Obama is hope-less

By Alan Caruba

On October 9, 2009, barely nine months after his inauguration on January 20th, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to President Obama. At the time, the committee said it was being awarded "for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples. The Committee has attached special importance to Obama's vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons."

Only a fool would say that Obama's international diplomacy has worked. The siege of our Cairo embassy hoisted the flag of al Qaeda. Our Ambassador to Libya has been killed. Syria's dictator kills his own people with abandon. The Iranians have not stopped working toward being able to make their own nuclear weapons and from Morocco to Indonesia, in a large swath of the world there are rallies whose slogan is "Death to America."

While President Obama's performance in office will be dissected by future historians, those of us who have to live through the experience day to day are often left wondering why he chose to pursue various policies.

A big part of the answer is that Obama is a dedicated Marxist. The recent tape of his 1998 discussion of the "redistribution of wealth" is pure Communism. It isn't garden variety Socialism. A large part of the U.S. population has had some difficulty understanding what Obama was doing because they have never encountered Marxism so directly before.

The U.S. has been adopting "progressive" policies and programs since the days of Teddy Roosevelt and his nephew Franklin D. Roosevelt and it must be said that even Republicans in the White House and Congress embraced them.

The result are "entitlement" programs such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid that have so distorted the economy that it is now impossible for Congress to balance a budget in which more than half is devoted to these programs before a single dollar is spent on defense and other domestic programs..

At the very beginning of the nation, Benjamin Franklin warned that "When the people find they can vote themselves money that will herald the end of the republic."

The result of Obama's first term has been the piling up of the kind of debt never seen in the entire history of the nation even during World War II. While it is true that Obama arrived as the wreckage of the 2008 financial crisis lay all about, the actions he took were odd.

The crisis which too conveniently occurred at the very end of George W. Bush's second term during the 2008 presidential election campaign was the result of government policies reaching back to the days of FDR when the government decided to manipulate the nation's housing sector by creating Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to purchase mortgages issued by the nation's banks.

When the crisis occurred, these "government sponsored entities" owned fifty percent of all mortgages and had been bundling them into assets sold to banks and investment firms. They would be dubbed "toxic assets" of unknown origin and no real value. They killed Lehman Brothers and required a massive bailout of major banks and investment firms.

Few argue that major banks had to be saved, but Obama had no need to seize control of General Motors and Chrysler. They could have gone through an ordinary bankruptcy procedure and emerged the better for it. Obama, however, was not concerned about the auto companies so much as he was concerned about the auto unions. In the process, the company's creditors and stockholders were shunted aside. Americans have always opposed the nationalization of its industries. It is Communism.

As the U.S. economy began to fail, unemployment climbed to Great Depression heights, people lost their homes, the food stamps program expanded exponentially, and as unemployment benefits ran out, people signed up for Social Security disability benefits in huge numbers. The Federal Reserve, an independent banking cartel, announced "quantitative easing" that involved printing money out of thin air to infuse it into the economy. This devalued the U.S. Dollar and we are now to be subjected to a third such failed effort.

For the first time in the nation's history, our credit rating was reduced and that process continues. If Obama is deliberately trying to destroy the economy, he is succeeding. All talk of "redistributing wealth" is pure Communism.

In the area of foreign affairs, Obama took credit for the U.S. withdraw of troops from Iraq that the Bush administration negotiated and then up'd the ante by inserting more troops in Afghanistan while setting a date for withdrawal; a war that the U.S. was losing and continues to lose. Even the troops Obama "surged" into Afghanistan have been withdrawn.

Our NATO partners are all bailing out as swiftly as they can, but Obama will let the Taliban kill our soldiers through 2013 insofar as they know the NATO coalition will be gone and no retribution will be exacted.

Indeed, the only retribution of any sort one can point to was the assassination of Osama bin Laden for which Obama took full credit over and over again. Did this possibly anger Muslims in the Middle East? Unquestionably. But the notion that Obama has an al Qaeda "kill list" that he personally was pursuing with antiseptic drone attacks evokes some very scary thoughts about this President.

The biggest failure is the one filling the front pages of newspapers and the television screens. His outreach to Islamists was greeted with the most predictable response ever. Apologizing for America. Bowing to the Saudi King. They perceived he was weak and it was an invitation to overthrow dictators and replace them with the Muslim Brotherhood. The "Arab Spring" was never about democracy and never about freedom. It was about Sharia law.

The son of a Muslim father, raised in a Muslim nation as a youth, attending mosques with his Muslim step-father, and on record to support Muslims, should surely have known that a holy war had been pursued for over three decades by the time he took office.

Even so, the White House completely failed to heed the inherent danger of the 9/11 anniversary and our Libyan Ambassador paid for it with his life, along with three of his staff. Obama's policy appears to be one that says if we do nothing, maybe they will leave us alone. They didn't. They won't. Instead, as our embassies were under siege, the President was attending fund-raising events and appearing on television with David Letterman.

In line with his intent to destroy the nation, his administration's target of choice was the energy sector and coal mines and power plants are shutting down across America. The massive amount of federal land has been off-limits to drilling for oil or gas, but fortunately it is occurring on privately owned lands. By deterring the building of the Canadian oil pipeline Obama killed an estimated 20,000 jobs that would have been created and thwarted the oil that would be transported to U.S. refineries.

In addition to the "stimulus" the Obama administration threw billions at the most loony forms of energy, solar, wind, and biofuels. At one point, he even suggested pond scum, algae, as an energy source worth funding. GM's electric cars cost $49,000 each and have few buyers other than the U.S. government.

In concert with the Departments of Energy and Interior, the Environmental Protection Agency was unleashed to pursue an orgy of regulation-making that has required the House of Representatives to vote to rein it in for fear of the economic destruction that would ensue. This legislation and every budget Obama put forward to Congress has been defeated or stalled in the Democrat-controlled Senate.

Obama is counting heavily on the short memory span of most Americans, understandably concerned with their own problems, but their problems are entirely the result of his administration's policies.

The pundits are wondering for whom distressed Americans will vote. Most assume they will vote for Obama, but Americans do not like being out of work with no prospect of new jobs or living with their parents after four debt-filled years of college.

And, lastly, there are disquieting reports that Obama administration departments and agencies are purchasing massive amounts of ammunition. The only people they would be used against are Americans.

None of this bodes well for the first Communist President of the United States, but with any luck a majority of voters will choose a successful venture capitalist to replace him and to do what Republicans have had to do since the days of FDR, clean up the mess that Democrats have left behind.

© Alan Caruba