As the magnitude of the failure of the Obama Administration becomes obvious to even his staunchest supporters, VDH dissects our big-spending President and finds him to be every tropism of the Hard Left rolled into one. But he is not much of a bargin at this price. We haven’t bought much for our staggering deficits:
Obama has managed the nearly impossible: the greatest peacetime deficits in U.S. history — about $1.5 trillion per year — in his first three years achieved almost no economic expansion. Instead, unemployment is chronic and stays over 9.2%; growth is stagnant; gas is sky-high — and the president seems stunned that none of what he had promised came to pass. All his liberal nostrums have been tried and been found wanting. There is no successful EU model, no winning blue-state statist paradigm for guidance.
The economy should be booming. That is what Keyensians have assured us of for decades (Obama the Keyensian! Raaaaacist! 8O) Instead we have (hopefully) seen the utter discrediting of Keyensianism. It is worse than doing nothing, because now we have added 50% to out national debt, and that millstone will be around the neck of the economy for the next 100 years. Had we simply done nothing, it is possible the economy could have recovered by now.
Carter 2.0
With a subheading like that, who can resist another round of “That ’70s Show”?
Abroad the misdirection, confusion, and petulance mirror-image the debt mess. In Libya we have no mission aim, no methodology, and no desired outcome — our consolation only that Libya is a tiny country compared to a nearly 30-million person Afghanistan or Iraq. Obama went to the Arab League and the UN, but not the U.S. Congress for authorization — but to do what? Help the rebels? Enforce a no-fly-zone? Kill Gaddafi? Overthrow the government? All, some, or none?
Our disasterous policy in Libya is simply an example of out disasterous policy everywhere. We can’t back Israel for anything, and we can’t seem to decide who we really want to win in Libya. Hanson has a theory on that:
The only reason I can think why we bombed Gaddafi, and then allowed him to survive, is that we ourselves are terrified of the possible end-game and aftermath, given that we have little idea of who the rebels are, and even less whether they would be better, the same, or worse than the horrific status quo.
Much like we had to pass ObamaCare to find out what was in it, we have to overthrow Kadaffy to find out what the rebels we are supporting actually are. So we half-way support them, as though we wanted them to fail. That our goal is the kind of bloody stalemate that is worse than mere war, worse even than losing a war.
Obama is the final expiation of all of America’s “sins”, the true Messiah of the Left:
Obama, you see, is our nemesis. He is a totem, the logical manifestation of a warped media, the reification of some crazy — and arrogant — ideas about redistributive politics, the statist economy, and cultural and social life that permeated American life the last forty years. He is the president with a 1,000 faces that we have all seen at work, on TV, throughout American life, and at some point the odds determined that we had to have a rendezvous with him— perhaps a catharsis to teach us the wages of Keynesian debt, of a social policy contrary to human nature with its equality of result doctrines, of an all-powerful, all-growing unaccountable government, of the now hip ambiguity about past American protocols and history. Obama is the exaggeration of all the dubious ideas that arose since the 1960s — brought to fruition on his watch, delivered by mellifluous cadences by an untouchable persona.
An utter disaster, without hope of mitigation. That is what we are left with for the Obama Administration. We still have more than a year of it to go, and Obama still will be a formidible candidate going into next year’s election. It is possible that he’ll exceed Carter, and win re-election. If that happens, the country will have chosen national suicide over substance. No one can deny the utter failure o f the Obama Administration. To elect four more years of failure would be madness.
