President Barack Obama may be about to learn that lesson the hard way.

When assembling a cabal, prudence dictates that one choose the participants with an eye toward circumspection. After all, a loudmouth is not the best repository for your darkest secrets.

In 2010, following the roughshod passage of Obamacare, the American people during the midterm elections unambiguously expressed their disgust with high-handed government edicts. A furious populace handed a solid House majority to Republican leadership, who promptly squandered the opportunity, never missing a chance to stand down, pledging unconvincingly to "fight on the next one."

Epithets swirled like leaves in a dust devil. Spinelessness was given a new and deeper meaning, and dissatisfaction with the "establishment" went from an undercurrent to a raging flood.

Through it all, our Republican leadership still surrendered faster than a French tank battalion as the Left rolled across the nation virtually unopposed.

Even the 2012 presidential race saw Republican nominee Mitt Romney repeatedly fail to press his advantage whenever Obama stumbled, almost as if he was opting to wait until his opponent regained his footing before resuming the fight.

Why? What prompted such haplessness among elected and aspiring Republicans? That question has haunted observers for years, with countless answers proffered and all found lacking.

Perhaps even more puzzling was the unprecedented departure of a great many incumbent Republicans immediately following the election of Donald Trump, a president of their own party. Why would these politicos be "retiring" in droves just when they finally have real power?

Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), one of the left wing's most prominent and vocal figures, has a 30-year history of ill advised, frothing rhetoric. "Auntie Maxine" is atop no one's list of vise-lipped confidantes, yet because of her prominence, she is clued in on much of the darker machinations of the Democratic Party and its backers. Occasionally, she reveals more than intended. February 2013 was one of those times.

From Roland Martin's television show:

The President has put in place an organization with the kind of database that no one has ever seen before in life[.] ... That's going to be very, very powerful[.] ... That database will have information about everything on every individual on ways that it's never been done before and whoever runs for President on the Democratic ticket has to deal with that. They're going to go down with that database and the concerns of those people because they can't get around it. And he's [President Obama] been very smart. It's very powerful what he's leaving in place.

Many observers at the time (myself included) found this statement a bit of a head-scratcher, as the database to which Ms. Waters referred was not immediately apparent. Personally, I assumed she was speaking of Obama's prodigious campaign organization, perhaps exaggerating the information gleaned from the campaign's wide-ranging social media contacts.

In any case, the comment drifted from collective memory in fairly short order and remained forgotten until just the other day, when it elbowed its way to the forefront of my consciousness.

Now, back to the explanation of previously inexplicable behavior on the part of Republicans under Obama.

In the pages of American Thinker recently, the commendable work of Sundance of the Conservative Treehouse has been featured. He has doggedly documented the publicly available information suggesting our law enforcement and intelligence gathering agencies had been weaponized against the political opponents of the Left (Trump especially, but not exclusively) in a spying scheme that features international participants from among our own allies.

Combining this documentation with the revelations from D.C. super-lawyer Joe DiGenova that this illegal surveillance and data-gathering operation had been in full swing far longer than anyone suspected, dating back to just before the election of 2012, and you have the bones of the most egregious plot of sedition our nation has ever seen, one involving the takeover of the federal government by use of blackmail.

Taken in light of the previously opaque comments from Auntie Maxine, one can't help but wonder whether the "database like no one has ever seen before" is in fact the result of the operation DiGenova references. Waters's description certainly fits.

Whenever there is scandal among the high levels of an administration, the first question that springs to mind is invariably "What did the president know, and when did he know it?"

In the case of Obama and the illegal abuse of America's intel and investigatory powers to gather information on his political opponents, it appears we need only ask Auntie Maxine, who helpfully told us six years ago that Obama was in on it from the outset.

The author writes from Nebraska and welcomes visitors to his website at dailyherring.com.

Image: majunznk via Flickr.