Try as he might to salvage what’s left of his tarnished legacy, President Obama can’t seem to avoid humiliating himself on his way out of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. A year or two ago it became painfully apparent that George W. Bush was no longer a viable excuse for Mr. Obama’s own failings and since that time our outgoing Lame-Duck-in-Chief has been grasping desperately for some new bogeyman to point to for the cause of his presidential woes. The latest bogeyman/strawman/red herring has in recent months become Russia and its strongman president, Vladmir Putin. I won’t get into the gory details of the tenuous link proposed between the Kremlin and the DNC hacks, it’s been rehashed ad nauseum at this point. What’s most interesting to me are Mr. Obama’s self-inflicted humiliations and those doled out to him by his nemesis in Moscow.
In 2008, Obama ran as the cool candidate who was hip and in touch with young people and the trends of an ever evolving 21st century cultural zeitgeist. He couldn’t be rattled, he couldn’t be thrown off his game, even by a professional politico such as Hillary Clinton. He was transcendent in his appraisal of our national circumstances and his gravitas helped carry him to an historic victory which would have otherwise been praise-worthy if it weren’t for the fact that his presidency has been an almost complete failure by most objective standards.
Watching the cool candidate of 2008 flailing in his final days as POTUS is an enlightening window into his true character.
Obama was all in behind his once-rival, once-underling, Hillary Clinton in her bid to claim the throne he had been keeping warm for her. His efforts, and the efforts of the billionaire donor class that buoyed Mrs. Clinton’s doomed campaign, were totally wasted. He immediately attached his legacy to the continuance of Democratic dominance over the White House and when Mrs. Clinton lost so did his dream of perpetuating the mediocre leadership he had established over his two terms in office. Being the insufferable ego-maniac that he is, Mr. Obama couldn’t come to grips with the obvious reality that it was his fault his policies and party came to be destroyed throughout the course of his tenure as president.
Since coming into office we’ve all watched his signature healthcare legislation wreak havoc on the insurance market and it now appears set to be entirely repealed by the Republicans, a damning rebuke of the president’s name and his hapless, hyper-partisan policy making. The Democratic Party itself has been eviscerated under Obama’s watch: the house belongs to the Republicans and the Senate is, for the most part, under their control as well. Governorships and state legislative bodies have largely fallen under control of the Grand Old Party, putting the conservative movement into a position of power it hasn’t enjoyed for nearly a century.
Thanks Obama.
On almost every front Mr. Obama has been a failure, not only to his party but to the nation, and the planet in general. Instead of engaging in intrepid introspection after his failures, he has instead looked outward to the world he failed for some answer to what he cannot imagine, that is, his personal defeats. When news broke of alleged Russian interference in our most recent election, Mr. Obama jumped at the chance to shirk the responsibilities of his many disappointments and preserve his ignoble legacy.
What evidence has the president presented to the public to link Moscow to these alleged hacks? None. Not a single shred of evidence, let alone proof, has been provided by Mr. Obama or his minions in our highly politicized “intelligence” community. So desperate to prove the success and imaginary testicular fortitude of his administration, Obama has resorted to hearsay, conjecture, and poorly manufactured circumstantial evidence to project his flaws abroad. And of course it hasn’t been enough for Mr. Obama to merely point the finger, he must also levy effete, farcical punishments against Russia for their unsubstantiated role in meddling in our democractic processes.
In response to these unproven incursions into our election, Mr. Obama expelled a number of Russian diplomats from our country and sanctioned various Russian intelligence operatives. He promised the response would also include actions which would not be publicly delineated, a promise that would be ominous if not for the impotency of his public retaliation against Moscow. Vladmir Putin’s response to these limp-wristed flailings has been pure class: Against the advice of his advisors, the Russian autocrat has taken the high road and abrogated his right to strike back at US diplomatic hostility and in doing so Mr. Putin has made a mockery of the Obama strategy of “going high when they go low”. Putin has always been the bigger man than Obama, this latest manuever is more proof of his superior stature.
(Mr. Obama is adept at overplaying his hand; witness his pink line in Syria, the inability of the Pivot to Asia to dissaude China from expanding its influence, his tepid cowardice in the face of the Arab Spring, and his craven groveling to the House of Saud when they demanded he subsidize their brutality against Yemen. I could go on but I think you get the picture…)
Not content to confine his tantrum to the realm of diplomacy, Mr. Obama has doubled down on his arrogant assertiveness by reportedly placing special forces on the Lithuanian border with Russia. The motive is no doubt to counter so-called Russian aggression, a surprising change in priority for the Obama administration considering its flaccid response to the legal and popular annexation of Crimea, as well as Russian military action in eastern Ukraine. But this is only half the story. No one seems to remember, or they choose not to mention, that the establishment of a neo-fascist government in Kiev was a policy foisted on eastern Europe by Mr. Obama’s administration.
It bares brief mention that Mr. Obama’s employment of the perennial Washington, D.C. tactic of regime change obliterates his pet “hope and change” narrative of 2008; he’s as much a business-as-usual American president as any before him. More significant, however, is the absurd notion that the US can topple democratically elected governments to no end while simultaneously being a paragon of virtue and a global leader for freedom and democracy. Washington, D.C. may act with impunity to aggreive Russia, But when Russia displays any counter aggression they are, to our government and its media cronies, an unprovoked rogue nation with a bloodthirsty maniac at its helm. The United States can destroy entire Arab nations on the basis of faulty intelligence while retaining its luster, yet Russia is an enemy of liberty when it enters Georgia or Ukraine under the legitimate pretense of shielding its own from foreign violence.
Double standards are nothing new to the regime in Washington, D.C. and the fawning spin-doctors of our mainstream media. But Mr. Obama has somehow found a way to take this kind of petulant, self-righteous finger pointing and hypocrisy to a new level. Obsessed with his image and legacy, Barack Obama doesn’t care how much damage he does to the country and world on his way out the door, just so long as he can sleep at night knowing he was able to fool his simpering sycophants into believing his hype as much as he does.
It seems the legacy of this sorry excuse for a man will be one of a feckless team player, an empty-suit indistinguishable from his antiquated Cold War predecessors who demand Russia be our perpetual enemy.
Original artwork by Jesse Comeau
Obama is being supported in his attacks on Putin by the Republican looney war hawks led by McCain.
sure bud
Exactly, “Looney War Hawks”
the repubs should be ashamed , they did not hurt obama half as much as they hurt our country.