The Democrat presidential nominee in 1988, Massachusetts Governor Michael S. Dukakis, said about the ethical standards of the Reagan Administration, “There’s an old Greek saying … the fish rots from the head first. It starts at the top.”  Dukakis went on to say that scandal and misconduct had become “almost an epidemic.  It’s the guy at the top who has to be held accountable.”

However, the ethical standards of the Reagan Administration were pristine compared to the cesspool of ethics scandals and the rampant lawlessness of the current Democrat administration.  Dukakis could have been describing the current occupant of the White House as the number of major presidential scandals continues to accelerate under Barack Obama.

As the American people are now finding out  --   little thanks to the “see no evil” mainstream news media  --  because of the president’s frequent attacks on his political opposition, his underlings, including apparently all the way up to his chief of staff, have been shading the truth; lying to the American people and to the news media, and are committing crimes in the name of their president.

During the 2009-2010 congressional health care reform debate about the president’s signature law, ObamaCare  --  passed without a single Republican Senator or a single Republican Representative voting for it  --  Sarah Palin issued a “statement on the current health care debate” which warned about ObamaCare’s “death panels.”

Palin wrote, on August 7, 2009, seven months before Obama’s socialized medicine scheme was signed into law:  “The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel”’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their “’level of productivity in society,’ whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.”

At least, Senator Marco Rubio, the Republican Cuban-American from Florida  --  who is leading in most of the 2016 Republican presidential national polls  --  is putting his political career on the line as a member of the Senate immigration reform group called the “Gang of Eight” which is routinely condemned by a lot of conservatives.  On the other hand, the president  --  who does not have to run for reelection again  --  is “hiding under his desk” (Bill O’Reilly’s description of those people unwilling to come on his Fox News show to debate him) with regards to serious immigration reform. 

The headline of the top story in “The Washington Post” on Sunday was:  “Stymied by a GOP House, Obama looks ahead to 2014 to cement his legacy.”  What that means, in plain English, is that America will be in gridlock for at least the next two years.   When the Republicans took over control of the House of Representatives in 2010, Barack Obama’s left-wing agenda was stopped in its tracks.  However, like most two-term presidents, Obama is concerned about his legacy.

Obama can claim only one major achievement for his legacy.  ObamaCare was rammed through Congress with no Republican votes in the Senate or the House  --  also a first for a major new entitlement program  --  and is deeply unpopular with the American people and it is only going to get worse. 

Obama desperately wanted to continue his radical agenda in the last Congress, but was stopped cold after the historic Republican victory in 2010.  He did, however, force the Republicans to vote for his $620 billion tax increase legislation after his reelection which also had some $330 billion in spending increases.  Even so, a minority of Republicans in the House voted for the gigantic Obama tax increase which had virtually unanimous Democrat support.

While watching his fellow Yankees, Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris, hit homeruns, the incomparable Yogi Berra uttered the famous phrase:  “It’s déjà vu all over again!” 

In the now infamous and so-called Y2K “crisis” before the turn of the millennium on January 1, 2000, there were dire warnings for months in advance about mass computer and system shut-downs and countless disruptions of services all over the world.  It did not happen. 

Never before has an American president played the American people for fools such as Barack Obama has done this year with his apocalyptic warnings about what is going to happen tomorrow when the paltry “sequestration” spending cuts hit the federal government; a cut of little over 2% ($44 billion in actual outlays) out of a gargantuan fiscal year budget of over $3.5 trillion. 

The following are a few of the consequences, according to Obama and his liberal acolytes, that will occur if the scheduled cuts resulting from Obama’s own sequestration scheme  --  which he and his new Treasury Secretary Jack Lew hatched during the summer of 2011  --  go through tomorrow:

Canadian-born Ted Cruz, freshman Republican senator from Texas, can never be president of the United States.  On the other hand, he can be Senate Majority Leader. 

Senator Cruz seems to be taking the opposite path to Republican congressional leadership than has his fellow Hispanic, fellow Reaganite, and fellow Tea Party hero, Senator Marco Rubio, R-FL.  The latter senator sat on the back benches in the Senate chamber for most of his first two years in the Senate beginning on January 2011 until stepping into the spotlight.  And what a spotlight that has been, including giving the response last week to the president’s state of the union speech.

After Barack Obama rammed his $620 billion tax increase bill through Congress with hardly any Republican support, he is now advocating even more tax increases.  He, of course, will not use all of these gargantuan and economy-dragging tax increases to reduce the national debt nor his annual $1 trillion deficits   --  four such deficits so far and counting  --  but President Obama will use the additional tax revenue for his new spending programs. 

Indeed, President Obama was in North Carolina yesterday pushing for all kinds of new spending programs including $1 billion in federal aid for a network of 15 so-called “innovation institutes” which will foster “more efficient” business models.  This guy’s appetite for new government programs is insatiable.  You would have thought that the absolute failure of Obama’s $1 trillion stimulus program in 2009 would have taught him a lesson.  But listening to both his second inaugural speech and his state of the union speech on Tuesday shows that Obama absolutely is not chastened by the abject failure of his big government programs and he wants even more spending. 

After getting badly beat by Barack Obama in the first two major battles of 2013  --  passage of Obama’s $620 billion tax increase and his $60 billion “disaster relief” bill  --  the Republicans will gain a huge victory if they can muster up courage for the next battle coming to a head on March 1^st.  

The Republicans in Congress will not even have to pass any legislation to gain a victory on March 1^st.  That is because what Obama, and his fellow Democrats in Congress, thought was a clever little trap for Republicans  --  automatic cuts amounting to $1.2 trillion (half in defense spending cuts and half in domestic spending cuts spread over a 10 year period  --  will back-fire on Obama and Democrats if the Republicans allow the “sequester” cuts (which will also reduce the nearly $17 trillion federal debt by $1.2 trillion; no small feat) to become reality on March 1^st.

Barack Obama has put up the scariest group of 2^nd term nominees for his major cabinet posts since Franklin Roosevelt.  One of Obama’s extreme left-wing nominations includes his Secretary of State nominee, John Kerry, who many of us Vietnam War veterans believe is a traitor to those of us who served; most especially after his treasonous remarks disparaging war veterans during a wartime congressional hearing.

John Kerry said this during an anti-war congressional hearing on April 22, 1971 after he came back from Vietnam:  "They told the stories at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, tape wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the country side of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country."