Who will be president on Jan. 21, 2017?

By Jim Thompson
HCP columnist

January 21, 2017 is the day after the next presidential inauguration, of course. There are speculations about Hillary Clinton, Ted Cruz, and others. I think they are all wrong.

I think Barack Hussein Obama will be “president” on Jan. 21, 2017. Why?

All the signs point to the big prize being finding a way to appoint himself president for life.

All you have to do is study the history of South American dictators to see a stunning similar pattern.

I chuckle when I see learned and famous pundits ponder why President Obama doesn’t react to particular events in a predictable way. They still don’t get it — Obama is playing his own game. It does not involve normal rules, normal values or any consideration of what others think.

It is his game with his rules and so far he has played it very, very well.

Dealing with Mr. Obama is like trying to negotiate nuclear disarmament with Russia back in the Cold War. Go back and look at the record – the Russians never negotiated.

We negotiated with ourselves. And when we had given away enough at a particular phase in the process, the Russians said, “OK, we will agree with that” and a great victory was claimed by all.

Obama is the same way. Name one thing on which he has comprised. He has made the opposition look like fools and turned the conversation into being about how stubborn they are. He is a master at this, all the while giving nothing.

Look at the way Obama views the rule of law. He has no respect for the law (or his oath of office). He enforces the laws he wants to, ignores the ones he doesn’t, despite taking the presidential oath of office, which has specific covenants about enforcing all the laws.

The polls show Obama slipping at the moment, but he can turn this around in a heartbeat by creating an outside threat. He has many choices. The NSA could suddenly find a massive threat to the electrical grid from China. Or North Korea or Iran could suddenly be able to deliver a nuclear warhead to our shores. Global warming could be found to be accelerating rapidly and need strong decisive action. Or incoming asteroids…

You get the idea, it is easy to conjure up a massive outside threat that a majority of the population will swallow. In sales, it is called instilling FUD: fear, uncertainty, and doubt.

Obama is nothing if he is not a master salesperson. And he has nearly all the press on his side to help him sell his sales pitch.

Other signs:

• Why did Homeland Security buy all that ammunition? Why have other agencies bought so much ammunition? Is it being stockpiled?

• What about President Obama turning his 2012 campaign organization into the permanent “Organizing for Action,” an organization still promoting “Obama love” for a person with only 3 ½ years left in office. Organizing for action has 50 different state organizations under the umbrella of one national organization. Seems like something intended to last longer than 3 ½ years.

Where is the biggest threat to Mr. Obama taking over in this way? It is certainly not Congress or the Supreme Court. They have no muscle and he doesn’t care what they say or do, including any thoughts of impeachment.

He has been working on emasculating the military. Maybe they will remember their oath of allegiance is to the Constitution, not any person or office (at least let’s hope so).

However, when one plots a path of incremental change as President Obama obviously has, it may be too late for the military to remember their allegiance. So, the military may not be a threat to him.

I think the biggest threat to Obama is Hillary. Right now, for Hillary’s sake, the Clintons want to use the Constitution to assure a legal change of power in 2017.

Of course, Hillary is getting to the age she may have natural health issues of her own before 2017, but extrapolating from my thoughts, one can conclude Hillary may be in danger.

Any other Democrat, a “strawman” if you will, could run, win and then turn the office over to Obama. This is constitutionally ambiguous enough that it could probably succeed. Easiest way to accomplish this, with Hillary out of the way, is to run Michelle.

All Mr. Obama has to do is make sure the general population does not rise up against him and he has won.

Two things are going to bear watching closely over the next three years.

Hillary’s health is the first one. A scary but not provable outside threat is the second.

These are the last two pieces of the puzzle to be completed.

Jim Thompson, formerly of Marshall, is a graduate of Hillsboro High School and the University of Cincinnati. He resides in Duluth, Ga., following decades of wandering the world, and is a columnist for The Highland County Press.