Obama has Lost his Mojo

By Alan Caruba

The hours and the days speed by. It is almost five months since President Obama was sworn in. A million people gathered in Washington on a bitterly cold day to hear him and to leave behind a mountain of trash.

Granted that in the weeks leading up to the inauguration, first the White House and then the Congress panicked in the face of what looked like a total Wall Street meltdown. A frantic effort was made to secure a blank check for billions to purchase the “toxic” paper, the bundled mortgages that turned out to have no identifiable assets.

Major banks, investment houses, and a huge, international insurance company tottered on the brink of failure. Some did. Some were merged.

Americans, even the most unsophisticated, understood that such an implosion threatened the financial bedrock of the nation, but first the Bush administration and then the Obama administration said that such steps must be taken. Congress went along because they had no choice.

They did have a choice; indeed, a range of choices.

The bailed out automobile companies could and should have been allowed to proceed toward bankruptcy, a procedure which would allow them to reorganize. That would have saved taxpayers $70 billion of their money. The bailout was unconstitutional.

The banking bailouts were unconstitutional too. Public funds, treasury funds, are never to be used to favor one private entity or enterprise over another.

While it is called the Federal Reserve Bank, it is an institution in effect separate from the government that grants it the right to print money, determine interest rates, and exercise oversight over the financial health of the nation. It operates on its own set of imperatives.

Any Economics 101 student would tell you that flooding the nation and the world with dollars backed up by nothing more than “full faith and credit” is reckless and foolish. It always leads to inflation and it undermines the borrowing power of the Treasury. Top lenders like China have made it clear they will no longer underwrite the huge entitlement programs and a spending frenzy that knows no end.

Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae are known as “government entities”, but together they own some fifty percent of all the mortgage loans issued by banking and lending institutions. Their top officers earned millions, but they are the primary cause of the collapse of the housing/mortgage bubble. Why? Because the government required banks and lending institutions to literally make bad loans. It was the law.

So Americans, whether they voted for Barack Obama or not, have arrived at a point where the man whose entire campaign was based on the promise of “hope and change” find themselves rapidly running out of jobs, money, and hope.

As credit froze up, unemployment began to increase and it is getting worse. Despite what the White House says, there is no such thing as “jobs saved” and the only jobs government can generate are government jobs.

A bogus $700 billion “stimulus” bill, promising funding of “shovel ready projects” is moving along at the pace of all government programs, very slowly. It’s not easy to spend that kind of money. The rest of the bill is pure pork. Typically, some of the projects are obscenely stupid. It should more accurately be called the Democrat Reelection Bill.

While the price of a gallon of gas begins to increase along with the prices of food and other necessities, the Obama administration is trying to push through legislation that would tax “greenhouse gas” emissions in the name of a global warming that is not happening. In parts of the United States, there will literally be no summer because the Earth has been cooling for the past ten years. In the first week of June there were record low temperatures in eighteen States.

The “Cap-and-Trade” bill moving through Congress will drive up the cost of energy for all Americans to astronomical levels. It would drive down and drive out manufacturing of every description. When Microsoft Corporation tells the White House it is prepared to move its corporate headquarters and other operations overseas, it is not kidding.

Now the Obama administration is trying to push through “healthcare reform” that is little more than socialized medicine, systems that have failed in Canada and England, forcing people to wait weeks and months for treatment. It would require everyone to purchase health insurance or be fined for not doing so. Your personal medical records? Any government bureaucrat could look at them.

Many Democrats are making it known they will not vote for “Cap-and-Trade” and may not vote for the takeover of the best health system in the world.

I predict that neither of these programs will become law and, if they do, Obama will have used up every ounce of trust and good will that has been extended to him. I also predict he will not care because his purpose is to bankrupt the nation and to destroy a Constitution he deems to be filled with too many restrictions on the federal government.

I predict that Barack Obama is just over a year away from seeing the Republican Party regain control of Congress in the same way it did in 1994. The October 2010 midterm elections will leave Obama a lame duck and likely a one-term President.

We cannot know what events will occur to further erode Obama’s vaunted popularity, the product of a mainstream media that has thrown away all journalistic standards, but you can be sure they will happen. Like 9/11 they will be largely unexpected by the general public or like Hurricane Katrina they will be an act of Nature.

On July 4, 2009, there will be 1,145 “Tea Parties” held across the whole of the nation according to the American Family Association. TEA being “Taxed Enough Already.”

Barack Obama makes people nervous.

Popularity is a curious thing. It can disappear overnight.

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