Barack Obama: The Damage And The Repair Tab

credit: businessinsider.com

My friend Bookworm—who should be on your daily “to read” list—asked an interesting question recently:  

Two weeks ago, the question at the Watcher’s Council was whether America can recover from Barack Obama’s presidency.  The answers were thoughtful, ranging from optimistic (we’re greater than Obama’s depredations) to cautious (with ruminations about the character of a people that would elect Obama).

I’m interested in your thoughts on the question of whether America can recover from Obama’s fundamental transformations.  We know that if the next president is Hillary or Bernie that we’ll just continue down the same road, only traveling faster and falling harder.  The question is really whether a Republican president can turn around what Obama did.

I’d also like to broaden the question for you:  After reading Obama’s delusional U.N. speech, and looking at the Middle Eastern implosion, the Muslim onslaught on Europe, etc., do you believe a strong conservative president can change the violent chain of events that Obama has unleashed across the globe?  Please remember that you have to figure in what Obama has done to our Armed Forces — everything from reducing our nuclear arsenal to lowering combat standards so that women can take the field.

We must, to answer Bookworm’s questions, at least attempt to define the problem, but where to begin? Barack Obama has so lowered American’s expectations for all politicians, and particularly the Presidency, it’s difficult to pick and choose among the hundreds—probably thousands—of scandals, betrayals, lies, acts of treason, stupidity, cruelty and malignant narcissism that are an everyday companion of Americans paying attention to what is happening within the Beltway.

Mr. Obama has led America—from behind, of course—over an ethical, moral cliff of such proportions it may be impossible to ever climb back. One can argue that America was running full speed for the abyss–with plentiful Republican help– before Mr. Obama took office, and his election—twice—was merely confirmation of that inevitable trend, but there is no question of his smug, gleefully feckless leadership.

He has packed the federal courts with like-minded ideologues. He has destroyed the reputation of the Department of Justice for even-handed enforcement of the law. He has weaponized the IRS, the EPA and countless other agencies, filling them with overt and covert Obamites that will be very difficult to fully identify and remove. His innumerable illegal edicts will likewise be difficult to fully repeal, and the damage they’ve done may never be fully repaired or reversed. The damage he has done to our intelligence agencies and our military will likewise be very difficult to fix, which is, of course, Mr. Obama’s intention, his deranged legacy.

Amazingly, he has even destroyed the reputation and ability of the Secret Service, yet another historic accomplishment of the Age of Obama.

Perhaps no recent outrage that so completely illustrates the absolute lack of morality of Mr. Obama and his followers as the case of Green Beret Sgt. 1^st Class Charles Martland.

Sgt. Martland, posted in Afghanistan, discovered that an Afghan police commander was serially, and brutally, raping little boys. Confronted, the commander admitted and laughed about it. Martland, and another soldier, roughed the rapist up a little. They didn’t put him in the hospital, they didn’t break his bones, they didn’t kill him, they roughed him up—a little–to get his attention and make him understand they were serious.

Martland made the serious mistake of thinking that the leadership of the US Army– America’s soldiers–actually protect the weak, punish the evil, and fight for American principles. He also made the mistake of thinking Barack Obama’s fundamentally transformed America is willing to fight Islamic barbarism.

The Army has involuntarily discharged Sgt. Martland. By all means, take the link and read the story, which is stomach-turning.

The Army has vigorously denied that America has a policy of ignoring the rape of children by our Afghan allies, but every solider that has served there knows that to be a lie. Such things are ignored in favor of cultural diversity, and because we’re dealing with an Islamic tribal culture. Apparently we expect nothing of such people other than that they perpetually remain barbarian deviants. Under Barack Obama, American military assistance has no cost to those reaping its benefits, but serving in the American military surely does. We dare not expect that our allies will refrain from homosexually raping children. So unsure of our national character, so insecure have we become, that we allow the serial rape of children under the bizarre lie that all cultures are equally valid and must be respected.

Under Mr. Obama, we have come to expect that any and every law may be broken by the political elite, who are above the law. But do we really want a military made of the kind of people that condone child rape? Do we really want American men, American fighting men, with such nonexistent values? It is the very American morality and decency of our soldiers that has always distinguished our armed forces from those they fight, and that give Americans the necessary assurance that our military members will not easily be turned against their fellow citizens. No more.

Even if our “leaders” condone the rape of children, there is no need to discharge Sgt. Martland. Chew him out for being politically incorrect if necessary, but transfer him elsewhere rather than discharge him. We cannot afford to lose men of his caliber, unless one judges by Obamite standards, in which case Martland is not nearly sufficiently culturally relative and deviant.

It is this—a high crime and misdemeanor—that should move the Congress to impeach and convict any president. We speak of the homosexual rape of little boys. What greater breach of American moral principle can be imagined?

Most importantly, why doesn’t this move the American people to rise up and demand impeachment?

The answer is simple: we are so overwhelmed—by sheer numbers and by the depth–by Obamite criminality, sloth, incompetence, immorality and stupidity that most Americans have lost the capacity for outrage. Acts that would surely have seen any past president impeached no longer raise more than an annoyed grunt of disgust and shake of the head, for Americans no longer believe the federal government able to equally and properly enforce the law or even to recognize immorality.

And then there is the issue of pardons. I’ve been writing for years about this.  If a Republican wins the White House in 2016, fully investigating and prosecuting all law breaking by federal employees and elected officials during the Obama years is mandatory. Some will be tempted to suggest that, like Gerald Ford with Richard Nixon, we must put it behind us for the good of the country, but the situations are not analogous. Mr. Obama’s corruption so far outpaces that of Mr. Nixon as to relegate any attempt at comparison to farce. If America is not to devolve into a banana republic, if America is to survive, the rule of law must once more be established and social justice forever banished.

Unfortunately, before he leaves office, Mr. Obama will pardon any and everyone that could do him significant damage, and of course, many perennial progressive favorites. He will not do this for humanitarian reasons, but to protect his legacy, and perhaps a few of his closest criminal advisors. The number of pardons he will issue will make undoing the damage he has caused more difficult if not impossible, and will ensure that justice will never be done.

But there is now a far more dangerous issue that may render any attempt to predict whether the damage Mr. Obama has done can be repaired. His foreign policy fecklessness, negligence and narcissistic blundering is finally provoking the kind of aggression weakness always invites.

Barack Obama, model for American youth
credit; news busters.org

Vladimir Putin, a dictator/strong man of the old school, has taken Mr. Obama’s measure and has gone beyond kicking sand in his face directly to pissing in his Kool-Aid. When Barack Obama was smoking dope and playing campus radical, Vladimir Putin was practicing espionage and subversion on an international scale. When Barack Obama was playing community organizer, Vladimir Putin was studying judo and more esoteric means of maiming and killing his opponents. Ralph Peters notes:

The first thing to understand about Vladimir Putin is that he’s not content just to win. He has to destroy his opponents, foreign or domestic.

His deeds may be despicable and his manners far too crude for the Upper West Side, but the guy is a force of nature, a man who — by sheer strength of will — has used a broken country and its rusting military to change the world. Meanwhile, our astonished president sulks like a high school girl stood up by her boyfriend (‘But Vladimir . . . you promised!’).

Now we have reached the point where a Russian general can barge into a US military office in the Middle East and order us to stop flying our aircraft over Syria. Oh, we’re still flying, for now — but you can bet that our flights are restricted and careful to the point of paralysis.

You bet President Obama’s afraid of Putin. Physically, tangibly, change-the-diaper afraid.

Weakness always invites war, and America’s enemies have, for six years, carefully and gradually tested that weakness. What was the last straw? The Iran deal? Did that convince Putin that he could do anything he liked and Obama would do nothing, or was it a more general and gradual assessment of the lack of Mr. Obama’s character and resolve, his unwillingness to defend America, her allies, and liberty? In any case, we now find Russia, Iran, Iran’s client terrorists, and Iraq allied to destroy Syria’s enemies–our allies which we are already abandoning–while claiming to be destroying ISIS.

And if that’s not enough, Putin is ordering America to withdraw our air assets. Make no mistake, he will try to shoot down our aircraft, either fighter to fighter, or by drawing them into a SAM ambush, or both. And when he does, what will Barack Obama do? Putin is betting he’ll do nothing, and he’s almost certainly right.

In Mr. Obama’s remaining time in office, we are going to see the power structure of the world radically redrawn. China is not building artificial island military installations because it likes quaint little islands or has a burning desire to experiment with geology. A few days ago, Russia did not have troops, aircraft and tanks in Syria. One day ago, Russia was not ordering America to abandon the skies over Syria. The fabric of a region, even the world, can change far, far faster than Barack Obama is able to comprehend, let alone act to influence. This is the man, remember, who dithered for a year before giving a green light to the raid that killed Bin Laden.  On the day the raid was finally scheduled to jump off, Mr. Obama waited yet another day, unsure if he would pull the trigger.

China has not been engaging in a massive military build up merely to claim bragging rights. China wants Taiwan and like Putin, may well decide that there will never be a better time than the dwindling age of Obama.

And what of North Korea? If China moves on Taiwan, North Korea could provide a useful diversion in a massive attack on the South. Who knows, the North just might succeed as Obama dithers and fails to act to protect the South, just as he dithers and fails to protect Taiwan.

A great danger is that Obama would be very likely to employ only token measures, sending our aircraft–he wouldn’t send any real ground forces under any circumstances–into combat with rules of engagement that virtually guarantee they’d be shot out of the sky. Could our enemies–and they are many and growing in number and strength, thanks to Mr. Obama–have better encouragement to go for broke? Peters again:

Want to know how low we’ve sunk? The president of France just repeated his demand that Assad has to go. Secretary of State John Kerry, following the pattern of his surrender to the Iranians, has already said that, well, maybe Assad can stay for a while until there’s a “managed transition.”

Never before has a US presidential administration combined such naked cowardice, intellectual arrogance and willful blindness. We don’t have a president — we have a scared child covering his eyes at a horror movie.

And Putin knows it.

Finally, let us not forget that there are a great many nuclear weapons out there, and if Israel, for example, is pushed into a corner, it will have no choice but to go nuclear. Would Putin fail to use nuclear weapons in retaliation? Would Islamists, with Russia watching their back, fail to use nuclear weapons if they had them?

Would Russia provide nucs to its allies if Putin thought it advantageous? Who is going to stop Putin?

credit: popsugar.com

Oh, and by the way, did you know that Hillary Clinton sold half of our uranium output to Russia when she was Secretary of State to enrich the coffers of the Clinton Foundation?

It’s going to be impossible to determine if the damage Obama has done, and has yet to do, is repairable until he relinquishes power once and for all. If a Democrat follows him in office, it will no longer be necessary to ask the question. The answer will be obvious.