By Victor Davis Hanson in PJ Media
Listen to the president and one would think
that he was in office during the financial crisis that began on September 15,
2008. For the nth time, Obama reminded the nation on 60 Minutes of the
financial meltdown he inherited. That is his usual way of suggesting to the
American people that they could hardly hope for normal times after six years of
his own governance. In truth, Obama entered office on January 20, 2009 — over
four months after the collapse of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that
precipitated a general financial meltdown.
One would not expect Obama to fault past
liberal congressional intervention in the financial sector that in large part
forced the issuance of subprime risky mortgages, much less the earlier
deregulation of the financial industry under Bill Clinton that helped fueled
the rampant speculation. The videos of the sad congressional banter about
supposedly insensitive questioning of the duplicitous and corrupt Fannie head
Franklin Raines, or the self-important bluster of former Rep. Barney Frank,
make a good 10-minute tutorial on the meltdown — namely how Wall Street sharks,
hand-in-glove with liberal congressional operatives and Clinton appointees,
offered federally “guaranteed” mortgages to those who had no ability to pay
them back, fueling a phony real estate boom and overvalued stock market.
Obama might at least admit that when he
entered office the panic had largely passed. The tools needed to deal with it
that he embraced had months earlier been implemented by someone else. Indeed,
Obama was president for just a few months before the recession that began in December 2007 ended in June 2009 — well before the effect of any of
the policies, good or bad, could have taken effect.
Our current economic mess — the worst
post-recession recovery since World War II, more people out of work than when
Obama took office, a steady decline in real family income, massive new debt —
is largely a result of his own policies of five consecutive $1 trillion
deficits, the Obamacare catastrophe, new burdensome and capricious regulations,
near-zero interest rates, and the anti-business psychological climate brought
on by constant hectoring of the “you did not build that” and “at a certain
point you’ve made enough money” sort.
Obama has a bad habit of claiming credit for
good things that he opposed, and for blaming others for the bad things for
which he was responsible. By his appointments (do we remember Steven Chu?), by
his rhetoric, and by his policies on new federal energy leases, Obama is on
record against horizontal drilling and the fracking of natural gas and oil. Yet
now he brags that energy prices are dipping, which is the case precisely
because the private sector ignored him and went ahead to take risks to develop
more gas and oil on largely private lands.
Energy-intensive industries are more
efficient, and their foreign counterparts less competitive, because Obama was
not able to reify his wind and solar dreams of the diminution of gas and oil.
A better 60 Minutes sound bite might have been, “Thank God the
energy sector did not listen to me and went ahead despite my efforts.” How odd that he
appointed as secretary of energy someone who wished openly for European gas prices (e.g., $9 a gallon), and himself promised to send
electricity rates soaring by going after coal production, and then bragged that carbon fuels are now cheaper
because his policies were insufficient to stop the private sector.
When Obama entered office (again in January
2009 — not the summer of 2008) Iraq was largely quiet. Troops there were analogous to peace-keepers in the
Balkans. There was a good chance that the country might have followed the
trajectory of South Korea after the far deadlier Korean War. Yet don’t believe
his critics about the status of 2009-2011 Iraq. Listen instead to both Obama
and Vice President Joe Biden who at variously times bragged about Iraq’s
“security” and “stability” that made it potentially one of the administration’s
“greatest achievements.” In other words, one might have thought that Obama
ordered the successful surge that brought such stability, rather than opposed
it vehemently, and declared it a failure when it had succeeded. When the country imploded,
largely thanks to Obama’s reelection obsessions with the withdrawal of U.S. peacekeepers, he ceased with the serial campaign boasts of “I ended
the Iraq war” (he had derided Mitt Romney for
wanting to leave troops in Iraq) — only to suddenly complain that either others
were responsible for the mess, or the mess itself was inevitable.
The same paradox applies to his
anti-terrorism protocols. To the degree that Obama abided by and took credit
for the Bush-Cheney measures that he had once derided — Guantanamo Bay,
renditions, drones, preventive detention, the Patriot Act — the U.S. remained
free from a terrorist attack. And to the degree Obama sought to set his own
policies — seeking to try terrorists in civilian courtrooms, transferring
terrorists to U.S. prisons from Guantanamo, leaving the southern U.S. border
wide open, setting red lines in Syria, bombing and leaving Libya, Benghazi,
endorsing the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt — increased risk has followed.
Finally, Obama is blaming his intelligence
team for not apprising him of the growing danger of ISIS all through 2013 and
early 2014 — although such warnings were expressed to the Congress in open
session and have been the stuff of the evening news broadcasts for nearly two
years. But one wonders why James Clapper or John Brennan, or, for that
matter, former Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano would either miss
the existential threat of ISIS or downplay the dangers that they privately knew
to be true.
In a word, they were parroting positions
outlined by candidate and then president Obama himself. His views about radical
Islam were expressed clearly in his first interview as president – to Al Arabiya — in which he made two claims: his predecessor George
Bush’s administration had been largely responsible for the problems with the
Middle East, and his own father’s Muslim heritage and indeed his own name were
powerful symbols of his new outreach to the misunderstood Islamic world.
Toady bureaucrats and careerists made the
necessary adjustments almost immediately. It was not long after that the euphemism offensive began, in which man-caused disasters, overseas contingency
operations and workplace violence excused the catalyst of radical Islam. John
Brennan not only trashed his former boss George W. Bush, but also in a series
of astounding statements over the next few years assured us that jihad was a
normal, peaceful tenet of Islam and the idea of an Islamic effort to recreate
the caliphate absurd. James Clapper outdid that by declaring the Muslim
Brotherhood in Egypt largely secular, insisting that Muammar Gaddafi would not
lose power in Egypt, and flat-out lying to the U.S. Congress. Napolitano,
remember, issued a white paper, focusing on returning veterans and conservative
groups as those most likely to commit terrorism. That outreach did not deter
terrorist killers like the Tsarnaev brothers or Major Nidal Hasan or the
beheaders of ISIS. It is quite absurd now for Obama to blame Clapper and our
intelligence agencies for downplaying the dangers of radical Islamist
terrorists when they were only dutifully following his politically
correct lead.
In the make-believe world of Barack Obama,
the American financial system melted down hours before he took office due to
the crimes of others. He then quickly saved it, and devised an economic plan
that has made Americans far better off than when he entered office. Obama next
went on to revolutionize the energy sector to lower gas and electricity prices,
brought stability to Iraq only to see it destroyed by others, and crafted a
unique outreach to the Islamic world that has lessened the threat of violence
and cooled passions in the Middle East. The net result, as the president
reminds us, is a more secure, quieter world than anytime in history and
unprecedented good economic times at home.
Whether such constructions are proof of
delusions or mendacity — or both — the reader can decide.
No comments:
Post a Comment