Worse than Nixon, Carter and Clinton.
A Scorecard Of Negatives, A Menace To Our Future
By ERNEST S. CHRISTIAN AND GARY A. ROBBINS Posted 03/16/2011 07:03 PM ET
By any rational standard, Barack Obama gets an F for job performance and should — on that basis alone — either resign or be voted out ASAP before he does further harm. Obama is a strange man who often seems not to be paying attention. Does he have a second job and work for America only part time? Is he real or virtual? Other nations no longer look to America’s mysterious president for leadership. “President Obama stands mostly mute at the sidelines like a perfectly groomed mannequin,” reports Matthew d’Ancona of the U.K.’s Telegraph. So faint and fumbling is Obama that even his hard-core lefty colleagues are forced to avert their eyes in embarrassment. An exasperated Richard Cohen at the Washington Post blurted out the truth regarding the president: “Like a picture hung in the sun, he fades over time.”
Columnist Ruth Marcus no longer seems comfortable in her “progressive” skin; it has been sullied by Obama. She now lampoons him for being “missing in action” on issues vital to America’s financial standing and moral integrity. In their own way, many liberals care deeply about this country; it’s just that they think they and a bunch of bumbling bureaucrats can run our lives better than we can. Big mistake! President Obama — the worst-case example — has not done one single thing to make America better off. His presidential scorecard is all negatives, a mixture of strikeouts, bunts, pop flies and game-losing errors so dumb and off-base they must be deliberate. Why else would he spend us into bankruptcy and lower our flag of freedom?
Obama’s foreign policy is a moral and intellectual outrage. People in Egypt, Libya and elsewhere in that region seek liberty and need help. But from Obama they get flabby babble that means nothing or is too little, too late and grudging. He is condemning whole populations to further enslavement — and pushing millions of people into the arms of bin Laden, thereby pointing a gun right back at America’s head. Obama’s cruel hypocrisy is a version of the anti-colonialist, noninterventionist hooey that South Africa’s former President Thabo Mbeki used as an excuse for letting Robert Mugabe murder and starve millions of people in neighboring Zimbabwe. Like Obama today, Mbeki cynically claimed to be pursuing a brand of diplomacy “softly, softly,” always passing the buck to toothless international tribunals. Meanwhile, Mugabe continued the mayhem.
Obama is as a matter of principle reluctant to interfere with the evil plans of despots — not even the mullahs in Iran who threaten nuclear holocaust — but he does not hesitate to impose harmful, downright bizarre “solutions” on innocent Americans. He spent trillions of dollars to create a mountain of debt and a few temporary make-work jobs — but, guess what? The debt must be repaid with tax increases that will destroy millions of real private-sector jobs for years to come. Smart move, Barack!
Paying interest on $14 trillion (soon to be $20 trillion) of debt is becoming one of the biggest items in the budget. By 2020, interest will be Obama’s new trillion-dollar-a-year “entitlement” program (payable mostly to the Chinese and Obama’s bailed-out banker buddies on Wall Street). Never mind about Social Security and Medicare; the bankers must be paid first. Obama talks airily about creating “green jobs,” but what he’s really doing is outlawing carbon fuels and destroying all the high-paying jobs in America’s manufacturing sector.
Through the combination of stultifying regulations, Obama-created high energy prices (gas may soon hit $5) and the sheer in terrorem effect of his continued presence in the White House, the president is “resetting” America’s economy to operate at a low GDP growth rate that for the foreseeable future is insufficient to provide jobs for our growing population. Unless Republicans quickly succeed in cutting back federal spending and downsizing government — despite Obama’s opposition — and unless they repeal ObamaCare, Americans face a bleak future of massive tax increases, lower living standards, government-run and rationed health care — and a gradual loss of personal freedom.
President Nixon was driven from office for lying about a two-bit burglary and other dirty tricks on Democrats. President Clinton was impeached by the House and almost convicted by the Senate for lying about Monica Lewinsky. President Carter was sent packing after only one term for being weak-kneed abroad and economically destructive at home. Obama traduces the truth daily and has already done more damage to the U.S. than Nixon, Carter and Clinton combined — and the worst may be yet to come. The man is a public menace who should be kept under political quarantine.
• Christian, an attorney, was a deputy assistant secretary of the Treasury in the Ford administration. Robbins, an economist, served at Treasury in the Reagan administration.