Intelligent people across the country are asking out loud whether another presidential term for Barack Obama actually will be as bad as we expect it to be.
Unfortunately, it probably will be.
Because he was as horrible, as disdainful of the Constitution and of decency, fair play and good judgment, as he was in the first four years, imagine what he can do now that he needs not worry about re-election. A look back serves as a reminder of how bad he has been already, so that good Americans can start figuring how to counter the worse Obama still to come. Herewith, then, lines from either opening or closing paragraphs of my prior columns on the Occupier in Chief, to remind us, as if we needed it, what we’re dealing with.
Sept. 18, 2008: “Rhetoric aside, Obama is about as much in step with the majority of Americans as Britney Spears would be if she were trying to foxtrot with Fred Astaire.… Strip away Obama’s deep-timbred voice and his puffball platitudes, and what remains is nothing more than an academic radical using Chicago machine politics to grab a power base and using smoke-and-mirrors to project a pleasing image.”
Nov. 6, 2008: “It will take very focused, very intelligent, very skillful action by conservatives to stop this creeping subversion of a free society. This is a whole different political battlefield than any on which we’ve fought before. And we haven’t yet found our Omar Bradley.”
March 13, 2009: “If this be treason, make the most of it. No, not treason against this wonderful nation. But this column may sound suspiciously like treason against the cult of Obama, and against his hagiographers in the establishment media, and against the very idea that this president actually loves this nation’s liberal, republican, constitutional order. Consider this also to be treason against the myth that our president is a man of deep, or even average, integrity.
“Barack Obama is a radical’s radical and a man whose ego vastly outstrips his prior accomplishments. He is dangerous, and after just seven weeks he already is leading this country into disaster.”
April 16, 2009: “Let’s cut through all of Barack Obama’s baloney. His speech on the economy at Georgetown University on Tuesday was a testament to the massive ego of a callow leader with grandiose pretensions bordering on megalomania. Everything he outlined in his vision for a near-Utopian economic future is designed to come about through the intervention of a government central planner — his own Oneself — combined with the coercive force of government to make it happen.”
May 15, 2009: “If somebody were deliberately trying to undermine the very fabric of these United States, he would first vow not just to change its policies but to completely ‘change America,’ and then would do just about everything Barack Obama already has begun to do as president.”
Oct. 23, 2009: “We will not be intimidated, we will not be bullied, we will not be silenced, and we will not lose. Barack Obama’s thugocracy is dishonest, dangerous, and malicious, but it cannot be stronger than the aroused might of a free people.”
March 5, 2010: “There is something way off balance in the character of Barack Obama. Something in the realm of zealotry, with a touch of megalomania, and perhaps an authoritarian impulse too. He combines Alinskyite tactics and outlook with an air of self-assumed moral superiority in a way that fails to respect the usual, small ‘r’ republican limits on American presidents.”
May 13, 2010: “Who the hell does Barack Obama, this morally preening, arrogant hypocrite, think he is? His vacuous, demagogic shtick about helping the ‘people’ fight ‘the powerful’ is getting so old from his lips, and already was so hackneyed even before he expropriated it, that it’s a miracle that even he himself can say it anymore without getting nauseated by his own oleaginous triteness. Obama spewed the same old effluvia Monday when introducing Elena Kagan as his nominee for the Supreme Court….”
Aug. 22, 2011: “This boringly ineffective would-be demagogue in the Oval Office keeps trotting out the same tired, petty, counterfactual lines in every one of his pompous, detached-from-reality speeches — and he did so again in his Saturday radio address. So shopworn is his refrain, and so counterproductive are his policies (both enacted and proposed), that the markets tank just about every time he opens his mouth, and the economy suffers with each minute he continues to occupy the White House. His resignation from office, in abject embarrassment at his failures, would be a great first step toward economic recovery, not to mention a balm to the souls of tens of millions of Americans sick of his condescension, his prevarications, and his incompetence.”
Oct. 21, 2011: “Civil unrest is President Barack Obama’s crutch, his comfort zone, and his trump card. That’s why he has encouraged the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ protest and its progeny across the country, despite significant political dangers to him for doing so. Closer looks at Obama’s career roots and at the protesters’ behaviors help explain both why the protests are worrisome developments and why the president actually likes them.”
Feb. 3, 2012: “By ineptness and, worse, by deliberate design, Barack Obama daily makes this nation weaker abroad, less free (and more authoritarian) at home, economically more feeble, and in the civic realm more bitterly divided than ever. Meanwhile, ominous developments crowd the world stage. In short, we’re in a big heap of trouble. The recent litany of Obama’s odiousness begins with his growing, unambiguous war against traditional Christianity….”
Sept. 6, 2012: “The Anointed One, the Occupier of the Oval Office, who will accept his party’s renomination for president tonight in Charlotte, has created chapter and verse of the political version of an Old Testament — a mythology explaining how the United States fell into economic difficulties and why his attempts to extricate us from distress so far have been unavailing. The problem is that, like most mythologies but very much unlike the real Old Testament, the Anointed One’s explanations are entirely wrongheaded, and sometimes outright dishonest.”
Sept. 19, 2012: “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.”
Nov. 14, 2012: “If this be sedition (which it isn’t), let the Obamites make the most of it. At some point the sleeping American public will rouse itself and insist that we are indeed Americans, and we are better and freer and stronger than the Eric Holders of the world think we are. The Obamites will not succeed. We will not let them.”
Nov. 20, 2012: “Thank goodness we are the United States of America: We’ve survived bad presidents before, and we will again. In the interim, though, Obama seems to be putting to severe test the purported Otto von Bismarck remark that ‘God watches over children, fools, and the United States of America.’ When it is the fool who is leading the USA, God is required to do double duty.”
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This is no time for second-term honeymoons. This is a time, quite calculatingly, to rally the opposition — not to fight every skirmish to the death, but to prepare the best, most advantageous ground for a counter-assault. Four excruciatingly difficult years confront us. Toil, tears, sweat: We know the litany. Now let’s add some brains to the mix. Somehow, we’ve spent four years losing to a dangerous fool.
