Tuesday, July 8, 2014

Obama's Long Fall

Joseph Curl cites a new Quinnipiac poll in support of his claim that President Obama is the worst president of our lifetime. I don't think polls are a good measure of such things, though. After all, the second worst president in the poll was George W. Bush who was ranked worse than both Carter and Nixon, which is absurd. Whether the current president is the worst or not - I think a strong case can be made on the basis of evidence unrelated to polls that he is - he has certainly made himself unpopular with everyone but liberal Democrats who stick with him, I believe, only because he's their guy on the left. Many liberals are embarrassed by the utter ineptness he has displayed throughout his term, but Obama's ideology is their ideology and they're not going to throw him overboard as long as he remains the symbol of modern progressivism.

Yet the policies of this administration have been disastrous. A piece at the Daily Beast lays the Iraq debacle largely at the feet of a dithering White House, and the tragedy on our southern border has been allowed to explode with little sign that the President has any desire to stop it.

Meanwhile, over the last six years the nation has grown to despise a mendacious IRS, an obtrusive NSA, an incompetent State Department which bungled Benghazi, a worse than incompetent HHS which bungled the Obamacare rollout, a corrupt Veterans Affairs Department, and a Department of Justice whose sole mission seems to be to cover the President's derriere.

All of this corruption and incompetence is tolerated, if not encouraged, by the President. He has obstructed every attempt to hold any of the malefactors accountable and has presided over six years of continuous scandal and economic malaise. He has rewarded his corporate and union cronies with taxpayer bailouts and supports, he has done nothing to get the economy firing on all cylinders, and is either deliberately trying to diminish the stature of this country on the world stage, in which case he is malevolent, or is simply a poseur who prefers to be out on the golf course or jetting around the world to solving the country's problems.

Like I said, polls should be treated with skepticism, but they seem to be unanimous nonetheless in showing that it's only a remnant of Americans who have any lingering confidence in Mr. Obama's ability, his intelligence, or his integrity.