Obama is a Failure

Apparently, Barack Obama can't seem to do anything right wrong.

Thus far, he has failed to destroy the economy.  On the contrary, it is showing signs of having stabilized, if not having made at least a modest turnaround in the positive direction.  Good going, Mr. President.  You could have at least waited a few months before ramming through that inevitable failboat of a stimulus, but oh no, you had to get things done quickly, didn't you?  You just had to go to work right away, addressing the "dire" state of the economy shortly after taking office.

He has also failed to destroy our standing in the world, at least those parts of it which actually would consider thinking of us as a positive influence on the national stage.  Well done, BO.  Our international relationships, generally speaking, are pretty good right now, and some have even improved a bit.  So much for the promised Chamberlain-esque appeasement we were all looking forward to.

He doesn't seem able, or even willing, to allow the unemployment situation to worsen.  Rather, we've had at least 6 months in a row with substantial positive net job gains.  Oh, and those have been across a variety of sectors, too! Manufacturing, healthcare, service, technology... it's like he's not even trying!  That stimulus was supposed to fail, and now look where we are.  Like many others, I initially thought he was faking it, but obviously he wasn't, and now fewer of us are paying the price for that.

And don't even get me started on the whole "white culture" business... seems like all he cares about is black people everyone.  While from time to time he does manage to offend a substantial sector of the population (see recent HHS decisions in re: insurance coverage for contraception), overall his approval ratings have been on a steady upswing for months now, across many different demographics.  Sigh.

All this equivocating, all this failed leadership, all this manifest weakness, in spite of a Congress that doesn't seem willing to entertain even the slightest possibility of compromise on anything major.  This confuses me, because you'd think that if all his proposals were indeed doomed to fail, they'd go ahead and rubber stamp them just to abbreviate the pain and ensure that his will be a one-term presidency.

I know this all sounds depressing, and I apologize for being a Negative Nellie here.  But I have confidence in him, and I believe you should, too.  Between you and me, I think he's holding back, waiting to unleash his real "A" material until after the Republicans have selected the inevitable winner of the 2012 election.  Seriously - at this point, bring Michele Bachmann back.  Anyone would be worse better than Obama, and since he's making such a hash of things, anyone would be able to beat him in November.

After all, when we're willing to ignore months if not years of cumulative data that points to a thus-far successful recovery, and when we're willing to caucus for a candidate who is amazingly similar to Obama, and when we're willing to prioritize religiously motivated bigotry for the sake of garnering votes from people we'd otherwise avoid in private, and when our favorite talking heads can't even decide which disinformation is most important, anything is possible.  Right?

Let's be real about this.  We thought we'd elected a man who hated our country.  We thought we'd elected a man who didn't believe in the American Way.  We thought we'd elected someone who hadn't even been born here.  Well, dear readers, we have evidently been betrayed, and then some.

It took Bush the Younger almost 6 years to really get things to a good point.  There was solid momentum there, you know?  Think about it: By acting unilaterally and presenting the American people with bogus intelligence, we were entrenched in two wars with no end in sight for either, and we had alienated many of our pre-2K allies.  The housing bubble had finally burst in 2007, deleting trillions of dollars of value from of the American economy (we only discovered later how awesome the global shockwaves were going to be), and the enormous surpluses from the Clinton years had completely inverted into projected deficits for decades to come.  By the end of 2008, the unemployment rate was skyrocketing, and we were losing hundreds of thousands of jobs per month.  There was nowhere to go but down up.

The only thing we have to wonder is whether the Republican who takes the Oath of Office less than a year from now can get us back on the right track, and whether they can do it quickly.  The House of Representatives has been making a decent go of it, accomplishing extremely little in '11, but Boehner and Cantor can't do it all by themselves.  In retrospect, they probably shouldn't have spent the first three or four months of the year trying to defund Planned Parenthood, even though I agree on the importance of withholding basic healthcare services from millions of low-income women and mothers.

Capitol Hill needs real leadership from the White House, not this pretend nonsense.  The fact that the House is even considering an infrastructure bill, even a symbolic an anemic one, is proof positive that both Pennsylvania Avenue and the House has lost all sense of priorities.

I for one will be looking forward to the return of Tea Party-esque supply-side policies that do nothing but prop up the rich, continue to retard economic growth, increase our budget deficits, fail to address urgent projects at home, force our citizens into healthcare-related bankruptcies, enable corporations to abuse regulatory loopholes, stunt our children's educations, and gradually erode the foundations of that pesky wall between church and State.