How can any cogent American citizen possibly even consider
voting for Barack Obama now? That’s what lots of conservatives and
moderates are asking each other, again and again. It’s completely
baffling, to those who grew up with any sort of sense of what
America means and what the American character traditionally has
been, that anybody can look at the man’s record and want more of
the same.
Almost the entirety of the Muslim world is now rioting against
an American president who promised that his olive branches to
Muslims would secure peace. Like Jimmy Carter, Obama has only shown
a weakness that has emboldened the Islamist haters. Meanwhile, our
closest ally in the region, Israel, a stable representative
democracy led by an American-educated, America-loving prime
minister, has repeatedly been insulted, abandoned, and undermined.
In short, the United States is in worse position with all
sides in the Middle East/northern Africa. We are
embarrassed, feckless, wounded… and in four tragic cases,
dead.
Allies in Poland and the Czech Republic have been repeatedly let
down and sometimes insulted. The “re-set” with Russia earned us
only Russian contempt. China and Russia ignore our entreaties
around the world, with absolute disdain for our wishes, our olive
branches, or Obama’s supposedly Nobel-worthy and messianic genius
for diplomacy.
Domestically, our debt has increased by 50 percent in just four
years, by some $5 trillion, with not a single observable benefit
from the spending. Our bond rating already has been downgraded by
one agency, and another major agency threatens to downgrade us. Our
unemployment rate has never been beneath 8 percent since Obama’s
first month in office, even though his economic team said his
outrageously expensive “stimulus” package would ensure that it
would never rise above 8 percent, and indeed that it would drop
below 6 percent within four years.
Our politics is more fractured, less civil, than ever — and as
Bob Woodward, of all people, indicates in his new book, this is
largely the fault of Obama. He has been the first president in
history to push through a major new program without a single vote
from the opposing party — and while refusing to incorporate a
single major idea from the other party, while ignoring overwhelming
public sentiment to pass it, and while bending the rules in
multiple ways to force it through Congress. Meanwhile, on the real
business of Congress, his Senate allies have ignored longstanding
law by refusing to pass a budget for three years now, while twice
rejecting the president’s own pitiful budget proposal by
unanimous votes.
Obama campaigned with a promise to rein in abuses of executive
power, but instead he increasingly rules by executive decrees of
dubious constitutionality. Congress won’t pass cap-and-trade, so he
orders it anyway. Congress won’t pass amnesty for illegal
immigrants, so he orders it anyway. Congress won’t undermine the
work requirement in the welfare system, so he guts the work
requirements by executive order. And on and on go the abuses.
His Justice Department is flagrantly corrupt and racialist. It
told a black majority town in North Carolina that it could not hold
nonpartisan elections because voters would fail to elect
the black “candidates of choice” if the candidate weren’t
identified as Democrats. It intervened against the heroic Fire
Department of New York to push racial hiring quotas on the
department so outrageous that it would force admittance into the
fire academy of candidates who missed as many as 70 percent (!!!)
of the questions on a simple entrance exam; and, in blocking all
applicants expected to be hired under the previous exam, it
prohibited a number of black applicants who actually had met
standards from being hired. So outrageous was this abuse that even
the leftist Village Voice ran a long feature story taking
up for the qualified black applicants whose chances for employment
were dashed.
And, of course, DoJ ran an idiotic gun-running program on the
Mexican border that led to the deaths of two American agents and
countless Mexicans while drawing a rebuke from the Mexican
ambassador, and then covered up and even lied about its actions.
Also, infamously, it dropped already-won cases against New Black
Panther thugs for flagrant voter-intimidation outside a
Philadelphia polling place in 2008 — dropped the cases, indeed,
just in time, meaning four days in advance, for one of those thugs
again to serve as an official Democratic Party poll-watcher in
municipal elections in 2009.
Gasoline prices are twice what they were when Obama took office
— and rising again. The housing market remains in the doldrums.
Food stamp use is by far at the highest level in history, and
poverty is markedly up. Food prices are markedly higher. Small
businesses are jettisoning the health-insurance benefits they
offered employees until Obamacare made it prohibitively expensive.
Doctors are retiring in record numbers rather than face Obamacare’s
scourges — and most of the law hasn’t yet taken effect. Coming
soon are new taxes on medical device manufacturers: Patients will
pay more for wheelchairs, prosthetics, insulin pumps, asthma
inhalers, pacemakers, and other essential fruits of modern medical
technology.
Taxpayers are on the hook for huge losses from the auto
bailouts, even as most of GM’s new jobs have been created overseas
rather than here, and even as auto dealerships across the nation
were shut down by administration fiat on political bases rather
than on the basis of which ones were profitable. Taxpayers are on
the hook for politically inspired “investments” to Obama cronies in
failing businesses such as Solyndra. Taxpayers are on the hook for
higher electricity prices due to a backdoor cap-and-trade scheme
imposed by (illegal) administrative fiat.
Religious liberties, meanwhile, are under repeated and sustained
attacked from an administration openly hostile to traditional
faith. And the president even refuses to defend in federal court
laws duly passed by Congress and signed by former President
Clinton.
The parade of abuses, incompetencies, extravagances, and
illegalities goes on and on. The record of improvements in any
sector of American life is… well, nil. Nothing is better, not a
single thing, at home or abroad. And Obama has offered no
recognizable plans, no new proposals, no substance at all, for
making things better in a second term.
This presidency is a disaster. Reasonable people are gobsmacked
at the possibility that it could somehow be allowed to continue its
degradations of American society.
