Despite whatever glossy patina the Left will eventually use to paint over the Obama legacy, the grimy, grubby truth will always be indelible. We are an uglier, angrier, more indebted and more divided nation than we’ve ever been. And we have a long, long way to go before we can recover all that we’ve lost to hopeless change.
Our first biracial president, a man with the unique potential to bring Americans of all shades of skin pigmentation together, instead reopened new wounds of prejudice that had mostly healed years ago. He managed to alienate law enforcement by pretending they’re all targeting blacks (even the black officers!) and accusing them of “acting stupidly.” He insulted those of us who put God’s word above the ever-changing social mores of contemporary society, scoffing at traditional marriage proponents (though he was deceitful enough to pose as a Christian to get elected). He mocked Second Amendment supporters and barely concealed his lack of respect for our military (And now has totally betrayed them with the pardon of “Chelsea” Manning).
Dennis Prager, long a voice of measured, thoughtful commentary, lamented a couple months ago that he had to admit Barack Obama was in fact the president who has done the most damage ~
I have never written or broadcast that our country was being seriously damaged by a president. So it is with great sadness that I write that President Barack Obama has done and continues to do major damage to America. The only question is whether this can ever be undone.
Prager goes on to list the various ways that America – as well as the wider world – is in significantly worse shape than it was eight long years ago ~
• He has mired the country in unprecedented levels of debt: about $6.5 trillion — that is 6,500 billion — in five years (this after calling his predecessor “unpatriotic” for adding nearly $5 trillion in eight years). Total national debt is rapidly approaching 20 trillion
• He has fashioned a country in which more Americans now receive government aid — means-tested, let alone non-means-tested — than work full-time.
• He has no method of paying for this debt other than printing more money — thereby surreptitiously taxing everyone through inflation, including the poor he claims to be helping, and cheapening the dollar to the point that some countries are talking about another reserve currency — and saddling the next generations with enormous debts.
• Among presidents in modern American history, he has also been a uniquely divisive force. It began with his forcing Obamacare through Congress — the only major legislation in American history to be passed with no votes from the opposition party.
• With his 2,500-page Affordable Care Act he has made it impossible for hundreds of thousands, soon millions, of Americans to keep their individual or employer-sponsored group health insurance; he has stymied American medical innovation with an utterly destructive tax on medical devices; and he has caused hundreds of thousands of workers to lose full-time jobs because of the health-care costs imposed by Obamacare on employers.
• His Internal Revenue Service used its unparalleled power to stymie political dissent. No one has been held accountable.
• Though he has had a unique opportunity to do so, he has not only not helped heal racial tensions, he has exacerbated them. His intrusions into the Trayvon Martin affair (“If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon”) and into the confrontation between a white police officer and a black Harvard professor (the police “acted stupidly”) were unwarranted, irresponsible, demagogic, and, most of all, divisive.
• He has also divided the country by economic class, using classic Marxist language against “the rich” and “corporate profits.”
• Regarding America in the world, he has been, if possible, even more damaging. The United States is at its weakest, has fewer allies, and has less military and diplomatic influence than at any time since before World War II.
• One wonders if there is a remaining ally nation that trusts him. And worse, no American enemy fears him. If you are a free movement (the democratic Iranian and Syrian oppositions) or a free country (Israel), you have little or no reason to believe that you have a steadfast ally in the United States.
• Even non-democratic allies no longer trust America. Barack Obama has alienated our most important and longest standing Arab allies, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Both the anti–Muslim Brotherhood and the anti-Iran Arab states have lost respect for him.
Oh, and don’t forget the illegal immigrant invasion and lack of any serious border security.
Barack Hussein Obama audaciously promised that he was going to fundamentally transform the country. So those of us who took him at his book title aren’t surprised by the current, dismal, divided state of America. We’re just saddened, and disheartened at the prospect of trying to recover all that’s been stolen, lost or wrecked in the last eight years.
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Related:
Stop Pretending The Obama Administration Was ‘Scandal Free.’ It Wasn’t