BARACK OBAMA A Major Disaster Waiting to Happen for America
A Savior or a Charlatan?
Barack Obama has emerged from obscurity to being the Democrat presidential nominee in a little over 3 years as a U.S. Senator with no significant legislative accomplishments or political leadership track record. His popularity has soared based on a message of hope, change and moving beyond politics as usual. His charismatic oratory has caused many to view him as a political savior who will lead America to the promised land of political peace, unity and prosperity for all. Others view him as nothing more than an inexperienced political charlatan with a gift for drawing people to his personality cult who would lead America to its economic destruction. What is the reality?
Webster's dictionary defines the word 'charlatan' as "one making noisy or showy pretenses to knowledge or ability : Fraud, Faker". Emotionally mature and rational people recognize 'charlatans' by their transparent promoting of their knowledge and abilities far beyond their life experience and proven capabilities, and by their use of charismatic oratory, and deceptions to obfuscate their inabilities and advance their personal desires and ambitions at the expense of trusting people in need or distress. At the core of every 'charlatan' is a massive ego that believes itself to be superior to everyone else, and that views its higher intellect as a clever means to deceive and manipulate the ignorance of others to achieve its personal goals.
Let's examine the facts and see if Mr. Obama matches the profile of savior or charlatan.
Barack Obama's Appeal
This very inexperienced but charismatic phenom has emerged as a political force largely in response to the widespread disillusionment caused by Iraq and the economy as well as President Bush's inability or refusal to effectively articulate the wisdom of his own policies or to systematically expose the Democrat's brazen demagoguery on every major issue.
President Bush's serious leadership deficiencies have caused many Americans to yearn for a President that understands their problems, that has the experience and insights to be a great leader and the oratory skills to articulate the wisdom of their policies while inspiring hope and confidence in the future. In response to this desire for strong leadership, many Americans have rushed to the conclusion that Barack Obama possesses these qualities and deserves to be President without giving any serious consideration to his true qualifications to be President or the credibility, wisdom or consequences of the positions he advocates on the major issues.
Therefore, it seems appropriate to objectively consider Mr. Obama's qualifications to be Commander in Chief and the guardian of the American economy as well as the real world risks, benefits and consequences of his suggestions for addressing the problems that all American's face together. One way to approach this analysis is to examine Mr. Obama's positives and negatives as they relate to his qualifications to be President.
Barack Obama's Positives
He is a charismatic orator who has inspired millions of followers to join his personality cult with promises of change and hope for the future by relieving them from the tyranny of their economic oppressors. Of course, Adolf Hitler, and Vladimir Lenin used these same abilities and tactics so is this quality a positive or a negative?
He is not President Bush. Of course neither are Hillary or McCain. A push at best.
He has been a U.S. Senator for just over three years. Of course, he has demonstrated no innovation or leadership ability on any major legislation during his tenure that would support his claims of being an imaginative non-partisan uniter. To the contrary, he has been one of the most partisan Senators who has embraced the most extremist left wing view points in his quest to ingratiate himself with the big money donors on the extreme liberal fringe. Both Hillary and McCain have much more impressive legislative and leadership credentials.
Based on the dearth of positives in Mr. Obama's profile, one must conclude that his whole claim to being qualified to be President is grounded in his superior intellect, wisdom, ideas and inspirational oratory skills.
Barack Obama's Negatives
He has no material economic, military, diplomatic or foreign policy experience.
He has no significant executive or business experience.
Before brief stints as an often absent Illinois state senator and U.S. Senator, his top professional experience was as a junior associate at a minor law firm, and as a "community" organizer. At least 50 million Americans have better qualifications to be President.
He has no proven leadership ability beyond flowery oratory that is long on pandering and demagoguery and completely devoid of credible substance.
He has claimed a hate mongering, racist, anti-American pastor as spiritual adviser for 20 years.
He has been revealed to be arrogant, condescending and elitist toward middle and lower income
Americans who are the very people whose cause he professes to champion.
He claims to be a uniter even as he aggressively uses divisive racist and socialist economic class warfare tactics.
He has associated with extremist radicals and shady characters for decades.
He believes the solution to every problem is a government handout or
program paid for by unAmerican soak the "rich" tax increases.
He believes taxes should be radically raised on the 25% of Americans who are already
paying 86% of Federal income taxes to give a tax cut to the 75% of
Americans who are only paying 14% of federal income taxes. This is nothing more than unAmerican, socialist wealth redistribution.
He believes that income taxes should be raised on the top 25% of wage earners
who are already paying 86% of federal personal income taxes to pay for
1) Handouts, health care and education for the poor, 2) tax cuts for the "overburdened" middle class, 3) carbon taxes to fix a global warming problem that does not exist, 4) handouts to the NEA, unions and trial lawyers for their political support, 5) more useless ethanol subsidies to farmers for their support, 6) giving citizenship and full food stamps, Medicare, health care and social security benefits to 15 million illegal aliens in exchange for their long term voting support, 7) fixing the Medicare/social security financial debacle, 8) dubious "clean" energy initiatives that have no hope of materially reducing the 21 million barrels of oil America consumes every day, and 9) balancing the Federal budget. All of this is financially impossible and would destroy the economy, but he promises it anyway.
He believes going into Iraq was a "massive" strategic blunder but he thinks abandoning Iraq
to control by America's worst enemies and thereby triggering a huge oil
price spike that would devastate the global economy is a brilliant strategy.
He claims he can save America $125 billion per year by leaving Iraq even though leaving Iraq will cause America's annual oil costs to rise by many multiples of $125 billion.
He believes massive tax increases, higher social spending, a massive and costly new health care entitlement and abandoning Iraq
to chaos will spark economic growth when every credible economic theory
indicates each of these measures would damage the economy.
He believes it is a good idea to create a massive and costly new health care entitlement just as millions of baby boomers are retiring and placing ever increasing financial strains of Medicare and social security.
He offers no credible economic growth agenda, but he does offer destructive, socialist tax and spend and isolationist programs to individual voter groups for their support with no regard for the very negative effects on the economy.
He claims the 2003 Bush tax cuts should end in 2010 because they were an
unfair tax break for the "rich" even though the bottom 75% of wage
earners saw their share of Federal taxes drop from 16% to 14% between
2000 and 2005 while the top 25% saw their's increase from 84% to 86%.
He claims the 2003 Bush tax cuts are the cause of high federal deficits
even though federal income tax receipts increased by 51% from 2003 to
2006 while the federal deficit fell from $378 billion in 2003 to $168
billion in 2007.
He blames the Republicans for the mortgage, banking and real estate crisis
even though mortgages, banking and real estate were all thriving before the Democrats took control of Congress.
He blames Republicans for the economic
slowdown even though the USA economy was booming (5% annualized GDP
growth rate in 3Q2007) until 8 months after the Democrats took control
of Congress and began demanding higher taxes, higher government
spending and an idiotic retreat from Iraq that sparked a $77 per barrel increase in the price of oil that is costing Americans over $550 billion more per year.
He blames Iraq costs for the economic slowdown even though Iraq is costing 75% of Americans less than $5 per person per month and Iraq costs have had a much smaller negative economic effect than Obama's policies on Iraq and taxes and federal spending.
He conveniently ignores the fact that everything except Iraq has gotten a lot worse in America since the Democrats took control of Congress with their pacifist/socialist agenda and Iraq has improved in spite of the Democrats, not because of them.
He believes it is a bad idea to continue to spend the $5 per person per month that 75% of Americans are investing in Iraq to deter huge further oil price increases that would wreck the economy and their financial well being while ideally positioning Al Qaeda and Iran to threaten the USA more aggressively.
He offers no solutions to the oil price crisis other than "windfall profit" taxes on oil companies that would increase gasoline costs and sap drilling funds. He clings to the ridiculous notion that "energy independence" can be achieved through unproven "clean" energy technologies that have very limited and very long term potential, but he opposes major incentives for new nuclear and clean coal power plants construction as well as offshore, shale, ANWR and Iraq stabilization and drilling that represent the only realistic means to rapidly reduce oil prices.
He is happy about higher oil prices because it keeps the economy sluggish so he can blame the Republicans and win votes from people who are in economic distress that he helped create. He also likes the fact that high oil prices offers him the opportunity to collect more income tax revenues from the oil companies while he demagogues the "greedy" oil companies who are paying 75% of their true pretax incomes in taxes. These huge additional Federal revenues allow Obama the chance to promise more pay offs to his voting constituencies once he is in office.
He cynically claims to be an advocate for the "poor" and "middle class" even as he opposes all serious means to reduce high oil prices that have a disproportionate negative financial effect on the poor and "middle class".
He and the Democrats created the oil price disaster by opposing every credible means to increase energy production, and demanding an unconditional retreat from Iraq, and yet Obama blames Republicans for high oil prices.
He rages against the economic and social injustices of America even as he personally benefits from living the American dream.
He has abstained or avoided votes on tough issues throughout his political career to maintain his political viability.
He has twice voted not to fund America's troops in Iraq to serve his political money masters at MoveOn.org.
He talks the talk of uniting America even though he is an extremist
liberal who has never walked the walk of achieving bipartisan consensus
on anything.
He relentlessly panders to workers on NAFTA in public even as he demeans their viewpoint in private.
He believes tyrants and terrorists are worthy negotiation partners that
would not threaten American interests if the USA abandons the Middle
East.
He wants to return America to a pre 9/11 legalistic approach to dealing with terrorists that completely failed to prevent all the terrorist attacks of the 1990s and 9/11. He is not sharp enough to understand that America must be proactive in preventing terrorist attacks before they occur rather than waiting for them to occur and then tracking down the main perpetrators who are usually already dead.
He believes it is okay to leave Iraq to control by Al Qaeda and Iran, the largest state sponsor of terror, where they would be ideally positioned to intimidate, undermine, threaten and possibly achieve their goals of ousting the "apostate" Saudi regime who happens to control the only excess oil supply on earth.
Just to further his personal political ambitions, he would
recklessly risk America's national security and the financial well
being of all Americans by abandoning Iraq to chaos as a political pay off to his big time money donors at MoveOn.org.
To secure the Democrat nomination, Obama promised to renegotiate NAFTA, to negotiate with Iran, Cuba and Venezuela without preconditions, to use public finance of his Presidential campaign, and to filibuster of FISA on retroactive telecom immunity. He has already verbally reneged on every one of these promises in a cynical move to appeal to moderate voters in the general election. Based on these blatant, self serving reversals, how can any serious person trust anything he says?
The
list of Mr. Obama's known positives are very few and highly questionable while the huge volume of his negatives are compelling evidence that he is completely unqualified to be President. Americans already
know more than enough about Mr. Obama for any rational person to determine
that he is a disaster waiting to happen for America.
When considering their disillusionment as they vote in November, Americans should remember the timeless axiom that things are never so
bad they cannot get a lot worse if people allow their adolescent
level emotions to override their adult common sense, and good judgment.
If the true substance of the issues matters to you, please explore the rest of this site for a fact and reality check on the major issues before you commit economic suicide by voting for Obama or any other Democrat in November.
