Sunday, September 9, 2012

President Obama is Like a Bad College Roommate

college roommates_Cropped 
I had a roommate in college who never did the dishes. I’d come home and find him on the couch watching TV. The kitchen would smell like left over Tuna Helper, and the sink would be full. I would start to do the dishes, and my roommate would say from the couch, speaking over the TV, “I was gonna do’em!” But he never did. And he never got off the couch to help me. It got to the point where I was mildly amused at the whole thing, and I would do the dishes just so that I could hear him say, “I was gonna do’em.”
I listened to Obama’s speech Thursday night on the radio. I was laughing at it with my wife because he kind of reminded me of my roommate. If Romney wins in November, and the Republicans start to turn things around (fingers crossed), Obama will be there watching, saying, “I was gonna do it!” But he never did. He had his chance. He made things worse, and he didn’t do anything that he promised.
Fewer people are employed now than four years ago. He promised that unemployment would go down to 6%, but it’s never gone below 8% the past three years, and that’s after they’ve fudged the numbers to make it as low as possible. The new jobless numbers are in. They show that only 96,000 jobs were added in the month of August, dropping the unemployment rate to 8.1%, not much better than where it was. And what they won’t tell you is that people are dropping out of the workforce altogether because they can’t find work.
And the reality is that the official unemployment numbers are exclusionary, with the actual rate being nearly 25%. Not that it's all Obama's fault, or Bush's. They are simply figureheads, but both parties are equally responsible for the massive interventionist failure into the US economy, just as both are nearly inept in resolving the issues they create.
Obama said four years ago that Bush was “unpatriotic” for adding $4 trillion to the national debt, but he has added over $5 trillion, more than any other president. He promised to at least cut the deficit in half by this year, but it’s still over a trillion dollars.
Six of one...
He truly has been the “food stamp” president. Fifteen percent of Americans are now on food stamps. That’s over 46 million Americans. Over the past four years, food stamp spending doubled to over $75 billion. He even promised that if he didn’t have the economy fixed by the end of his first term, he would forgo a second term. Well, we know that he’s not about to drop out of the race anytime soon, so I guess his definition of “fixed” is different from ours. Maybe he thinks he has “fixed” the economy.
Even on foreign policy, he hasn’t been able to keep his promises to his own base’s supposedly anti-war sentiment. Obama, the “anti-war” president was responsible for the troop surge to Afghanistan, where troops are scheduled to remain until 2024. Obama hasn’t closed Guantanomo Bay, and it doesn’t look like he intends to. He indicated in his acceptance speech that he “ended the war in Iraq,” but actually he didn’t. The initial agreement for troop withdrawal was negotiated by President Bush in 2008, and the last of the troops to leave were scheduled to leave at the end of 2011, but that had nothing to do with Obama.
And then there’s the debacle in Libya, where Obama circumvented the Constitution and authorized a military strike with NATO forces. But that wasn’t a war. It was a “humanitarian mission.”
The one thing Obama has is Osama bin Laden, but even that is questionable because the White House’s account of the incident changed multiple times. We still don’t even know what really happened. It’s a very touchy subject with Obama’s administration. So touchy, that the Pentagon is threatening to sue the Seal Team 6 member who wrote a book detailing the mission to get bin Laden. There must be something in that book that Obama’s administration does not want anybody else to see. So, does Obama even have bin Laden to brag about? I don’t think so. Besides, he didn’t get him. He only authorized the mission.
Overall, the economy is worse. Gas prices are higher. Inflation is on the rise. People’s median incomes are lower. We’re less safe. The national finances are much worse. Obama talked about “hope” and “change” in his speech. Here’s hoping we have change this November.

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