Fundamentally Transforming the United States of America

Barack Hussein Obama has fulfilled that promise, at the very least.

Roger Kimball:

The economy: During Obama’s first term, the credit rating of the United States was downgraded by S&P for the first time in history. [and] ... According to a report released in 2012 by the Federal Reserve, Americans have seen their wealth plummet by 40 percent over the past few years. 

Race relations: They are in a rawer state than I can remember thanks to a president who played the race card at every opportunity. The Cambridge police were “stupid,” according to the president, in the way they handled the case of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., famous Harvard huckster, back in 2009. If he had had a son, said the president, he would “look like” the thug Trayvon Martin, who jumped George Zimmerman and was shot dead by Zimmerman while pounding his head into the concrete sidewalk.

And then there’s the position of the United States on the world stage. ... “Not since the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991,” the historian Conrad Black observed yesterday, “and prior to that the fall of France in 1940, has there been so swift an erosion of the world influence of a Great Power as we are witnessing with the United States.”

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For the America-hating, transnational progressive Left, the disaster that is Obama must have been fun at first: warm and fuzzy speeches in Cairo about how, deep down, Islam is as American as apple pie, economically suicidal decisions like the veto of the Keystone pipeline, unleashing the Internal Revenue Service against groups that promoted things like patriotism or the tea party: wot larks! ... The long march through the institutions of bourgeois capitalism is an amusing trek so long as you are the one giving the marching orders and commanding the funds and the security to make sure that, if there is any rough stuff, you are well out of it. But when that changes? If there is a tune everyone will remember from the Obama administration, it will the percussive sound of scurrying feet, rodent feet hurrying to get off the ship.

So stayed tuned. Obama drew (or didn’t draw: depends when you ask him) a “red line” about Syria: ... Meanwhile, alas, Michael Morell, deputy director of the CIA, recently said that toppling Assad would be the biggest threat in the world to U.S. security. All those weapons, all those al-Qaeda groups: a bad mixture. Scurry, scurry, scurry. “I don’t remember a time,” said Morell, “when there have been so many national security issues on the front burner as there are today.” Thank goodness we have John “reporting for duty” Kerry and Barack Obama handling things. Feeling better?

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