My latest in PJ Media:
Pearls are being clutched more tightly than ever on the Left, as passages from hard-Left “journalist” Bob Woodward, published in the Washington Post, show the loutish President Trump daring to utter a few critical words about his sainted, brilliant predecessor, Barack Obama. “I don’t think Obama’s smart,” Trump is quoted as saying. “I think he’s highly overrated. And I don’t think he’s a great speaker.” Why, how dare Trump tell the truth about the Left’s favorite naked emperor!My new Rating America’s Presidents: An America-First Look at Who Is Best, Who Is Overrated, and Who Was An Absolute Disaster features three presidents on the cover, next to each of the three segments of the subtitle. Next to “Who Is Overrated” is a photo of none other than Barack Hussein Obama, who did a great deal to earn the honor.Start with the politicization of the government. The IRS targeting of conservative groups on Obama’s watch was a prelude to many more revelations about how the civil service had become a corrupt and compromised stronghold of the Left while he was president. Obamacare gave the federal government a huge role in health insurance and, not coincidentally, caused more trouble than it solved. Millions of people lost plans that were working and had to pay more for other plans, or in fines for not having insurance, than they would have paid previously. And the federal government continued its seemingly inexorable advance toward control of every aspect of citizens’ lives.
Shortly before Obama was elected in 2008, he said, “When you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.” In December 2013, he said that the fact that some people made much more money than others was the “defining challenge of our time.” He believed not in equality of opportunity but equality of outcome, which could only be enforced by the state powers exercised in socialist states. He didn’t make America a socialist state, but with Obamacare and more, he put it firmly on the socialist path, as both Mexico, because of NAFTA, and the People’s Republic of China drew millions of jobs out of the U.S.
Obama’s foreign policy was just as disastrous, although in Iraq the responsibility was not wholly Obama’s. While Obama repeatedly took credit for the killing of Osama bin Laden, efforts to find and kill him had been going on for years before he became president. If anything, the raid on bin Laden’s hideout, which was just down the street from a major Pakistani military installation, highlighted the failure of both Bush and Obama to reevaluate and reconfigure America’s alliance in light of the new realities of the global jihad. Pakistan may have been an ally during the Cold War, but it certainly was not by the twenty-first century.
There is much more. Read the rest here.