Obama--Now Comes the Lynch Mob

I feel sorry for Barack Obama. I actually do. I doubt if he wants pity from anyone like me—or probably anyone at all—so I won’t extend it personally, but I think the man is getting a bum deal right now. Let’s face it he was the proverbial man up to his derriere in alligators when he took office—two wars, a collapsing banking system, a stock market in free fall, jobs vanishing at the rate of half a million a month and the entire housing industry under water.
He got very very busy. He had no more choice in the matter than Franklin Roosevelt had in 1933. There didn’t seem to be a lot of time for introspection or reflection so he didn’t take any. (I think a bit more reflection might have been in order, but I understand why he didn’t.)
Some of what he did seems to have worked—at least for the moment. Growth in unemployment has fallen to half the rate of February. Many banks are still in deep water, but they seem to be breathing. The stock market has bounced back up a few thousand points.
The housing market is still very sick (a quarter of all mortgages are under water), but here and there a hammer can be heard. Some houses are starting to sell. Retail sales are hurting, sometimes badly, but the reason isn’t entirely lack of money—a lot of folk are paying down debt.
Obama’s first six months in office could have been a lot worse. To those who point out that they could have been a lot better, I answer, “So could Lincoln’s! So could Roosevelt’s!” The man pinned a lot of tails on donkeys. That he missed some isn’t perhaps as remarkable as that he managed to get any on at all.
He put us a trillion more in debt, true. But we were already so deeply in debt when Bush left office, the next trillion almost doesn’t matter. We can’t pay off the debt as of June, 2009. What the heck; we couldn’t have paid off the debt in June, 2008, either.
That’s simple reality. If, God forbid, we were to go belly up on a collapsed dollar in the next five years, there is no way Obama is entirely to blame. He coulda, shoulda done a dozen other things. No doubt. But I give him credit for trying—while flying on instruments only.
Don’t anybody tell this Republican that Bush would have done better. Fiscal sanity was simply not George Bush’s forte’. (Nor was it Bill Clinton’s. And, let’s face it, the term “voodoo economics” still applies to Ronald Reagan. It’s only now that we can finally see the zombies.)
I didn’t vote for Mr. Obama; I wouldn’t vote for him now. He has as much faith in the power of government to fix all ills as I did when I was in my twenties, laboring in the Johnson administration. I learned over the years that I was wrong. Obama may learn too.
Whatever Barack Obama’s mistakes, misapprehensions or good and bad guesses, he does NOT deserve the calumny being heaped on him now!
I just read today that at least a quarter of the residents of North Carolina don’t believe Obama is American born—which would make him ineligible to be president. A lot of people in the rest of the nation think the same thing.
In a lot of minds, he remains simply an “uppity n-----r”. Not just in the south. A lot of people just cannot stand the thought of one of “them” sitting in the Oval Office.
People look at the trillion dollar bailout he got through—a carryover of a Bush policy—and insist he’s bankrupting the nation. (He sure didn’t do it alone!)
He’s called a “socialist”. When the choice was letting General Motors (and its thousands of workers and hundreds of satellite companies) go broke, he stepped in the several billion and gave it another lease on life—as well as continuing a huge payroll and tax base.
I’m not totally sure that was the right move. But it certainly wasn’t a “socialist” move—keeping what was once America’s largest private corporation in business—and you cannot say definitively that George Bush would never have done it. Look at the banks he bailed out!
If he stays in Washington bailing out companies and banks, he’s criticized for doing too much. If he takes his family to look at our national park system, he’s blasted for not being back in the office, hard at work. (Air force One is as tricked out electronically as the White House!)
The egregious lies he faces for his attempts to reform our collapsing health care system are unbelievable. (In some cases they are not lies—they are simply products of unbelievable ignorance, coming from the same kids who sat in the back row, disrupted the class and absolutely refused to pay any attention in school.
Like the guy who shouted, “Don’t let the government get its hands on my Medicare!!” Just who did he imagine runs and funds “his Medicare”? Or his Social Security? Or his Veterans benefits? Who guarantees his bank deposits, his pension? Ye gods!)
But it’s the LIES that make you sick. Death panels, long waits for an appointment (I’m mid-way through a six-month wait right now, at a private physician’s office). Rationing of health care—ever had an HMO or a private insurance company say “No”? I have.
People who should know better—who did pay attention in school—are twisting every word in Obama’s health care bill into something unrecognizable. They are doing it with a straight face and all the appearance of concerned virtue.
They do it in the name of religion. They do it in the name of liberty and freedom. They willingly deny fifty million Americans ANY health care lest dollars should also be spent on abortion—a procedure, however immoral, that is declared medically valid in legislatively and legally.
Pick a different venue to fight abortion than one in which millions are denied life-saving care. Don’t tell me you are denying those millions medical help to “save lives”. At that point you start lying to yourself—which is the worst sort of lying.
This is a firestorm I doubt Mr. Obama ever fully imagined when he set out to run two years ago. I wrote a year ago that he is, in the eyes of his myriad supporters a new “messiah”. I also wrote that those who cheer a political “savior” today find reasons to be disappointed in him tomorrow. Then the cheering turns into something a whole lot less pleasant.
For Barack Obama, tomorrow has come. As I said, I feel a bit sorry for the man.