President Obama’s Passions
Obama and the World
(c) Can Stock Photo
Every now and then you read a book or an article, or in this case an internet posting, that is so perfect, so powerful in its depiction of an extremely important piece of reality that you feel like screaming out to the entire world, “YOU MUST READ THIS!” This is the case with Robert Tracinski’s post Barack Obama: Worst. President. Ever.
What Tracinski concentrates on is how Obama’s emotional attitudes toward the United States and the rest of the world are so ill-suited to the demands of his office. What strikes Tracinski is how Obama can be completely engaged with domestic and local state problems, while being so totally unengaged with world events that threaten our security. Considering Obama’s reaction to the recent ISIS attacks on Paris, Tracinski declares
He was perfunctory, devoid of content, and utterly listless. His delivery was flat and without affect — expressing neither outrage nor sorrow — giving the impression that he had no desire to be in front of the cameras or to make any comment at all.
To this unemotional reaction to the depredations of ISIS, Tracinski contrasts Obama’s emotional, engaged devotion to the cause of gun control.
It’s clear that the prospect of imposing gun control domestically gets Obama riled up. Fighting the enemies of America overseas does not. But the first of these goals is actually prohibited to him by the Constitution — while the second is mandated for him. I don’t know if we’ve ever seen a president whose personal priorities are so out of sync with the actual demands of his office.
In my post A Failed, “Lead From Behind” Foreign Policy (1), I discussed what the Wall Street Journal called Obama’s “international confession tour” of the world, undertaken early in his first term. In his various stops in Europe, the Middle East, and Latin America, the new President was intent on confessing our country’s sins to the rest of the world. This behavior was very revealing of how evil and baleful he thought the United States’ world influence was. Why would Obama and the American Left react this way? Could it be primarily because they would like to take Defense Department resources to be reallocated to domestic government programs? Or is it mostly because they would like to sharply decrease the international influence of a (once) highly successful capitalist power? This then would allow countries with reigning political philosophies farther to the political Left to gain more influence. I have no answers to these questions. All I have are suspicions both of these motivations are driving Obama and the Democrats.
Such motivations would indeed explain why the Obama administration would want to denigrate and deemphasize the dangers of Islamic jihadists to Western Civilization in general and to the United States in particular. It would also explain why they were so ardent in chasing after an ultimately unsuccessful Russian policy “reset”. What was their reward for the Russian “reset”? What the Western world received in return were Russian invasions of Eurasian Georgia and the Ukraine, as well as serious Russian military threats to all the countries bordering the Baltic Sea. As I noted in the context of Islamic jihad, wishful thinking that the rest of the world will play nice with us if only we play nice with them can get a lot of Americans killed.
However, Obama’s foreign policy record is not the only reason for considering him as the worst president in U.S. history. There are also the many failures of his economic policies producing the worst recovery from a recession at least since and including the Great Depression. Obama’s administration and Democrats in Congress have greatly contributed to our economic woes with Obamacare, and a huge increase in federal government economic regulations. Particularly destructive have been regulations mandated by the Dodd-Frank Act. Also, Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency has been guilty of promulgating many destructive regulations.
Finally, the autocratic tendencies of the progressive Democratic Party (see the posts Is Democracy the Best Government? Is It in Danger?, Bernie Sanders and the Road to Serfdom, Do Progressives Want a Police State?, Progressives’ Basic Assumptions, The Complexity of Reality, and The Proper Functions of Government) have tempted the Obama administration into a rather impressively long list of scandals. See The Corruption of the Democratic Party.
Are these all not sufficient reasons to consider Barack Obama the worst President in United States history?
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