I know we’re supposed to be people of positive expectancy and sunny hope, but regular readers know that my expectations for the Obama presidency were low and grim. But I was wrong.
The first 100 days were much, much worse than I could have imagined; the damage to our country deeper and more systemic than I thought possible in such a short time. One year ago this month I wrote (emphasis added):
One of the things I find most alarming about the prospect of an Obama presidency (in addition to the doctrinaire liberalism, the friendly legislature, and the angry, grievance-mongering wife) is the fact that he carries two dangerous qualities in very large measure–naivete and hubris.
He is like Jimmy Carter was (and is) in this respect, only more so. And at least Carter had some executive experience as Governor of Georgia. Sen. Obama has never run anything or done anything. But his confidence in his charm and good intentions seems boundless. God help us all.
There is not in the word in those paragraphs that seems overly pessimistic in the light of the last three months. Just the opposite, in fact, The actions of the Obama-Reid-Pelosi triumvirate can easily be sorted into two categories: the Appalling and the Galling .
Appalling is the cynical nationalization of whole sectors of the U.S. economy under the cover of a “crisis”; the empowerment of toxic unions; the funding of the abortion industrial complex; and the politicization (ACORN-ization) of the census bureau.
Galling is the bald hypocrisy of running a campgaign that demonized the Bush Administration for it’s counterterrorism policies and then, once in office, keeping all those policies in place. As NRO’s And McCarthy wrote today:
The Obama campaign slandered the commissions, just like it slandered Gitmo, military detention, coercive interrogations, the state secrets doctrine, extraordinary rendition, and aggressive national-security surveillance. Gitmo is still open (and Obama and Holder now admit it’s a first-rate facility), we are still detaining captives (except when Obama releases dangerous terrorists), the Obama Justice Department has endorsed the Bush legal analysis of torture law in federal court, and Obama has endorsed state secrets, extraordinary rendition, and national-security surveillance (and the Bush stance on surveillance has since been reaffirmed by the federal court created to rule on such issues).
Do these people ever get called on their hypocrisy?
Even so, Obama & Co. are still managing to make America less safe. Check out Debra Burlingame’s op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, for example.
How’s all that for a Saturday blast of sunshine and sparkles? Sorry. Lighter stuff will follow. But first I have to stop weeping for our once-great nation.