By Dennis Prager
Tuesday, October 29, 2013
I have been broadcasting for 31 years and writing for
longer than that. I do not recall ever saying on radio or in print that a
president is doing lasting damage to our country. I did not like the
presidencies of Jimmy Carter (the last Democrat I voted for) or Bill Clinton.
Nor did I care for the "compassionate conservatism" of George W.
Bush. In modern political parlance "compassionate" is a euphemism for
ever-expanding government.
But I have never written or broadcast that our country
was being seriously damaged by a president. So it is with great sadness that I
write that President Barack Obama has done and continues to do major damage to
America. The only question is whether this can ever be undone.
This is equally true domestically and internationally.
Domestically, his policies have gravely impacted the
American economy.
He has overseen the weakest recovery from a recession in
modern American history.
He has mired the country in unprecedented levels of debt:
about $6.5 trillion dollars in five years (this after calling his predecessor
"unpatriotic" for adding nearly $5 trillion in eight years).
He has fashioned a country in which more Americans now
receive government aid -- means-tested, let alone non-means tested -- than work
full-time.
He has no method of paying for this debt other than
printing more money -- thereby surreptitiously taxing everyone through
inflation, including the poor he claims to be helping, and cheapening the
dollar to the point that some countries are talking another reserve currency --
and saddling the next generations with enormous debts.
With his 2,500-page Affordable Care Act, he has made it
impossible for hundreds of thousands, soon millions, of Americans to keep their
individual or employee-sponsored group health insurance; he has stymied
American medical innovation with an utterly destructive tax on medical devices;
and he has caused hundreds of thousands of workers to lose full-time jobs
because of the health care costs imposed by Obamacare on employers.
His Internal Revenue Service used its unparalleled power
to stymie political dissent. No one has been held accountable.
His ambassador to Libya and three other Americans were
murdered by terrorists in Benghazi, Libya. No one has been blamed. The only
blame the Obama administration has leveled was on a video maker in California
who had nothing to do with the assault.
In this president's White House, the buck stops nowhere.
Among presidents in modern American history, he has also
been a uniquely divisive force. It began with his forcing Obamacare through
Congress -- the only major legislation in American history to be passed with no
votes from the opposition party.
Though he has had a unique opportunity to do so, he has
not only not helped heal racial tensions, he has exacerbated them. His
intrusions into the Trayvon Martin affair ("If I had a son, he'd look like
Trayvon") and into the confrontation between a white police officer and a
black Harvard professor (the police "acted stupidly") were
unwarranted, irresponsible, demagogic and, most of all, divisive.
He should have been reassuring black Americans that
America is in fact the least racist country in the world -- something he should
know as well anybody, having been raised only by whites and being the first
black elected the leader of a white-majority nation. Instead, he echoed the
inflammatory speech of professional race-baiters such as Al Sharpton and Jesse
Jackson.
He has also divided the country by economic class, using
classic Marxist language against "the rich" and "corporate
profits."
Regarding America in the world, he has been, if possible,
even more damaging. The United States is at its weakest, has fewer allies, and
has less military and diplomatic influence than at any time since before World
War I.
One wonders if there is a remaining ally nation that
trusts him. And worse, no American enemy fears him. If you are a free movement
(the democratic Iranian and Syrian oppositions) or a free country (Israel), you
have little or no reason to believe that you have a steadfast ally in the
United States.
Even non-democratic allies no longer trust America.
Barack Obama has alienated our most important and longest standing Arab allies,
Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Both the anti-Muslim Brotherhood and the anti-Iran Arab
states have lost respect for him.
And his complete withdrawal of American troops from Iraq
has left that country with weekly bloodbaths.
Virtually nothing Barack Obama has done has left America
or the world better since he became president. Nearly everything he has touched
has been made worse.
He did, however, promise before the 2008 election that
"We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States
of America." That is the one promise he has kept.
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