by Jim Butler
Sangamon County Rifle Association President
The Obama administration’s Presidency has been an unmitigated disaster in terms of unemployment, profligate deficit spending and miserable GDP growth – to say nothing of his Supreme Court appointments.
Ideologically, Obama has shown in both word and deed that he rejects America’s founding ideals. America’s greatness, in Obama’s world, is not found in our freedom, protection of private property, rugged individualism, equal opportunity, merit-based achievement, and entrepreneurship. Instead, Obama believes success depends on government to stimulate the economy, initiate and control business activity, and spread the wealth equally regardless of the effort expended.
Obama’s cap-and-trade federal takeover was rejected by his own Democratic Senate, so he has taken his unilateral war on fossil fuels to bureaucratic fiats. Regulations that are killing coal, a no-brainer pipeline (Keystone) Obama rejected and drilling moratoriums have cost Americans tens, if not hundreds of thousands of high-paying jobs and raised gasoline prices to historical highs.
His Obamacare law gives us massive new taxes and negative effects on quality, access and affordability of medicine. It has become so unpopular with voters that Obama barely mentions it.
Barrack Obama has a dreadful record of callous disregard for the best interests of the American people as he has pursued an unrelenting drive to expand the federal bureaucracy, increase tax rates, and implement radical left-wing policies, including gutting our military – just like another president in our past named Jimmy Carter.
President Obama chose to alienate America’s closest allies including Great Britain and also Israel, America’s oldest and most loyal ally in the Middle East. He visits Muslim countries while ignoring allies. He snubs the national leaders of allied nations, especially Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu time and time again.
Domestically, President Obama admits he’s coming for our guns, telling Sarah Brady, “We are working on gun control, but under the radar.”
Obama and his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton signaled the UN that America supports steps toward global civilian disarmament and would have signed onto a UN gun ban treaty.
President Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. has qualified himself to join Harry M. Daugherty and John Mitchell as the most disgraceful attorneys general. But even Daugherty’s Teapot Dome mischief and Mitchell’s stonewalling defense of a felonious president cannot match the injury to the rule of law and American national security that Eric Holder has caused in his brief three years in office. The havoc Holder has created goes far beyond corruption on any single issue. The damage he has done crosses all components of the Department of Justice, and has trickled down to infect the systems of law and legal jurisprudence throughout the country.
In a 1995 speech, preserved on C-SPAN, Holder advocated “brainwashing” (his word) Americans to make them oppose possession of guns.
Does Holder’s Project Fast and Furious program to illegally export firearms and munitions to Mexico ring a bell?
Even worse, it seems that President Obama is strangely indifferent to the looming fiscal cliff that his policies have caused as he pursues his transformation of the United States of America to a European-style-democratic-socialist welfare state.
Is this the legacy we want to leave to our future generations?