He’s an elitist. He’s aloof. He looks down on working Americans. He’s a Kenyan. He’s a Muslim. He’s — gasp! — a Socialist.
President Barack Obama is not a Kenyan Muslim Socialist. He’s a mainstream DNC Liberal, another Bill Clinton but without the adultery. He’s bad for America, but not because he’s going to herd Loyal Americans™ into FEMA concentration camps.
There are many ridiculous reasons people hate Obama, and we detailed some of them here. But there are genuine, serious reasons to be concerned about the Obama presidency and its legacy. Here are a few.
He’s Done Nothing to End the Israeli-Arab Conflict
The kind of low-effort conservative who gets all their information from FOX & Friends will tell you that Obama does not support Israel. This opinion is based on the following facts:
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Oops. There are no facts to support that assertion. Mainstream Democrats and mainstream Republicans all support Israel, as a reflex action. They think you can’t get elected without the support of major Jewish-American organizations. So they support anything any Israeli government, Labor or Likud, does; and they hose down the Israelis with US taxpayer dollars.
Any genuine conservative wants to see a free, democratic Jewish State with its capital in Jerusalem. But any genuine conservative also wants to end this endless conflict, because Israel will never be safe until there’s peace. That means a peace deal.
And it’s not that Obama has tried and failed, a la Bill Clinton. It’s that he hasn’t tried, period.
Does America have some special obligation to end a war between foreigners halfway across the planet? No. But could an American president accomplish peace, and help stabilize the Middle East? Yes. Could peace happen without American intervention? It’s highly unlikely. So do we want to keep exporting taxpayer dollars to Israel forever? Or should we at least takes steps towards a permanent fix?
He’s Done Nothing to Fix Wall Street
The global economy goes through boom and bust cycles, as a matter of design. Bust! So you ramp up regulation, and the economy recovers. Boom! Everyone’s making money, so you eliminate the regulations. Bust! It all goes to hell, and the cycle begins again.
Both parties have blood on their hands when it comes to the Great Recession. Liberals want Keynesian solutions, and to put the people responsible in jail. Conservatives want free market solutions, and to put the people responsible in jail.
Go inside the Beltway, and “Liberal” and “Conservative” go out the window when it comes to finance. Democrats and Republicans agree on one thing: whatever Wall Street wants, Wall Street gets. And no one goes to jail, except Bernie Madoff — because he stole from Hollywood celebrities and wealthy East Coast elites, not ordinary Americans.
They say Wall Street financiers don’t like Obama, but they should. George W. Bush began the biggest free money handout in American history, but Barack Obama fulfilled it. Rather than try to repair the rotten foundation of American finance, Obama just shored up those foundations — with taxpayer money — and set us up for the next Great Recession.
Obama isn’t a Socialist. At all. But he’s not a free market Capitalist, either. He’s a champion of the weird apolitical symbiosis that exists between the Beltway and Wall Street, in which wealthy Yale and Harvard grads invent crazy, dangerous schemes to make themselves billions in free money without contributing anything to society, ruining our economy — and the political establishment just rubber stamps it. That’s how we got subprime mortgages. That’s how we got the student loan crisis. It’s why your house is underwater, and half the people in Greece are unemployed.
And in 20 years, it’s all going to happen again, because Wall Street lapdogs like Obama and Mitt Romney will never do anything about it.
He’s Enacting 1984, Just 30 Years Late
The conservative radio/internet axis of amateur commentators never heard of an Obama scandal they didn’t immediately seize upon. But Benghazi turned out to be nothing. The IRS affair was a joke. It was Whitewater and Vince Foster all over again — a lot of hot air about nonsense, diverting well-intentioned people from the real scandals.
And Obama has real scandals.
After 9/11, George W. Bush and his neo-conservative brain trust dismantled the Bill of Rights, and established the beginnings of a National Security State, in which Americans abandon their inalienable rights in exchange for protection from a handful of admittedly-dangerous foreign religious fanatics.
When he ran for president, candidate Barack Obama promised to roll back this unprecedented infringement on our freedoms.
BWA HA HA HA HA HA HA.
It’s not good that companies like Google and Facebook collect data that can be used, by smart people, to reconstruct every single detail of your personal life. But at least we knew it was going on. At least we were having a national conversation about it. At least you could opt out.
We didn’t know the NSA was strong-arming these companies into turning over all our personal information, for abuse by government bureaucrats. And the companies couldn’t tell us about it, without risking prison.
But you know who did know? Barack Obama.
I understand why a commercial company might want to store data on my personal shopping, reading, and movie-watching preferences — they want to sell me things. But what’s the legitimate reason for the government needing this information? Are the middle-class white American teenagers who use SnapChat planning on defecting to Al-Qaeda any time soon? When I “liked” Kate Upton’s page on Facebook, was I secretly communicating my fervent support of Hamas?
Honestly, I don’t know why the NSA decided to collect our metadata. As a number of researchers have pointed out, it’s a huge waste of time and resources, and contributes nothing to the War on Terror. But whatever the real reasons are, and Obama has not shared them, I assure you — we, as Americans, will not like them.
It’s one thing for a government to have secrets. It’s another thing entirely for a democratic government to hide what it’s doing, for no other reason than they know it will be unpopular. Barack Obama lied when he said he would restore the Constitution; he lied by omission when he kept these domestic spying programs secret; and he lied when he said “we are increasing our chances of preventing a catastrophe… through these programs.”
He Wants to Put Edward Snowden in Prison
Whether you like Edward Snowden, or agree with what he did, is beside the point. Snowden saw that the Constitution was being shredded, and made that fact public. Whether he did it the “right way,” or for pure motives, is irrelevant.
In 2008, Barack Obama said he would “shine a bright light on how Washington works.” Let me quote, in its entirety, candidate Obama’s statement entitled “Protect Whistleblowers”:
Often the best source of information about waste, fraud, and abuse in government is an existing government employee committed to public integrity and willing to speak out. Such acts of courage and patriotism, which can sometimes save lives and often save taxpayer dollars, should be encouraged rather than stifled as they have been during the Bush administration. We need to empower federal employees as watchdogs of wrongdoing and partners in performance. Barack Obama will strengthen whistleblower laws to protect federal workers who expose waste, fraud, and abuse of authority in government. Obama will ensure that federal agencies expedite the process for reviewing whistleblower claims and whistleblowers have full access to courts and due process.
Tell it to Edward Snowden, Mr. Obama, who lives in exile in Russia, facing “sealed” criminal charges if he returns to the United States. (There’s nothing like a secret court, ask an East German.) Tell it to Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald, the NSA scandal journalists who are afraid to return to the US out of fear of prosecution. Tell it to The Whistleblower Formerly Known as Bradley Manning, who rots in a military jail for “aiding the enemy.” I guess the enemy in this case is the American people, who don’t want the government lying to us left and right about what’s going on with our foreign wars.
In June 2013, the text quoted above mysteriously disappeared from the pages of change.gov.
He Assassinates Children
George W. Bush, and Barack Obama after him, have devised a brilliant system for eliminating Islamic terrorists.
First, the CIA gives their very best guess as to who, in Pakistan or Yemen, is working for a terrorist organization with plans to attack the US. The CIA has a wonderful record in this regard. That’s sarcasm.
The CIA figures out where this potential terrorist might be hiding — say in a suburban house, or at a wedding. Then they sit around a table until they are really, really sure they have the right guy. Super sure. Totes sure.
Then they send a remote-piloted drone to blow up the house or wedding, killing everyone — because if you’re within 100 feet of someone we guess is probably a terrorist, then we guess you must be one too. Then when rescuers and emergency responders show up, we blow them up — because, again, they might be terrorists, and why take a chance? Anyway, they’re foreigners, so who cares, right?
Want to see a list of the dozens of children killed in US drone strikes? I can’t confirm every name on that list is real, or that all those kids were killed on the orders of Barack Obama. But if you think that AGM-114 Hellfire missiles have some magical ability to differentiate between the innocent and the guilty, I have some bad news for you.
“But we’re at war,” you say, “and innocents die in war.” Really? Are we at war with Yemen and Pakistan? I don’t remember hearing about that. And in fact, people in our military do, usually, kind of go out of their way to try not to murder innocent children.
But when you’re a video game console jockey sitting in front of a viewscreen 6,000 miles from the target, blowing up grainy black-and-white images that may or may not be a wedding, under the direct orders of the president himself, you’re probably not going to refuse because there may be a kid down there. A team of special forces commandos sent in to take out a terrorist at least has a chance to differentiate between friend and foe. A missile does not.
Barack Obama says he’s protecting us. All I see is a US president turning terrorist lies about the United States into truths, and recruiting for the bad guys. While, of course, lining the pockets of war profiteers.
There’s a meme going around the Internet, meant to be a slight dig at conservatives. Any time something bad happens — long line at the post office, rainy weather, 11 hot dogs in a 12-pack — you say “thanks, Obama.” It’s meant to make fun of conservatives who blame the president for everything that goes wrong.
But there are real reasons to sarcastically “thank” Obama, real issues that need to be addressed. And if the ideologically-identical Hillary Clinton takes the White House in 2016, none of these problems will go away.
If a Republican wins in 2016 (after I win the lottery and the unicorns invade, both scenarios are just as likely), will he or she fix these problems? Only if conservatives hold their feet to the fire. But that won’t happen if we keep on harping about non-issues like Benghazi and the evils of the First Lady’s nutrition program — instead of dealing with the real problems.