The last 3½ years have seen a lot of this slogan. While the hope—for the better—waned long ago, President Obama has, in fact, achieved quite a lot in the way of change. Here are some of those changes:
He got Obamacare rammed through, albeit in the dark of night in a wholly, cynically, partisan manner, and he did it without a single Progressive (or Republican, come to that) congressman actually reading the bill prior to voting on it—some proud in their ignorance. This bill achieves quite a lot: it lets children extend their childhoods and parental dependencies to their 26th year, by staying on mumsy’s and popsy’s health insurance policies. It adds to the Federal deficit with its trillion-dollar costs. It lets you, taxpayers, pay for coverage for an additional 20+ million health insurees. It nationalizes the health care and health insurance industries.
He got Dodd-Frank rammed through in the same manner and with the same level of Congressional ignorance. And pride of ignorance. This bill also achieves quite a lot. It creates a fourth branch of government in the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Financial Stability Oversight Council. These two agencies are wholly unaccountable to the Congress—and so to us—are not under control of the President, and at least the CFPB’s budget comes, on demand, from the Federal Reserve System. Yet these two will, single-handedly and without oversight, determine whether financial institutions will be allowed to do business (vis., extend loans or credit of any sort—even at your corner mom and pop grocery store) and the conditions under which they will be allowed to do so.
He’s achieved a trillion-dollar cut in our defense capacity at a time of rising PRC aggressiveness, a soon-to-be-nuclear-armed Iran, and an expansive, grasping Russia. This includes a shrinking Navy, a gutted Army, and an Air Force with little capacity for anything other than looking pretty in fly-bys.
In an apparent nod to an earlier Secretary of State, Henry Stimson, he’s leaking every cyber-warfare and counter-terrorism secret we used to have to the news outlets. Apparently, if we have no secrets, other gentlemen have no need to resist the temptation to read ours. Or he subscribes to the theory that if we tell our enemies everything we have, we don’t need to spend our resources trying to figure out what they know about us (another savings!). Or both.
He’s instructed his DoD to desist using unpleasant interrogation techniques. And, since he believes our enemies have no knowledge of anything that’s of intelligence value at all, he’s instituted a program of killing them rather than capturing them and having to figure out how to hold them and question them. And he brags about personally selecting, by name, the ones that are to be assassinated—a Roman circus thumbs down from the Emperor.
No, Obama has wrought enormous change. Just all of it has been destructive of our great nation.
We need to fix this.