A.J. DiCintio
Obama's failures one date at a time
By A.J. DiCintio
Ideologues on the left are fond of attributing Obama's political free fall to his behaving like an "overintellectualized professor" who, having failed to convince the public about the exquisite excellence of his solutions to the nation's problems, dooms himself to making outrageous compromises with an opposition populated by "blockheads" who "boast about their vacuity." (quotes from Maureen Dowd, NYT)
The truth, however, is quite different; for as his empty, high-sounding rhetoric has long revealed, Obama is nothing more than a true-believing liberal whose resume contains not a single important achievement, let alone one requiring exemplary leadership "in the Arena" of TR's real world, where a person's "face is marred by dust and sweat and blood."
Add to that vacuum the reality that we can borrow from F. Scott Fitzgerald to say youthful Barry invented just the sort of Barack Obama a person infatuated with the vast, vulgar, pretentiousness of leftist ideology would be likely to invent, and the president's failures become remarkably unsurprising, though no less pernicious.
Following is an enumeration of the worst of those failures one date at a time, the list representing an astounding tribute to the human capacity for perverse irony, given candidate Obama's penchant for using "high sentence" to promise America a brave new world bubbling with the effervescence of hope and change.
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Nearly a month after he was inaugurated in the midst of an economic earthquake, the president travelled to Denver, where he used the venue of the city's Museum of Nature & Science to sign the stimulus bill, a law MSNBC characterized as a "mammoth" $787 billion plan "designed to revive the economy and save millions of jobs."
Now, the important aspect of this law is not the universally known fact that it failed utterly but the reason it was destined to become a shamelessly wasteful insulting joke of a debacle.
That reason is this:
Barack Obama's idea of bringing courageous, honest, innovative change to a Keynesian attempt to stimulate the economy was to turn the writing of the entire bill over to power mad, pork starved congressional Democrats headed by the political hacks known as Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid.
And sure enough, just as the president sowed perversity, the nation reaped it in the form of hugely increased indebtedness producing an unemployment rate that blew though Obama's 8.5 % "Maginot Line" to peak at 9.7% in March of 2010.
Did Obama "overintellectualize" his approach to the stimulus bill? Well, only if one uses the term as a synonym for "to behave like a cowardly political hack."
Yet the same liberal politicians and pundits who prefer euphemisms over truth concocted the meme that the stimulus failed only because it wasn't big enough.
That ironic nonsense, unfortunately, wouldn't be the last regarding the president's job creating failures.
For instance, MSNBC also reported that before signing the stimulus bill in front of "roughly 250 people including alternative energy business leaders," a gushing Obama inspected solar panels on the museum's roof.
Well, our "brilliant," currently Solyndra-plagued president may have gushed; but with respect to crucially important research that seeks to efficiently harness the sun's power, the only energy he has encouraged is that radiated by sycophantic shills who labor madly to explain that a steadfastly pragmatic, meticulously scientific Obama has simply "overintellectualized" not just his approach to solar energy but the nation's entire energy problem.
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
Following is what the NYT wrote about the bill Barack Obama signed into law on this day:
"With the strokes of 22 pens, President Obama signed his landmark health care overhaul. . . into law. . ."
"Overhaul"? Now, that would send Hamlet into one of his raging denunciations of unforgiveable duplicity or disgusting sycophancy.
After all, while there are many terms that may fairly be applied to the abomination called the Affordable Care Act, which Obama and his Democratic minions rammed down the throats of a dissenting public by using every rotten trick in the political playbook, "overhaul" is not one of them.
So, in a length immensely shorter than 2,000 pages, here's what the act actually accomplishes:
First, it enlarges and assigns enormous new power to the federal bureaucracy, giving the federal government de facto control over the nation's healthcare system.
Second, at a cost of perhaps two trillion dollars over the next decade, it provides government subsidies to people without health insurance.
That's it.
But you say that with respect to healthcare, you hoped this "post-everything" president would make smart, fair, innovative reforms to the nation's currently unsustainable Medicare and Medicaid programs so that they remain healthy going forward?
You say you hoped this "change agent" president would propose a panoply of creative, common sense, medically sound, fiscally responsible reforms to the entire healthcare system, whose inflationary spiral, left unchecked, is certain to create an economic disaster?
You say you hoped that having saved trillions by effecting that kind of rational change, this thoroughly modern, forward-looking president would offer a plan that decentralizes power, thereby empowering states to efficiently administer programs that make health insurance affordable for every citizen?
Well, there's no shame in those expectations because for very good reasons "Hope springs eternal in the human breast."
But now that you know hope for wise, courageous, mature leadership from the pride of the Chicago Machine is unfounded, you just may count yourself among the near landslide proportion of voters who to this day insist "Obamacare" must be repealed.
Tuesday, February 14, 2011
By this date, the American public had pretty well grasped the vexing economic problem facing the nation: specifically, that the cancerous national debt must be brought under control even as the economy remains weak and recession prone in a frightening period that may constitute a long term "new normal."
With that reality established, every sensible citizen will agree that the nation would be blessed, indeed, if its president would distinguish himself by speaking of economic problems and their possible solutions with an unremitting honesty that never loses sight of fairness as well as hard realities.
Did Barack Obama's behavior square with that lofty hope?
Sadly, not a bit; for on that February day he proposed his budget for '12 as part of a ten year budget plan so lacking in the need to curb the federal government's voracious appetite that even with increased taxes of $1.6 trillion and the rosiest of economic assumptions, his proposal projected a national debt in 2023 of $23 trillion, an increase of 64% over the current $14 trillion.
Making matters worse, the plan ignored how the rising cost of Medicare as well as the impending shortfall of Social Security receipts would aggravate the debt projection, even as the president ignored mathematical facts in pushing his signature strategy of waging class warfare regarding his tax proposals.
To be brief about the death of this shameful and shameless example of politics at its rottenest worst, the plan garnered not a bit of support in Congress, members of both major parties included.
Thrusting yet another knife into whatever hope some citizens retain for a reformed Obama, the president has been unrepentant in continuing his corrupt, duplicitous, dangerous economic demagoguery, once again causing us to invoke Fitzgerald and say that having dedicated himself to the kind of power loving, amoral politics espoused by leftists such as Saul Alinsky, "to this conception [Obama will be] faithful to the end."
Before closing, this admittedly incomplete enumeration must mention one last profound failure.
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
On this day, which will live in U.S. diplomatic infamy, President Obama abruptly walked out on Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu, disrespectfully announcing he was going to the White House living quarters to have dinner and sarcastically mentioning the PM could let him know "if there's anything new."
That incredibly vulgar insult aimed directly at the PM of a U.S ally and indirectly at a nation with which the American people feel a special relationship is all the more revoltingly ironic in that it came from a man who campaigned on the platform that in the interest of peace he is willing to meet with the world's most disgusting tyrants without precondition.
Moreover, the incident is all the more frighteningly significant because it reveals that in addition to "cosmopolitan" Barack Obama's leftist ideology and embarrassing lack of experience, we must add his smug, arrogant, childishly vindictive temperament as a reason for his failures.
That disturbing trio represents a very disturbing reality regarding the executive whom the nation trusts to uphold the principles and ideals of its Constitution, protect it from enemies internal and external, nurture its economic life, and address "We the People," its true rulers, with brave, humble honesty.
© A.J. DiCintio
September 24, 2011
Ideologues on the left are fond of attributing Obama's political free fall to his behaving like an "overintellectualized professor" who, having failed to convince the public about the exquisite excellence of his solutions to the nation's problems, dooms himself to making outrageous compromises with an opposition populated by "blockheads" who "boast about their vacuity." (quotes from Maureen Dowd, NYT)
The truth, however, is quite different; for as his empty, high-sounding rhetoric has long revealed, Obama is nothing more than a true-believing liberal whose resume contains not a single important achievement, let alone one requiring exemplary leadership "in the Arena" of TR's real world, where a person's "face is marred by dust and sweat and blood."
Add to that vacuum the reality that we can borrow from F. Scott Fitzgerald to say youthful Barry invented just the sort of Barack Obama a person infatuated with the vast, vulgar, pretentiousness of leftist ideology would be likely to invent, and the president's failures become remarkably unsurprising, though no less pernicious.
Following is an enumeration of the worst of those failures one date at a time, the list representing an astounding tribute to the human capacity for perverse irony, given candidate Obama's penchant for using "high sentence" to promise America a brave new world bubbling with the effervescence of hope and change.
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Nearly a month after he was inaugurated in the midst of an economic earthquake, the president travelled to Denver, where he used the venue of the city's Museum of Nature & Science to sign the stimulus bill, a law MSNBC characterized as a "mammoth" $787 billion plan "designed to revive the economy and save millions of jobs."
Now, the important aspect of this law is not the universally known fact that it failed utterly but the reason it was destined to become a shamelessly wasteful insulting joke of a debacle.
That reason is this:
Barack Obama's idea of bringing courageous, honest, innovative change to a Keynesian attempt to stimulate the economy was to turn the writing of the entire bill over to power mad, pork starved congressional Democrats headed by the political hacks known as Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid.
And sure enough, just as the president sowed perversity, the nation reaped it in the form of hugely increased indebtedness producing an unemployment rate that blew though Obama's 8.5 % "Maginot Line" to peak at 9.7% in March of 2010.
Did Obama "overintellectualize" his approach to the stimulus bill? Well, only if one uses the term as a synonym for "to behave like a cowardly political hack."
Yet the same liberal politicians and pundits who prefer euphemisms over truth concocted the meme that the stimulus failed only because it wasn't big enough.
That ironic nonsense, unfortunately, wouldn't be the last regarding the president's job creating failures.
For instance, MSNBC also reported that before signing the stimulus bill in front of "roughly 250 people including alternative energy business leaders," a gushing Obama inspected solar panels on the museum's roof.
Well, our "brilliant," currently Solyndra-plagued president may have gushed; but with respect to crucially important research that seeks to efficiently harness the sun's power, the only energy he has encouraged is that radiated by sycophantic shills who labor madly to explain that a steadfastly pragmatic, meticulously scientific Obama has simply "overintellectualized" not just his approach to solar energy but the nation's entire energy problem.
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
Following is what the NYT wrote about the bill Barack Obama signed into law on this day:
"With the strokes of 22 pens, President Obama signed his landmark health care overhaul. . . into law. . ."
"Overhaul"? Now, that would send Hamlet into one of his raging denunciations of unforgiveable duplicity or disgusting sycophancy.
After all, while there are many terms that may fairly be applied to the abomination called the Affordable Care Act, which Obama and his Democratic minions rammed down the throats of a dissenting public by using every rotten trick in the political playbook, "overhaul" is not one of them.
So, in a length immensely shorter than 2,000 pages, here's what the act actually accomplishes:
First, it enlarges and assigns enormous new power to the federal bureaucracy, giving the federal government de facto control over the nation's healthcare system.
Second, at a cost of perhaps two trillion dollars over the next decade, it provides government subsidies to people without health insurance.
That's it.
But you say that with respect to healthcare, you hoped this "post-everything" president would make smart, fair, innovative reforms to the nation's currently unsustainable Medicare and Medicaid programs so that they remain healthy going forward?
You say you hoped this "change agent" president would propose a panoply of creative, common sense, medically sound, fiscally responsible reforms to the entire healthcare system, whose inflationary spiral, left unchecked, is certain to create an economic disaster?
You say you hoped that having saved trillions by effecting that kind of rational change, this thoroughly modern, forward-looking president would offer a plan that decentralizes power, thereby empowering states to efficiently administer programs that make health insurance affordable for every citizen?
Well, there's no shame in those expectations because for very good reasons "Hope springs eternal in the human breast."
But now that you know hope for wise, courageous, mature leadership from the pride of the Chicago Machine is unfounded, you just may count yourself among the near landslide proportion of voters who to this day insist "Obamacare" must be repealed.
Tuesday, February 14, 2011
By this date, the American public had pretty well grasped the vexing economic problem facing the nation: specifically, that the cancerous national debt must be brought under control even as the economy remains weak and recession prone in a frightening period that may constitute a long term "new normal."
With that reality established, every sensible citizen will agree that the nation would be blessed, indeed, if its president would distinguish himself by speaking of economic problems and their possible solutions with an unremitting honesty that never loses sight of fairness as well as hard realities.
Did Barack Obama's behavior square with that lofty hope?
Sadly, not a bit; for on that February day he proposed his budget for '12 as part of a ten year budget plan so lacking in the need to curb the federal government's voracious appetite that even with increased taxes of $1.6 trillion and the rosiest of economic assumptions, his proposal projected a national debt in 2023 of $23 trillion, an increase of 64% over the current $14 trillion.
Making matters worse, the plan ignored how the rising cost of Medicare as well as the impending shortfall of Social Security receipts would aggravate the debt projection, even as the president ignored mathematical facts in pushing his signature strategy of waging class warfare regarding his tax proposals.
To be brief about the death of this shameful and shameless example of politics at its rottenest worst, the plan garnered not a bit of support in Congress, members of both major parties included.
Thrusting yet another knife into whatever hope some citizens retain for a reformed Obama, the president has been unrepentant in continuing his corrupt, duplicitous, dangerous economic demagoguery, once again causing us to invoke Fitzgerald and say that having dedicated himself to the kind of power loving, amoral politics espoused by leftists such as Saul Alinsky, "to this conception [Obama will be] faithful to the end."
Before closing, this admittedly incomplete enumeration must mention one last profound failure.
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
On this day, which will live in U.S. diplomatic infamy, President Obama abruptly walked out on Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu, disrespectfully announcing he was going to the White House living quarters to have dinner and sarcastically mentioning the PM could let him know "if there's anything new."
That incredibly vulgar insult aimed directly at the PM of a U.S ally and indirectly at a nation with which the American people feel a special relationship is all the more revoltingly ironic in that it came from a man who campaigned on the platform that in the interest of peace he is willing to meet with the world's most disgusting tyrants without precondition.
Moreover, the incident is all the more frighteningly significant because it reveals that in addition to "cosmopolitan" Barack Obama's leftist ideology and embarrassing lack of experience, we must add his smug, arrogant, childishly vindictive temperament as a reason for his failures.
That disturbing trio represents a very disturbing reality regarding the executive whom the nation trusts to uphold the principles and ideals of its Constitution, protect it from enemies internal and external, nurture its economic life, and address "We the People," its true rulers, with brave, humble honesty.
© A.J. DiCintio
The views expressed by RenewAmerica columnists are their own and do not necessarily reflect the position of RenewAmerica or its affiliates.
(See RenewAmerica's publishing standards.)
