Cicero in his letters to intimates informs us that one of the most caustic influences on public affairs in the last years of the free Republic was the long ears, i.e. the political intelligence-gathering organization, of Julius Caesar and his party, which was a revolutionary faction similar to Obama's today, which coexisted and cooperated with a similarly effective and repressive organization of not just street toughs, but street killers, many of them ex-gladiators and veteran soldiers, who possessed names and addresses.
Obama's gathering together powers and political tools similar to those Caesar used to end the Republic says more about him than five or six long articles in opinion journals ever could.