The Poisonous Presidency

By Alan Caruba

When the leaders of the United States, the President, his Vice President, his Secretary of State and others deliberately lie to its citizens, knowing full well that the facts about the tragic killing of an American ambassador and three of his staff are widely known, the nation has reached a point where it is paramount that he be removed from office.

The forthcoming election is the instrument and current indicators are that President Obama will be defeated. It is to be hoped that power in the Senate will be returned to the Republican Party and retainedl in the House of Representatives. This is the only way steps can be taken to avoid the financial collapse that faces the nation and achieve the repeal of Obamacare that Mitt Romney has promised if elected.

What worries me most, however, is the utter disdain for the truth that has marked the presidency of Barack Obama. It has been nearly four years of sustained lies about the steps that were taken to respond to the financial crisis facing the nation when he took office. The so-called “stimulus” wasted billions, becoming little more than a slush fund for Democratic fund-raisers, unions, and other connected parties to the administration.

Instead the administration literally seized control of General Motors and Chrysler, then in the normal process of bankruptcy, claiming to save the jobs of auto workers. What they did was shunt aside the legitimate creditors and investors in GM. They arbitrarily discontinued its often long relationship with several hundred auto dealerships, adding their employees to the unemployment lines. They then insisted that GM invest millions in the creation of an electric car that cost $47,000 to purchase and ended up purchasing them for government use with taxpayer’s money.

Obamacare, more than 2,700 pages in length and incorporating more than twenty new taxes, was passed by a Democrat-controlled Congress with little evidence that any of those who voted for it had even read it. Arguing initially that he was not a tax, when challenged in the Supreme Court, the administration then said it was a tax. For some inexplicable reason, the Court permitted it to stand despite its clear over-ride of the Constitution’s Commerce Clause that forbids the government from requiring a citizen to purchase anything.

Under Obama, the foreign policy of the nation has now seriously weakened its position in the world and combined with cuts to defense spending, put its ability to protect the homeland and project power abroad at risk. The administration failed to negotiate an agreement with Iraq that would permit U.S. troops to remain in place, as they do at the invitation of many nations around the world, leaving Iraq vulnerable to al Qaeda. Setting a date for withdrawal from Afghanistan only emboldened the Taliban.

The so-called Arab Spring has mutated, not into the establishment of democratic institutions in nations like Egypt or Libya, but an opportunity for the Muslim Brotherhood to at least ascend to positions of power in opposition to America’s interests in the Middle East and Northern Africa.

We now know that President Obama skipped some sixty percent of the daily CIA briefings that presidents long have made a part of their duties and this no doubt led to its ignorance of the impending tragedy in Libya, but the fault lies, too, with the State Department that ignored the slain ambassador’s pleas for increased security for the embassy and consulate. This is a president who has been missing in action as the Islamic jihad began to heat up across the face of the globe.

The hostility of President Obama’s administration to the vital energy sector of the nation has denied access to oil extraction on the vast acreage of federal lands. It has denied permits for offshore drilling to a far larger degree than previous administrations. It has mercilessly attacked the coal industry, responsible for nearly fifty percent of all electricity generation in the nation. Plants for electricity have closed down under the pressure of costly EPA regulations. Only the natural gas sector has grown, thanks to the technology of fracking, but both oil and gas is being extracted mostly on private land.

The economy, which could have recovered in much the same way it did during the Kennedy and Reagan administrations, has barely increased while 23 million Americans remain out of work or have stopped looking for jobs. There are 47 million Americans on food stamps, utilizing eighty percent of the budget of the Department of Agriculture. There are millions who have seen the value of their homes decrease while others have faced foreclosure. The Labor Department was just caught rigging the data on new jobs to get it below 8 percent in a record-setting 43 months.

Barack Obama, a man whose personal life history is mostly a construction of lies, whose personal records have been hidden from public examination, and who stunned viewers of his first debate with Mitt Romney by appearing so unprepared and so willing to repeat past lies, has been at the heart of a poisonous presidency.

Americans, no matter what their political affiliation or as independents, are now saddled with $16 trillion in national debt, four to five trillion of which was imposed in just the last four years, have a common interest to defeat Barack Obama. The nation will not survive four more years if he is reelected.

© Alan Caruba, 2012