How Did Obama Fare in 2009? Don't Ask an Obamaniac!

A couple days ago I got in trouble with two Obama-loving (and Jewish) Facebook friends for calling their President Golden Calf “the worst president in American history.” They accused me of being petulant, partisan, vapid, and having gone off the deep end.

I disagreed, explaining that if anyone was those things, it was Obama himself. I also pointed out that I was far from the only one severely disappointed with the current president and his administration. Obama’s approval rating teetered around 50% since mid-July and has stayed below that since mid-November.

But if anybody wonders why so many Americans disapprove of President Hope&Change’s performance, Victor Davis Hanson counts the ways in a December 23 article …

• Constant apologies abroad for everything from slavery to Hiroshima
• Bows to Saudi royalty, the Japanese emperor, and Chinese autocrats
• The on-again/off-again Guantanamo shut-down mess
• The fight with the former CIA directors
• The public show trial of Khalid Sheik Mohammed
• The reach out to Ahmadinejad Castro, Chavez, and assorted thugs
• The Honduras fiasco
• Czars everywhere
• The serial “Bush did it”/reset whine abroad
• The Queen of England/I-pod fiasco
• Gordon Brown gets snookered in his gift-giving
• Unceremoniously shipping back the Churchill bust
• The end of the special relationship with the UK
• The New York on-the-town presidential splurge
• Anita Dunn and her Mao worship
• Timothy Geithner/Tom Daschle/Hilda Solis and their taxes
• What ever happened to Gov. Richardson? 
• “No lobbyists” = gads of them
• The Podestas’ insider influence-peddling empire
• Sotomayor’s “wise Latina” chauvinism
• The Special Olympics silly quip
• Trashing Nancy Reagan
• The Skip Gates/police acting “stupidly” mess
• The get-Chicago-the-Olympics jaunt to Copenhagen
• Cap-and-trade boondoggle
• “Millions of green jobs” 
• Ignore gas, oil, coal, and nuclear power production
• Cash-for-clunkers
• The Joe Biden gaffe machine
• Jobs “saved” or “created” rather than references to the actual unemployment rates
• Van Jones, the racist and truther
• Desiree Rogers won’t testify
• The blowback from, and silence about, the Rangel/Dodd corruption
• The White House party crashers plan to take the 5th Amendment
• The ‘bipartisanship’ con
• The pork-barrel stimulus spoils
• The demonization of the Town-Hallers
• The Acorn Mess
• The Kevin Jennings/Safe School Czar embarrassment
• The SEIU direct access to the White House
• The Asian Tour comedown
• The politicization of the take-over of GM and Chrysler
• The Obama readjustment in the order of paying back car creditors
• Car dealerships closed on shaky criteria
• Obama as “Caesar” 
• The Emanuel “never let a serious crisis go to waste” boast
• The Black Caucus/Rangel/Waters bid to bail out the inner-city radio stations
• Yosi Sergant and the NEA
• $1.7 trillion deficit
• The planned $9 trillion added to the national debt
• New income tax rates; health care surcharge talk; and payroll tax caps to be lifted
• Rahm Emanuel’s promised payback to those states that trash the stimulus
• The supposed C-span aired health care debate
• The promised website posts of pending legislation
• Czechs and Poles sold out on missile defense
• Sermons to and finger pointing at the Israelis
• The failed ‘Putin helps to stop a nuclear Iran’ gambit
• Voting present on the Iranian reformers in the street
• Serial but empty deadlines to Ahmadinejad
• The good war/bad war twisting and turning on Iraq/Afghanistan
• The months-long dithering over Afghanistan
• Renditions, tribunals, Patriot Act, etc. once trashed, now OK
• Healthcare take-over
• The 2,000 page proposed new health code
• The embarrassing Nobel Peace Prize nomination
• The attacks on surgeons, Chamber of Commerce, Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, etc. 
• The Islam mythologies in the Cairo Speech
• The al Arabiya “Bush did it” interview
• Obama’s TV “my Muslim faith” gaffe

Whew! That’s a lot of screw-ups for less than one year in the presidency. One might even say it’s the resume of the worst president in American history (or at least in the past 150 years; a history-buff friend reminds me that Andrew Jackson was a real bastard.)

What I find interesting about this list, which VDH points out isn’t even exhaustive, is how dutifully the mainstream media systematically whitewashed the scandals, missteps, gaffes, and lapses in judgment. Basically, unless you are a regular follower of Fox News or the conservative radio and/or internet circuit, you are likely to even be aware of most of the items on this list. (Yet there are those out there who know every tiny sordid tidbit involving Sarah Palin, whether it’s true or not.) Isn’t that pathetic?

Seriously, show this list to any liberal/Democrat and I would guess that they wouldn’t have heard of at least two-thirds of the items therein. (I’d test that theory myself, but I get the sinking suspicion that no liberal/Democrat friend of mine would read through a mere few items. At that point they’d accuse me of being petulant, partisan, mean-spirited, and making up lies to smear “the black man in the White House,” and then walk off in a huff. Like being confronted with the man-made global warming climate change hoax, they wouldn’t be able to handle the cold hard facts in front of them. As Ann Coulter has said, “The truth cannot be delivered with Novocaine.”)

VDH wasn’t done. Here is his analysis of Obama’s Nobel prize speech:

I listened to it this morning quite early and posted at NRO. Bottom line: an academic sermon on peace/war with the now accustomed Obama characteristics:

1) long again (4,000 words);
2) “I” or “me” 34 times: same old self referencing;
3) the inadvertent cosmic arrogance [“I do not bring with me today a definitive solution to the problems of war.” = you think?];
4) straw men trope: some say this; others say that; but I uniquely say …;
5) reference to my own personal inspirational story;
6) trash my predecessor or his policies;
7) end with hopey/changey cadences.

That was pretty much it — a pulpit exegesis that could have been cut to 500 words. I would have done the speech in 10 minutes and used the extra time to have lunch with poor neglected King Harald. (Second recommendation: Obama should try to hire some speech-writers over 40. There are a lot of old pro Democrat wordsmiths around that might come in and offer something new other than the now tired boilerplate.)

Yup. You wanted hope and change? You got it. Ready for (at least!) three more years of this?