The must-read essay of the day, perhaps of the week, is Kevin Williamson's dissection of President Obama's vast expansion of the arbitrary powers of the bureaucratic state and his lawless behavior in office.  The piece, titled "The Front Man," is full of well-turned phrases and is a delight to read, so it should be read in its entirety. He sees Obama as less a tyrant than front man:

Barack Obama isn't the leader of the free world; he's the front man for the permanent bureaucracy, the smiley-face mask hiding the pitiless yawning maw of total politics.

He explains:

...the United States is not going to fall for a strongman government. Instead of delegating power to a would-be president-for-life, we delegate it to a bureaucracy-without-death. You do not need to install a dictator when you've already had a politically supercharged permanent bureaucracy in place for 40 years or more. As is made clear by everything from campaign donations to the IRS jihad, the bureaucracy is the Left, and the Left is the bureaucracy. Elections will be held, politicians will come and go, but if you expand the power of the bureaucracy, you expand the power of the Left, of the managers and minions who share Barack Obama's view of the world.

The second half of the essay catalogues Obama's lawless behavior, and is sobering. Williamson avoids the word"tyrant" because it would contradict his title and thesis, that Obama is a front man, but acting in willful defiance of the law seems to me to be a path toward tyranny. The bureaucratic state is not incompatible with dictatorship, as demonstrated by Mussolini and that other guy that Godwin's Law says I shouldn't mention.

There is lots of memorable writing. Just a couple of examples:

• He is a man with a first-class education and a business-class mind, a sort of inverse autodidact whose intellectual pedigree is an order of magnitude more impressive than his intellect.
• his household entourage does resemble the Ringling Bros. Circus as reimagined by Imelda Marcos when it moves about from Kailua Beach to Blue Heron Farm.

His conclusion is spot on:

This is a might-makes-right presidency, and if Barack Obama has been from time to time muddled and contradictory, he has been clear on the point that he has no intention of being limited by something so trivial as the law.

The essay is long and worthwhile. To my mind, the second part of the piece could be part of articles of impeachment. But we all know that Obama is virtually immune from that constitutional remedy because of both his father's race and the media support he enjoys. And besides, as Williamson points out, Congress has been supine in delegating its powers away to the bureaucracy, which is, as he points out, the same thing as the Left. They would have no stomach for impeachment, no matter how far Obama goes in ignoring constitutional restraints on his power.