Obama indicted

Barack Hussein Obama was for America and the world comprehensively a catastrophe. The indictment following is not so comprehensive, but it's unanswerable, to wit and in no particular order:

The astronomical national debt was astronomical enough by the time Obama swore to turn it back, damning Bush for his contribution to it and promising a "net spending cut"; in the event and despite Obama's hacking of defense and hiking of taxes on the wealthy and on capital gains, the piling on of the national debt over Obama's eight years comes to $9.3 trillion, near enough to doubling the debt, or amassing as much as the 43 presidents previous.

Obama makes the first president since GDP statistics have been calculated never to see economic growth of at least 3% in at least one year of his presidency. Obama managed to abolish the boom-and-bust business cycle by chopping the peaks off the peaks-and-valleys, his economic recovery, if a "recovery" it was, being the feeblest since the 1940s. GDP shrank or bounced along the bottom in nine quarters of Obama's 32, and lest it be supposed that the recession which Obama famously "inherited" accounts for that, let it be observed that the contractions or flatlinings or both come in six years of Obama's eight: 2009, '11 and '12, '13 and '14, and a flat quarter as late as the end of '15, just a year before Obama walked out of the White House for the last time.

Obama's labor participation rate was the worst since the stagflation 1970s, Americans uncounted in the labor force having multiplied by 14 million under Obama, to 95 million, which worked wonders on Obama's official unemployment rate but was not so wonderful for the real economy and the real people in it. One American family in five are unrepresented in the labor force, i.e., families having not one breadwinner amount to 20%.

Americans dependent for their daily bread on food stamps multiplied under Obama by 13 million, and Americans in poverty by 8 million.

And to round out the roundup of economic ruin, America imported more than it exported in Obama's terminal year by nearly three-quarters of a trillion, and by that blessed end of the Age of Obama the homeownership rate was the worst in better than half a century.

The first black president whose very election we were promised would "heal the racial divide" brought instead the first race war since the 1960s, sanctioning at the highest levels the racial-grievance excuse-making for ghetto pathologies, claiming "racism" behind political disagreement and law enforcement, and intimidating police forces into abandoning the policing of minority precincts, with the consequent explosion in violent crime and in race riots.

Murders in America's greatest cities leapt by 31% in these couple years past, and by 57% last year over the year before in Obama's hometown of Chicago, where the Second-Amendment-abolitionists wrote the gun laws and an old Obama administration hand runs city hall. A Chicagoan anymore is shot every couple hours, and Chicago is more treacherous than Kabul. And as many Americans were killed in Chicago under Obama as were killed in Iraq under Bush.

After two terms of the first black president, blacks uncounted in the labor force were up 18.5% and blacks dependent for their daily bread on food stamps up 58%; even homeownership among blacks was worse for eight years of the first black president. They may go to their graves in devotion to this "first black president" who was in fact half-white-American and half-Kenyan-elite, and whose only hereditary association with slavery was on his maternal, slavemaster side, and for whom discrimination was affirmative action, but Barack "first black president" Obama was a catastrophe for blacks in America.

Before Obama's preposterously-named "Affordable Care Act", cost was first among the deficiencies of healthcare in America, but Obamacare only multiplied that cost, driving up the average health insurance premium by 25% in 2017 alone.

The uninsured are with us still, and since Obamacare so too are the untold masses restricted by Obamacare to 30 hours' work and wages weekly. Then there are the everything-and-the-kitchen-sink policies demanded by Obamacare, and the outlawing of barebones, emergency-only coverage, plus the “Shared Responsibility” tax/fine of hundreds per person per year (one is at a loss as to which to call it, a "tax" or a "fine", for the reason that Obama swore it was a fine when political necessity demanded it not be counted a tax, then when the legal necessity was that it not be counted a fine, it was conveniently recast as a tax; what it is truly is an outrage and a burden). Obamacare also has dispossessed untold masses of their plans and their doctors, notwithstanding Obama's assurances, and strained Medicaid and Medicare. And that's to say nothing of the violence done by Obamacare to the American freedom of conscience, unto the point of compelling nuns to buy abortifacients.

The lawlessness of Obama and his administration is a subject fit more for a book, and a thick one, but at or near the top of any accounting of Obamian lawlessness must be its application for the furtherance of the invasion and colonization of the United States by the Latin American Third World. Obama's lawless executive orders inviting "DREAM"-ers from Latin America to America made a commonplace of the hitherto-unknown phenomenon, of the herding and driving of masses of Latin American children on foot across Latin America, to be dumped on the American banks of the Rio Grande. And Obama's administration by their own accounting released into American society something over 86,000 criminal aliens in all of two years.

And partisan in their lawlessness: Obama and his administration were "the most dagger-partisan since Richard Nixon", to invoke an old formulation of Rex Murphy's. Obama's IRS isolated 400 Tea Party groups, to take but one example, and denied them the status they demanded and deserved so as to knock them out of two election cycles.

Obama presided over the triumphal march of the international jihad over the greater Near East including countries never dreamt of as terrorist territories, before there was a President Barack Obama; the jihad has today its first nation-state, also unthinkable before Obama; al-Qaeda is dwarfed as a force and a threat by the greater jihadi army of ISIS which before Obama was unconceived; and terror attacks in this country and in Europe which before Obama were one-offs, were in the Age of Obama a commonplace: in the two months preceding the 2016 Summer Olympics jihadis managed a terror attack someplace on earth outside Syria and Iraq every 84 hours. The Navy SEALs put a bullet in bin Laden's head on Obama's watch, but otherwise the war on terror went altogether the way of the international jihad.

ISIS is the product of Obama, and for a demonstration of Obama's comprehensive, catastrophic failure on ISIS this is unimprovable: Obama had pronounced ISIS "contained" a matter of hours before the Paris massacre of November 2015 wherein ISIS slaughtered more than 100 innocents. Before there was a President Obama, ISIS was unconceived and a jihadi nation-state was unthinkable; ISIS today constitutes the government of a swath of Syria and Iraq, and its jihadi empire of ISIS affiliates reaches into 18 countries.

In Iraq Obama inherited a won war, tossed it away along with its sacrifice, and extraordinarily has bequeathed to us a new, Third Iraq War.

More Americans died in Afghanistan in just the first year-and-a-half under Obama than in the seven-and-a-half years under Bush, and for a war which Obama's half-measures and declared timetable had determined could not end in victory: in Afghanistan Obama condemned America to the cost in blood and treasure of a war-winning big push, with the defeat of a retreat and withdrawal, abandoning the field to the enemy. And seven-and-a-half years after Obama assumed command of the Afghan War, on the eve of the Democratic National Convention, 80 Afghan Shiites were massacred in Kabul, not by the Taliban or al-Qaeda but by Obama's “JV squad”, also known as ISIS.

So far from frustrating Iran's nuclear drive or better yet pushing to liberate the Iranian people from their theocracy and at the same time to liberate the world from the principal state author of terror, Obama lifted such sanctions as there were on Iran and spared the mullahs' wicked, Armageddonist tyranny for the second time in his presidency, rewarding Iran with $150 billion in international trade plus $400 million in airlifted cash, and opening Iran to development by the advanced economies, i.e., the greatest leap yet in Iran's drive for the bomb.

Before there was a President Obama Libya was an ally of the United States in the terror war; within months of Obama's intervention there, unauthorized by Congress and undebated by the people, Libya was a wild wild west for the international jihad. Not long thereafter Libya was the site of the seizure and slaughter of an American ambassador, among other American dead including those two whose deliverance of the survivors was in defiance of the suicidal stand-down order from the top, worse even than the Iranian Hostage Crisis of three decades previous and a failure of Obama three times over: Obama abandoned the American personnel in Benghazi to “normalized” security despite the manifest threats and appeals for reinforcement, then declined to rescue them in the event, and finally he made out that the affair was the doing somehow of an immigrant to America who'd spoken ill of Islam in a YouTube video. And Libya today is another project of the ISIS caliphate, to where Obama ordered it bombed in another of his undeclared wars.

Before there was a President Obama there was no notion of war in Syria; the inaptly-named Syrian Civil War today has run half a decade, killed half a million, displaced four million and driven the greatest refugee crisis since the Second World War -- a crisis in the West as much as in the Near East -- and birthed the great jihadi army that is ISIS.

China in the Age of Obama seized dominion of the South China Sea, and Russia invaded and conquered some part of eastern Europe. Before there was a President Obama war in Europe was unthinkable; since Obama and his “Russian Reset” a Continental European shooting war is the everyday.

And that's to say nothing of North Korea and others I'm sure I'm neglecting, or of the contracting and crumbling under Obama of the United States Armed Forces. What Obama pursued instead was a retro-'70s arms treaty, to take but one example, restricting America's nuclear arsenal, unused since 1945.

To hear Obama tell it, he brought sunlit uplands, but surely if his fantasy were more than fantasy then that would be registered electorally, and there the very party he's led must know as well as any that Obama brought catastrophe: Obama leaves his party and his cause a shambles, the incoming Republican president and administration being the most militantly reactionary and conservative since the advent of conservatism as we conceive it, and Obama's Democrats having lost in his time 13 seats in the Senate and 64 in the House, 13 governorships, and 33 state houses. Time will tell if Obama's principal legacy will have been the advent and ascendance of a new Americanism, conceived in reaction against him.

(NB: For a large part of the facts and figures herein I owe to the very useful compilations of Sean Hannity)