BY CHRISTOPHER G. ADAMO – By now everybody who regularly receives e-mail “forwards” has seen the one showing Barack Obama ostensibly standing in front of a devastated landscape that clearly is meant to represent the United States under his stewardship. The caption reads, “My work here is done.” Accusations of partisanship and racism aside, the message conveyed is so profound because it succinctly reflects the determined efforts of the Obama White House to radically change America over the past two and a half years.
The Standard and Poors downgrade of America’s credit rating during this past week, and the market upheaval that has followed are certainly not the first financial fiascos fomented and overseen by the current administration. Unfortunately, they are not likely to be the last. Nor has the country fared any better in other areas, whether on the diplomatic front, the culture war, or in regards to America’s dwindling technical prowess.
So fast and furious have been the concerted assaults on the institutions and foundations of the nation that the erosion and destruction is no longer easy to assess from the perspective of individual events. Rather, in retrospect it now appears more as a grim and depressing blur of havoc inflicted continually on the nation in the past thirty-two months, with little immediate relief in sight. Nevertheless, some (but certainly not all) of the more reprehensible milestones need to be revisited, in order to maintain a proper evaluation of this administration and the danger it continues to pose with each passing day.
The financial upheaval of the past week is only a snapshot of efforts, begun even before Obama’s inauguration, to radically transform the nation’s economy from one of free markets and individual initiative to a collectivist autocracy in which the resources of the people are controlled and dispersed by the ruling elite. The recent anxieties experienced by everyone from professional market watchers to average citizens on Mainstreet are fully warranted. If this administration is able to achieve its ultimate goals, the former means of pursuing individual livelihoods and exercising freedoms will be soon eradicated, and the nation’s place on the world stage ultimately eliminated.
From the first days of the Obama White House, an anti-capitalist, anti-western agenda was clearly being implemented. Among Obama’s first acts after being inaugurated was the removal of a statue of Winston Churchill (a gift to America by the government of Great Britain) from the Oval Office. But the item was not merely relegated to some lesser location. It was sent back to the British government as an obvious insult against a staunch and reliable ally.
Following on the heels of that childish and petty act were a series of groveling visitations before foreign leaders who harbor unrestrained hostility towards America. At the expense of the nation and its reputation, Obama did his best to elevate himself above former U.S. policy and actions, on which he repeatedly laid blame for any simmering resentment among America’s enemies. Muslim despots and South American Marxists could count on warm embraces and adulation from him, while he repeatedly expressed scorn for this nation in their presence.
Meanwhile, he very proudly dismantled the nuclear shield that America had been establishing over Eastern Europe, thus leaving the entire region vulnerable to attacks from rogue middle-eastern nations and conceivably susceptible to the lingering musings of Russian expansionists. With cold deliberation, he took a situation that had been quietly moving towards stability and security, and shredded the protections it offered to potential allies. Meanwhile, amid empty platitudes and reassurances from his cabinet that America’s new outreach would garner stable and devoted friends in the Muslim world, the Iranians have stepped up their efforts to build both nuclear weapons and the missile technology needed to deliver them
It is a sad testament that, on July 21, the final landing of the Space Shuttle Atlantis at Cape Canaveral Florida signaled not only the end of that program, but the dismantling of America’s ability to even put a human being into orbit. Having cancelled the Constellation program, which was planned both as a successor to the Shuttle as well as a stepping-stone towards renewed American exploration of the moon and beyond, Obama decried it as excessively expensive and unnecessary. In this he reflected the attitudes of American leftists during the 1960s, who castigated the nation over the cost and aggressiveness of the Apollo program which, in a defining battle front of the “Cold War,” achieved President Kennedy’s goal of landing a man on the moon before the end of that decade.
According to the liberal socialists of that time, that money could have been better spent back here on earth by handing it out in various social/welfare programs. Clearly, Barack Obama stands in agreement with them, having squandered $787 billion with the single stroke of his pen on February 18, 2009 when he signed his bogusly titled “Stimulus” giveaway. That incomprehensible sum was more than thirty times the cost of getting Armstrong and Aldrin to the moon’s surface. Yet now, barely two years later, the nation has absolutely nothing to show for that enormous raid on the nation’s coffers.
Elsewhere, Attorney General Eric Holder, Obama’s minion at the Department of Justice, saw to it that the nation’s top law-enforcement agency was henceforth mutated into a thoroughly politicized tool of the left. Most notably, by refusing to prosecute members of the “New Black Panthers” who interfered with voting in the 2008 elections, Holder has since made it clear on numerous occasions that, under his watch, the ultimate purpose of that organization is to advance the liberal agenda. Selective enforcement of “justice,” based on the political ideology of those in question, is no justice at all. But it is par for the course for the current White House.
While no discussion of the horrendous damage done to America by Obama and his cronies would be complete without mention of their crowning affront to the nation known as Obamacare, space does not allow a thorough examination of the manifold threats it poses. Nor can anything less than an entire volume be properly devoted to the many affronts to the Constitution in both its passage by a corrupt congress and the manner in which it is intended to be implemented.
Suffice to say that the devastation to the nation is real and ongoing. If America is to avoid the slippery slope facing it on so many fronts or, the catastrophic end game the current situation portends, at the next election, the government must be expunged of both this current administration and any remnant of the mindset that has enabled its abhorrent actions.