Crimes Against Liberty and a Scathing Indictment of Obama

Crimes Against Liberty and a Scathing Indictment of Obama
Guy Benson
Wed, Sep, 22, 2010

Author and columnist David Limbaugh’s latest offering Crimes Against Liberty: An Indictment of President Barack Obama offers a comprehensive and damning critique of the Obama Administration’s ongoing Left-wing romp through American politics. Although his book’s subtitle promises “an indictment,” Limbaugh tells Townhall.com that it’s not a legal case he seeks to build. “I’m not advocating impeachment; it’s figurative,” he says. “But I do allege that he’s abused his power and acted outside his Constitutional authority.”

The book details one distressing episode after another—from the New Black Panther case dismissal, to the firing of Inspector General Gerard Walpin, to the intimidation of Chrysler’s bondholders. Limbaugh calls the current direction of the country “a crisis,” and says the purpose of the book is to catalogue every outrage to remind the American people exactly what has transpired in less than two years. “I want to fight [Obama] on the issues, and I want to beat him back at the ballot box, and his enablers in Congress,” he says.

In building a case that the current “regime” (to borrow a phrase from his famous talk-show host brother) poses a clear and present danger to American liberty and exceptionalism, Limbaugh argues that the president is a narcissist, a liar, and “deeply dislikes this country.” How so? “I think it’s so obvious,” Limbaugh explains. “He goes around the world apologizing for an American that he conceptualizes that is not the America that I know and love. America has used its power benevolently, and philanthropically, and magnanimously, so I get a little tired of people going around—especially the President of the United States—saying what a terrible country we’ve been.” He punctuates his point with a rhetorical question: “[Obama ] says he wants to ‘fundamentally change’ America. How many things do you love that you want to fundamentally change?”

Limbaugh is also critical of Obama’s broken promises, which he calls lies—identifying several high-profile presidential assurances that have not panned out. Chief among them is the assertion that no household making under $250,000 annually would see any form of tax increase during an Obama presidency. “He’s breached [that one] in a bunch of different ways,” Limbaugh says, referencing the regressive cigarette tax Obama levied within weeks of taking office as a prime example. He also cites Obamacare as a source of countless new taxes and fees that violate Obama’s tax pledge, including the “flagrantly, outrageously unconstitutional” individual mandate.

Not surprisingly, Limbaugh reserves some of his harshest language for passages addressing the Obama White House’s “Stalinist, 1984-style” efforts to silence and intimidate its critics, including talk radio and Fox News. Limbaugh inveighs against the imposition of “Gangster Government,” a term coined by writer Michael Barone, and shreds the image of Obama that his campaign crafted in 2008. “[Obama was] supposed to be this post-partisan guy, this healer,” Limbaugh says, “But actually he’s a bully. [Former WH Communications Director] Anita Dunn declared war on Fox News, cutting them out of the Sunday [talk show] marathon—but that’s just the beginning. Their attitude about speech, like Leftists, is not about freedom. They’re not about Constitutional rights. They’re about ‘ends justify the means.’”

Although the Obama administration has only held power for roughly 20 months, Limbaugh says the greatest challenge of writing this book was not producing sufficient material to fill a substantial volume (Crimes Against Liberty runs well over 400 pages, including citations), but rather to cut down and synthesize an overwhelming body of evidence from which to draw up a serious, albeit symbolic, indictment. “It could have been a lot more than [400 pages]. The hardest thing was to scale it down,” he says. Still, he believes his work is “very readable and encyclopedic in its thoroughness, and it really does cover comprehensively what [Obama]’s done.”

Crimes Against Liberty boasts testimonials from Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, Terry Jefferey, and Ann Coulter—all of whom exhort readers to purchase Limbaugh’s book. You can do so online, or you can receive a free copy with a subscription to Townhall Magazine.