Passing The Torch

Baby, You’re The Worstest

The United States has been wildly successful over the last 234 years largely in spite of our Chief Executives rather than because of them.  That’s only to be expected in a nation founded on the principle that the best government was the least government.  But, as more and more power has ceded to the Executive branch over the past 75 years, our Presidents have gained a corresponding ability to take any bad situation and make it much worse.  Some have even raised bungling to a high art. Of the latter, competent historians rate two men as the most accomplished: Jimmy Carter, who helped to boot the Shah from Iran, gave away the Panama Canal, and introduced gas rationing and double-digit inflation to American consumers; and the current occupant of the Oval Office, whose first two years in office make Old Jimbo look like a rank amateur.  As Ben Shapiro argues in his Townhall column,

During his entire first term, Carter’s record doesn’t touch the Obama administration’s record in its first year and a half. Obama has already tacitly OK’d the Iranian nuclear program and derided Israel’s nuclear program. He has allowed Iranian protestors to be slaughtered in the streets without so much as a peep for days on end. Obama has allowed the Russians to sponsor an uprising in Kyrgyzstan that resulted in the removal of a U.S. airbase. He has lent legitimacy to an Islamist Turkish government and sold American debt to a communist Chinese government that supports North Korea. He has presided over the largest oil spill in world history in the Gulf of Mexico and spent his efforts blaming everyone but himself.

He’s poised to raise our taxes at the end of the year. He’s pushing for comprehensive “immigration reform” that will really act as an amnesty for illegal immigrants. He has denigrated Arizona before Mexico, bowed before the king of Saudi Arabia and the Chinese president and the Japanese emperor, hugged a Venezuelan quasi-dictator, and undermined a constitutional uprising in Honduras. He has pushed carbon taxes and gas taxes and estate taxes. He has propped up unfit mortgage borrowers and penalized those who pay their mortgage on time. He has bailed out his buddies in the banking industry and nationalized the auto and health industries for the benefit of his union friends.

He has insulted the Cambridge police and defended Muslim terrorists like Maj. Nidal Hassan. He has utilized advisers who are Marxists (former Green Jobs Czar Van Jones), anti-Semites (foreign policy adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, special adviser Samantha Power, National Security Adviser Adm. James Jones), racists (Attorney General Eric Holder), sycophantic pro-Islamists (Deputy National Security Adviser for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism John Brennan), kooks (Director of White House Office of Science and Technology John Holdren), perverts (Safe Schools Czar Kevin Jennings), and paid thugs (Rahm Emanuel).

When Obama took office, the national debt was just under $10 trillion. Now it is $12 trillion, and by 2015, it will be at least $19.6 trillion. Unemployment under Obama increased to 9.7 percent, up from 7.6 percent when Bush left office. The inflation rate has yet to explode, but most economists believe it will have to unless Obama drastically raises taxes, destroying the economy even further.

Carter can’t touch this guy.

To be fair, Obama has had some assistance during his race to the bottom. The 111th Democratic Congress, led by the deranged Nancy Pelosi and the beady-eyed pickpocket Harry Reid, was arguably the worst in history, surpassing even the appalling 110th Democratic Congress in its insane profligacy. That legislature is mercifully gone, having left behind a disgusting mess.  But perhaps the most outrageous incidence surrounding the debacle that is Obama is the number of poor deluded souls who continue to enable him.  Primarily journalists from Manhattan to be sure, but still. They’re as addicted as the degenerate gamblers who bet the houses where their wives and children sleep on swaybacked old nags that leave the post at 20-1. If our mainstream media had half the sense of those broken-down old trotters, they’d either back a different horse or sign themselves into a competent rehabilitation center.