It should be clear by this time that Barack Obama is not good for America, not good for Israel and the Middle East, and, on the larger scale, not good for the world. The disaster of his presidency will ramify for years to come whether he is re-elected or not. And the so-called “free world” will be the worse for his administration’s policy blunders and its abdication of America’s historic and “exceptional” role as liberty’s guarantor.
The damage he has inflicted on the nation he was elected to lead has been rehearsed at great length by many observers and in many different places. Here we might briefly note his broken campaign promises (Gitmo, network transparency, crossing the aisle, renditions, predator strikes, etc.); his cold- shouldering of Congress in the Libyan adventure, a violation of American law; the implication of his administration in the Gunwalker scandal, which makes Watergate look like small potatoes; the illegitimate switch in the order of creditors in the Chrysler meltdown; his astronomical inflation of the American debt and deficit and the consequent downgrading of the country’s credit rating; his patronage of the public sector unions, the outrage of crony capitalism (Siga), and favoring the bogus Green industry at taxpayer’s expense (Solyndra, Beacon Power Corp.); his refusal to drill for oil domestically and his deferral of the Canadian Keystone Pipeline project, which would have fostered significant employment and helped free the United States from dependence on Middle Eastern and Latin American tyrannies; his support for the anarchic and disreputable Occupy Wall Street movement—this is only an abridged list. That he has enfeebled the United States, perhaps more than any other president in its history, including the lamentable Jimmy Carter, cannot be doubted by anyone who retains a modicum of political and fiscal sanity.
His inept meddling in the Middle East is only more of the same, shunted offshore. Obama has endorsed Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s increasingly fundamentalist Justice and Development Party in Turkey, which is manifestly hostile to the U.S. An Islamist government has been installed in Tunisia in a revolution heralded by Obama as a beacon of Maghrebian liberty. Obama’s complicity in deposing Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, an American ally, has had the effect of empowering the anti-American Muslim Brotherhood and jeopardizing the peace treaty with Israel. The region is now ready to erupt. Similarly, his part in ousting Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, who posed no threat to American interests, created a radical, Sharia-inspired government in Tripoli and, additionally, has released a flood of looted weaponry into Gaza, where it will be used by Hamas’s terrorist regime. It is evident that, like a reversal of the Midas story, whatever Obama touches turns into lead—or in the case of his reluctance to seriously challenge the Iranian ayatollahs, into uranium.
With respect to Israel, one of America’s staunchest allies and crucial technological and intelligence partners, Obama’s disdain and bad faith are obvious to all except those who are themselves anti-Israel or who are intent on deceiving themselves because unwilling to admit that their electoral support was egregiously misplaced. Obama’s response to French president Nicolas Sarkozy’s recent diplomatic gaffe in calling Benjamin Netanyahu a “liar” speaks volumes: “You may be sick of [or “fed up with”] him, but me, I have to deal with him every day.” The administration’s attempt via Ben Rhodes, Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications, to soften and deflect the plain connotation of the statement is frankly disingenuous.
We recall that this is a president who bowed from the waist to the Saudi monarch but insolently snubbed the Israeli prime minister during the latter’s now infamous White House visit. We recall, too, that Obama has delivered effusive orations in Cairo and Ankara but has yet to address the Knesset in Jerusalem. His insistence on Israel’s return to the indefensible pre-1967 borders reveals his strong anti-Israel bias; it is no exaggeration to suggest that Obama will not rest content until Israel’s mortgage on the future, like America’s housing sector, is underwater.
As I say, all this is so well-known as to prejudice repetition. Yet that Obama still commands an approval rating that oscillates between 40 and 50%, that various minority groups continue to invest in his presidency despite his having done little to further their cause, that university educated youth cannot realize that an anti-business, redistributionist and bureaucratizing president is diminishing their future job prospects, and that the influential liberal/left constituency refuses to recognize that Obama’s congenial policies may eventually cost them the country they take for granted, quite literally boggles the mind.
If there is such a thing as mental radar, it should immediately have located and identified the president’s subversive agenda. Obama has humiliated his country’s allies, thereby weakening a liberal West already on the point of foundering and rendering conflict and upheaval ever more likely. He has privileged the United Nations over Congress, dismissing America’s legislators with supercilious unconcern. Indeed, to cite the words of John Fonte in Sovereignty or Submission, he is likely aiming for “the subordination of U.S. constitutional law to transnational law.” Obama has left his southwestern border unprotected, sued the state of Arizona for applying the law, and championed an “amnesty” program that would open the door to millions of illegal immigrants. He has snarled American industry in red tape. He has snubbed the owl of Minerva, casting prudence and wisdom to the winds in pursuit of a furtive—but not clandestine—purpose, namely, to Europeanize the United States and transform it into what it was never intended to be: an unexceptional, neo-socialist, debtor nation on the brink of insolvency and progressively vulnerable to the incursion of its enemies. Flouting common sense and sound principles, this scornful president has torpedoed his nation’s interests and well-being.
In short, with a mixture of sectarian determination and ineffable contempt, he has breached the hull of the ship of state.
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