Exactly six month ago today, President Barack Obama was sworn in as the 44th President of the United States, accompanied by all the traditional pomp and circumstance as is customary for such a momentous event.
We wrote earlier an article about the so called ’100-Day hype’ wherein we believed this review to be senseless. But now, after six months, we think it is in order to visit these past months as to the President’s actions, achievements and failures. He is one eight’s into his term as President and enough has happened since his inauguration to take a serious look at this time frame.
Astute political observers will likely agree with us that while all political campaigners make endless promises to potential voters to get elected and most of these promises sound attractive and persuade people in their decisions as to whom to vote for, even though the campaigner knows full well that some of his or her ‘promises’ are totally unrealistic and will in most instances never be accomplished or turned into reality, yet they will keep on promising in the hope that it will get them votes. However, and this is not easy, there are some things that are being said that reflect the candidates true intention, his/her political ideology and therefore the true ambitions of the person running for political office.
Then-candidate Barack Obama, had at least one such moment when he spoke last year in Ohio to the man who became known across America as ‘Joe the Plumber’ and told him and we paraphrase that it was proper to ‘spread the wealth around’ in this country. He also made repeated statements that he wanted to fundamentally change America and return it to its rightful owners. To us, this said it all and was the real thing. We interpreted this to mean that he planned to bring true socialism through government to America and it genuinely scared us.
Six months into his presidency, we here at this site can clearly see that he meant those words on the campaign trail. As evidence we present that the President
- ordered the government take-over of General Motors and Chrysler Corporation and made the United Auto Workers Union the major stockholder while giving the bondholders a much smaller share of the company,
- He expressed his so much desired and promised bi-partisanship by telling the Republicans who visited him in the White House and bringing their ideas to him that they should remember one thing: “I WON!” Meaning obviously he did not care what they presented and that bi-partisanship is in his mind when Republicans (the minority) agree with him,
- He pressured Congress into getting a Stimulus bill on his desk within a few weeks, failure to do so would result in the nation’s unemployment rate going up to about 9%. The Democrats (without any Republican votes in the House and only three in the Senate) gave him in February an unread bill for $787,000,000,000 (787 billion dollars for short) which he signed. Five months later, the impact of this utterly important bill has not been felt nationwide and unemployment stands at 9.5 % as of the end of June, a higher number than predicted had this bill not been passed. The President now says that he expects this number to continue to rise and go well into double digits in the coming months, After six months in office, President Obama is still blaming everything bad and negative on the previous administration, in short: It’s still all Bush’s fault who left him (Obama) with a big “mess”,
- So far, the President has appointed more than two dozen so called “Czars”, these are ‘task masters’ who report only to the President and do not require confirmation by Congress as Department Secretaries do. Their (the Czars) budgets are unknown and they have immense decision-making powers and they do not fall under congressional oversight provisions. To us, this is a dubious way of governance since it does not have any transparency whatsoever, it smacks of deviance to say the least and the complicit media is playing along,
- Now he is pressuring Congress to pass major health care legislation and also an energy bill, called ‘Cap and Trade’. Between these two pieces of new legislation, they will cost trillions and trillions to the American taxpayers, that is, these are trillions of dollars added to the nations debt or increased taxes. These are very dangerous pieces of law since they are being rushed through Congress by the Democrats without any clarity as to its contents and nobody truly knows what it will cost at its implementation and what rights and freedoms we as individuals are giving up,
- On his second day in office, the President signed an executive order to close the Guantanamo detention camp within one year without a plan as to what to do with the approximately 250 detainees. Six months later, only about a dozen prisoners have been released or transferred to other countries and the world is wondering what he will do with the rest of the detainees. This was a hasty and very unwise decision and was merely made to satisfy some of his very liberal anti-war supporters. It shows lack of leadership but instead reflects immature/hasty decision making for political purposes only.
- On foreign policy and the international front, the President has so far not achieved anything worth mentioning. He has attended several international meetings and has giving major speeches in Egypt and in Europe, but he has been unable to persuade any of the European’s for example to take any of the detainees in Guantanamo, even though they were the ones calling for the camp’s closure for years. He has been rebuffed by the Russians on several fronts and at the recent G-8 conference in Italy, he could not get any agreement from any leader to set targets for global warming (carbon) reductions. When he (in his Inaugural speech) addressed some countries (including Iran) by extending his hand if they were to open their fists, Iran’s response was to ask first for an ‘apology for all American misdeeds against Iran’. While he has lectured Israel and demanded to stop further settlement expansions, he has authorized nearly one billion dollars to be given to Hamas, the terrorist organization currently in charge of the Gaza strip.
We could easily add several more events and actions in these past six months but we leave it at this. In summary, we firmly believe that President Barack Obama has shown no regard for this countries accumulation of debt by the trillions of dollars. His very ambitious domestic agenda is like a train towards European style socialism. The current fiscal year’s (ending on September 30, 2009) deficit is estimated to be near two trillion dollars. On the international front, the President has been trying very hard to be liked by all and also shown a willingness to reverse a number of his predecessors decisions. Accommodation is noble but his primary concern should always be the interest of the country that elected him President. He is not the President of the world and his attempts to appear to be open and more understanding towards everybody is not reflecting leadership. The North Korean’s are shooting off missiles whenever they want to and the Iranian’s are on a fast track to attain nuclear weapons. And all President Obama has in response to this are ‘words’, not ‘action’,
Finally, these past six months have not shown President Barack Obama to be the exceptional, once in a lifetime President the liberals in America had predicted him to be. The next six months will be even more important as to what will happen in America and around the world.