept.  But it seems to fit the times.)