The deep state dials up a win for the ancien regime.

More than 10 million people got “Obamaphones” under the federal “Lifeline” program but as the Washington Times recently reported, at least 36 percent of the recipients were ineligible to receive them. More than 5,500 people got two phones and 6,400 Obamaphone recipients were dead people. This scam diverted some $9 billion to private bank accounts and the Federal Communications Commission, “didn’t even have a good yardstick to measure whether the program was meeting its goals.” It gets worse.

One carrier ripped off the program for $10 million and the FCC is going after them for $51 million, but as Fox News reported, Agit Pai and the other FCC commissioners “were told not to reveal the details of its investigation until April 1, a day after the FCC voted to expand the Lifeline program.” FCC mouthpiece Will Wiquest, a former press secretary for socialist Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, claimed the timing of the enforcement action was “in no way related to the timing of the vote on the program modernization.” It did not emerge who, exactly, told the FCC to hold off on the fraud revelation but the Obamaphone scam proved instructive on a number of fronts.

Welfare programs are notoriously corrupt and counterproductive. Federal oversight bodies seldom detect fraud much less prevent it, and secrecy rules. The swamp extends to fathomless depths, but Deep State operatives always find smooth sailing.

Democracies reach a dangerous tipping point when the numbers of those who vote for a living equal or surpass those who work for a living. By catering to those who vote for a living, a politician can boost his chances for election. Mitt Romney recognized this reality when he let slip that 47 percent of the voters were “dependent on government” and would thus vote for the incumbent “no matter what.”

They were more likely to vote for the incumbent if he gave them “free” cell phones and other goodies. In September, 2012, in a video that went viral, a black female supporter shouts that Obama “gave us a phone” and that “Romney sucks.” The 2012 victor was simply applying authoritarian principles that loom large in his background.

David Garrow’s massive Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama is the latest official version, but the Pulitzer winner does let a few things slip by. In the early going, the star is known as Barry Soetoro, after Lolo Soetoro, the Indonesian foreign student his mother Ann Dunham married in 1965. An unnamed “smart journalist,” tells Garrow that for Barry, “Indonesia was the formative experience.” Part of that experience is surely the Besuki school, where Barry was registered as a Muslim, but there is also a political dimension.

When Barry was a child, the Indonesian strongman was Sukarno, a Muslim who learned Arabic by studying the Quran. He led the Indonesian independence movement but as president he suppressed the parliamentary system in favor of “guided democracy,” an authoritarian arrangement in which all good things proceed from the man in charge.

This model was Barry’s first formative political experience, and by all indications he was okay with it. In Garrow’s narrative, the rising star goes to Indonesia, not Kenya, to polish off the manuscript that became Dreams from My Father, which Garrow calls “in multitudinous ways, without any question a work of historical fiction.”

In 2009, a year after he became President of the United States, Indonesians erected “Little Barry,” a four-foot-high bronze statue of Barry Soetoro in shorts and a t-shirt, with a butterfly landing on his extended left hand. In the White House, the former Barry Soetoro displays his own flair for “guided democracy.”

For example, he wanted to delay certain mandates in the Affordable Care Act legislation until after the 2014 mid-term elections. In this and other actions, as Thomas Sowell noted, the president showed “contempt for American Constitutional democracy,” through the seizing of arbitrary powers not granted to any president by the Constitution of the United States.” This was as close as the nation had ever come to one-man rule.

The style was decidedly authoritarian, a Sukarno regime of sorts. The rising star got most everything he wanted: American retreat abroad and at home more dependency on government. His designated successor Hillary Clinton failed to gain the White House, but Deep State operatives keep the previous regime moving ahead.

Somebody ordered the FCC to quash revelations of massive Obamaphone corruption until after the program had been expanded, and the FCC duly obeyed. More corruption remains undiscovered and the former president is already hiding the evidence.

For example, the materials relating to Susan Rice’s surveillance of Trump campaign and transition officials, have been sealed at the Barack Obama Presidential Library, and remain off limits for five years under the Presidential Records Act. In similar style, many states refuse to cooperate with the federal investigation of voter fraud. As the president tweeted, what are they trying to hide?

President Trump should have investigators working three shifts on the unmasking operation, IRS targeting (“not even a smidgeon of corruption”), the Clinton emails (“she has not jeopardized America’s national security”), Fast and Furious, Benghazi (“what difference at this point does it make?”), and voter fraud (“fake news … something that has constantly been disproved”). Otherwise the ancien regime continues and the winner is the man whose major formative experience was in Sukarno’s Indonesia. As it happens, that was not the only new revelation of Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama.

In Garrow’s narrative, the Communist pornographer Frank Marshall Davis gives Barry “paternal advice” before he heads off to Occidental College. In New York, girlfriend Genevieve Cook describes him as a “pompous jive.” In Chicago, mayor Harold Washington’s policy advisor Hal Baron recalls the rising star as a “very glib” purveyor of “cocky standard Alinsky bullshit.”