By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
We are told it is bad form to gloat, to crow, to engage in schadenfreude when an adversary suffers a comeuppance; that it would be more mature to offer “constructive criticism” than engage in the “blame game.” Fair enough: I guess it makes sense. It is nice to be nice.
Yet it strikes me that those who refused to buy into all the hoopla when Barack Obama first made his appearance on the national stage deserve to be cut some slack if they rub it in a bit. The president’s fall from grace has been so dramatic it deserves a spotlight. Who ever thought that Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and Chris Matthews would be leading the charge to separate the Democratic Party from the president’s failed performance in office?
We have come a long way from the days when the Nobel Peace Prize Committee awarded Obama its prize before he did a single thing as president; when Chris Matthews would talk without embarrassment about getting a “thrill up his leg” when he heard Obama speak; when David Brooks of The New York Times would write in earnest tones of how impressed he was by the sharp crease in Obama’s trousers; when presidential historian Michael Beschloss would say with a straight face — and without a smidgen of proof — on the Don Imus program that Obama is the smartest man ever to serve as president. (Beschloss doesn’t appear much on the talk shows these days. I wonder if this bizarre statement has anything to do with it?)
So I would raise no objections if the country found itself going through a few months of “I told you so” comments from Obama’s naysayers. As long as the focus is not placed solely on Obama’s failed leadership and character defects. If we do that, Pelosi, Schumer, Reid, and the liberals in the media will get away with delivering the message that the country is in a mess not because the liberal agenda is defective but because Obama was incompetent in carrying it out. The policies that Obama championed are what failed, not just Obama the man.
Let’s go through some of the key elements of the left’s agenda that have been proven wrong or ineffective, or both, during the Obama presidency. These are policies and decisions that would have failed, no matter who was president when they were put in place.
Where to begin? How about with Solyndra, the botched computer program during the Obamacare rollout, Obama’s embarrassing concession about all the “shovel-ready jobs that weren’t so shovel-ready,” and his administration’s failed attempt to get the economy rolling again? What did these things teach us? That the left’s confidence in an economy planned by their self-appointed elites is wrongheaded. The liberal elites can’t deliver what they promise.
If the proposition that increased government spending is the way out of the mess we are in does not yet elicit universal horselaughs, it should. The national debt is now over $18 trillion. How much more are we supposed to go into the hole? Even Vermont and Sweden have surrendered on their single-payer health care models, discovering there is no way to pay for them.
The world arena? The popularity Obama enjoyed when first elected gave him the opportunity to conduct foreign policy the way the academic left has been calling for since the Cold War. That was what his “apology tour” for America’s sins was all about. We have learned that the path to world peace is not for the United States to stop “threatening” the nations of the world. The place the American left once called “Amerika” is not what is wrong with the world.
Did our adversaries beat their swords into plowshares in response to Obama’s deference to them? Not even remotely. We got a militant ISIS, a defiant Assad regime in Syria, an expansionist Russia under Vladimir Putin, and an Iran pushing forward with its nuclear arms development, with barely a pretense that it is doing otherwise. The trendy leftists in our universities may have bought into Obama’s claims about the wisdom of “leading from behind.” The world’s dictators saw it as an opportunity for aggression.
Obama also showed the American people that the left-wing’s domination of our universities is not some bogeyman invited by right-wing kooks. Average Americans, busy working to feed their families and pay the mortgage, often are unaware of the campus radicals’ moral relativism, their contempt for traditional values (which they call “ethnocentric beliefs”), and their view of American capitalism as the source of evil in the world. They know now, after witnessing the lineup of assorted Marxists and homosexual activists that Obama appointed as his “czars.”
Obama gave us Van Jones, the admitted former Communist and 9/11 “truther” as his “green energy czar,” Kevin Jennings, the founder of the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network, as his “safe schools czar,” and Carol Browner, a member of the Socialist International’s Commission for a Sustainable World Society, as his assistant to the president for Energy and Climate Change. This is what the modern American left looks like, not some struggling blue-collar worker from a John Steinbeck novel.
In addition, the country is getting to see what black activists with a chip on their shoulder are all about. I am not talking about the president (even though that case can be made that he fits that description).
I am talking about Attorney General Eric Holder. Obama had a reason to pick Holder. Not only was he a lawyer who made his living defending radical leftists, he first made his mark while a freshman at Columbia University in 1970. In that year, he participated in a five-day, armed protest and occupation of the university’s Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) building organized by the Black Students Organization.
There is a reason why Holder did not prosecute the Black Panthers who blocked the polls in Philadelphia, why he covered up what happened in the “fast and furious” gun-running scandal, why he is ignoring the harassment of conservative groups by the Internal Revenue Service, and why he jumped to the conclusion that Michael Brown was the victim of a racist police officer in Ferguson, Mo.
But Holder is not the only lawyer in the country with this agenda. And Barack Obama is not the only politician who would appoint such a man to be attorney general. The world of left-wing activists is full of them. We can’t assume that the threat they pose will disappear once Obama has settled into accumulating his post-presidency fortune.
Powered by WPtouch Mobile Suite for WordPress