Several of my progressive friends who support President Obama and his policies tell me I will appreciate him more as a president once I compare him to his successor. Given the frontrunners of this season’s candidates for the presidency, they may have a point.
But what they fail to see is that President Obama and his predecessor have created a mess of colossal proportions.
But what they fail to see is that President Obama and his predecessor have created a mess of colossal proportions.
Thanks to George Bush and Barack Obama, the next president will have to deal with the Middle East and its bubbling cauldron of religious hatreds, war, death, and chaos. Largely because of the policies of these two presidents, countries like Iraq, Libya, and Syria are in ruins or remain battlefields. President Bush and his advisors led us into Iraq with his foolish hope of establishing an American style democracy in a country totally unequipped to handle such a government. President Bush had forgotten that democracies are grown, not imposed. President Obama’s “lead from behind” policies, the foolishness of his own advisors in Libya, and his mystifying disengagement from the region as a whole have only abetted the murderous disorder of the region.
On the home front, these two presidents, their administrations, the Congress, the lobbyists, and the American people have burdened this nation with an enormous debt. In 2000, when Bush was president, our debt was 5.629 trillion dollars. When he left office in 2008, it was 9.986 trillion. By 2010, that debt had climbed to 13.7 trillion dollars under President Obama. It now has risen to around 19 trillion dollars.
(Let’s pause a moment to make clear what constitutes a trillion dollars. Here are some figures from a CBS news site If you spent one dollar every second, you would spend a million dollars in twelve days. At that same rate, you would need 32 years to spend a billion dollars. But it would take you more than 31,000 years to spend a trillion dollars.)
Just this past week, President Obama spoke of our “strong American economy.” He offered his points for believing this delusion, but left out details like the falling median income, permanent joblessness, increased use of government social programs, and an economic growth rate of just 3% annually. And with a debt approaching 20 trillion dollars, it’s hard to imagine any economy, no matter how robust, could be “strong” in the long run.
Presidents Bush and Obama also hampered economic growth by increasing federal regulation. The Code of Federal Regulations expanded by 2,490 pages annually during the Bush administration and by 3,504 pages annually under Obama. This ever-growing thicket of regulation strangles new business, sends some companies overseas, and discourages employment.
These two twenty-first century presidents also failed to control an invasion of immigrants into our country. Under ordinary circumstances we might regard this deliberate negligence as dereliction of duty, but in a world beset by terrorism such negligence is criminal. We frisk Granny at the airport while we turn a blind eye to platoons of unknown refugees pouring across our southern border.
The culture wars have intensified. Christians who take their faith seriously feel under attack. Sparked by the controversial election of President Bush, the divide between conservatives and liberals widened into a chasm. Some universities pushed political correctness to ever more radical limits, bringing into the language such words as “trigger warnings,” “micro-aggression,” and “safe spaces,” concepts suggetsting that today’s students belong in a nursery rather than in a dormitory. Racial tensions in the United States are worse than they were in the last two decades of the last century. Often President Obama by his remarks has exacerbated these tensions.
At the end of his eight years in office, President Bush left the country engaged in a war it would not win and with a broken economy. At the end of his eight years in office, President Obama will leave us in a much-weakened position abroad with a debt double that created by President Bush.
My liberal friends may be correct in saying that President Obama will shine compared to the next president. This illumination, however, will be the result not of President Obama’s successes, but of his many failures. The man or woman who steps into the Oval office next year will face a horrific mess. That person faces the daunting task of trying to unify the country while at the same time solving problems whose solutions will prove painful.
Some historians refer to the twentieth century as “the American Century.” Unless affairs take an uptick, we won’t be hearing the same thing about the next hundred years.
On the home front, these two presidents, their administrations, the Congress, the lobbyists, and the American people have burdened this nation with an enormous debt. In 2000, when Bush was president, our debt was 5.629 trillion dollars. When he left office in 2008, it was 9.986 trillion. By 2010, that debt had climbed to 13.7 trillion dollars under President Obama. It now has risen to around 19 trillion dollars.
(Let’s pause a moment to make clear what constitutes a trillion dollars. Here are some figures from a CBS news site If you spent one dollar every second, you would spend a million dollars in twelve days. At that same rate, you would need 32 years to spend a billion dollars. But it would take you more than 31,000 years to spend a trillion dollars.)
Just this past week, President Obama spoke of our “strong American economy.” He offered his points for believing this delusion, but left out details like the falling median income, permanent joblessness, increased use of government social programs, and an economic growth rate of just 3% annually. And with a debt approaching 20 trillion dollars, it’s hard to imagine any economy, no matter how robust, could be “strong” in the long run.
Presidents Bush and Obama also hampered economic growth by increasing federal regulation. The Code of Federal Regulations expanded by 2,490 pages annually during the Bush administration and by 3,504 pages annually under Obama. This ever-growing thicket of regulation strangles new business, sends some companies overseas, and discourages employment.
These two twenty-first century presidents also failed to control an invasion of immigrants into our country. Under ordinary circumstances we might regard this deliberate negligence as dereliction of duty, but in a world beset by terrorism such negligence is criminal. We frisk Granny at the airport while we turn a blind eye to platoons of unknown refugees pouring across our southern border.
The culture wars have intensified. Christians who take their faith seriously feel under attack. Sparked by the controversial election of President Bush, the divide between conservatives and liberals widened into a chasm. Some universities pushed political correctness to ever more radical limits, bringing into the language such words as “trigger warnings,” “micro-aggression,” and “safe spaces,” concepts suggetsting that today’s students belong in a nursery rather than in a dormitory. Racial tensions in the United States are worse than they were in the last two decades of the last century. Often President Obama by his remarks has exacerbated these tensions.
At the end of his eight years in office, President Bush left the country engaged in a war it would not win and with a broken economy. At the end of his eight years in office, President Obama will leave us in a much-weakened position abroad with a debt double that created by President Bush.
My liberal friends may be correct in saying that President Obama will shine compared to the next president. This illumination, however, will be the result not of President Obama’s successes, but of his many failures. The man or woman who steps into the Oval office next year will face a horrific mess. That person faces the daunting task of trying to unify the country while at the same time solving problems whose solutions will prove painful.
Some historians refer to the twentieth century as “the American Century.” Unless affairs take an uptick, we won’t be hearing the same thing about the next hundred years.