OBAMA UNITES?

 

I sometimes wonder if President Obama actually considers the things he says before he opens his mouth and words come out. The man says one thing one day and the opposite the next. Today he said that his country is not "as divided as some have suggested." Really? At every opportunity he has attempted to divide us whenever possible.

Even The Huffington Post has adopted his tact of saying one thing and then the opposite with an article last year headlined “Evidence Shows Obama Did Not Divide The USA” while this year an article says “We’re More Divided As A Nation Than Ever, And This Poll On Obama’s Legacy Shows It”. Really? They think this happened in a single year?

An article at The Blaze noted 7 areas in which this has happened under his tenure.

1-Antipathy between parties – His reluctance to meet with member of the opposite party began the day he took office and has remained. And that attitude has functioned to increase bad feelings between parties.

2-Polls continue to show that most Americans think the country is on the wrong track. But every time he talks about this issue he says it’s going along perfectly. So apparently he knows better than anyone and the majority of the people are wrong. Which would tie into his elitist attitude of thinking he’s smarter than anyone else.

3-Trust in government is at an all-time low. With the economy sinking for most Americans, with the wealthy gaining more and the poverty stricken losing more (something he has said needs to end ever since he was a candidate in 2008 yet has apparently only helped along), with racial unrest higher than I can recall seeing it, with enemies of the state emboldened by his inaction and with a member of his administration allowed to get off scot free for crimes others have done jail time for by other members of his administration is it any wonder?

4-Ordinary Americans worse off economically. I mentioned this already as one of the reasons Americans don’t trust the government.

5-Greedy government workers. Not greedy in the sense that they want more, we all do. But in the sense that while he hasn’t increased the number near as much as one would think he has increased what they make. A study by the Cato Institute found that “federal workers’ pay and benefits were 78 percent higher in 2014 than private employees who earned an average of $52,688 less than public sector workers last year. So I guess the best way to make a decent living is to work for the government. But I’m sure he thinks that businesses who “didn’t build that” are the problem.

6-Borrowing from future generations. He seems to be unaware or just not care about the fact that for every program he wants to push forward (or for that matter increasing the wages of government employees) has a price tag affixed to it. He’s like a person with a charge card who never looks at the bill and just hands it to a waiting spouse. As the article states “It took 200 years and two world wars for the United States to accumulate $10 trillion in debt. But since he took over, Obama has managed to increase that to $18 trillion.” He has borrowed more money in 8 years than every administration combined since George Washington.

7-Looming retirement apocalypse. 29% of baby boomers have no savings whatsoever in pensions of retirement funds. Those that do have only small amounts. From the article “The massive expansion of government spending under Obama has encouraged the Federal Reserve to keep interest rates at near zero for six years, lowering the interest on the debt that the government must pay. But it has also meant that retirees earn practically nothing on their savings.” This means that immigrants and government employees have done fantastic while he’s been in office but that retirees and the middle class have suffered.

His comments today were in response to race relations going on right now. Even there he’s done little to promote solid relations and more to tear them apart. Whenever anything happens he always feels the need to say something and it seems more often than not in incites people rather than calms them as a leader should do. In 2009 police in Boston responded to a breaking and entering complaint a concerned citizen called in, arrived and questioned the person who was in the house who turned out to be the actual owner. But rather than understand they were responded to a complaint, which had he not been there would have saved his place, he began hurling insults at the police, complaining that it was all because he was black and created such a scene that he was arrested for disorderly conduct, which charges were later dropped. Before the facts came in thought President Obama weighed in on the matter saying "I don't know, not having been there and not seeing all the facts, what role race played in that. But I think it's fair to say, number one, any of us would be pretty angry; number two, that the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home, and, number three, what I think we know separate and apart from this incident is that there's a long history in this country of African Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately." So he starts by saying he doesn’t have all the facts and then turns it into an issue of race, while at the same time calling the police stupid. Way to unite Mr. President.

During a trial involving the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, again not knowing what all the facts were before he spoke, the President said “Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago”. Was the incident a tragedy? Certainly. Was there reason to suspect Martin? Possibly. The neighborhood he was in had been victimized by robberies in recent days and he looked suspicious to an overzealous community watch member. But in making his statement the President took sides again before the facts came in.

Consider Ferguson and the riots that followed the death of Michael Brown. Evidence proved that the depiction of him trying to surrender with his hands raised in the air, the “Hands up, don’t shoot” portrayal of events were far from the truth. He actually had assaulted the police officer, tried to take his gun and was coming at him again when he was shot, not running away or having his hands raised. But of course President Obama weighed in, as always not knowing the facts first. “Obviously we don’t yet know what happened,” Obama said. He continued later with “There was a whole structure there, according to the Justice Department report, that indicated both racism and just a disregard for what law enforcement is supposed to do.” So let’s ignore the fact that Brown had just committed theft, punched the officer when stopped for doing so, tried to take his gun to shoot him and then began to attack him again. No this was all about racist law enforcement. At least when you weigh in before you know what actually happened. Am I the only one that sees a pattern here? Does he really think that in making these comments, almost always before the facts are released, that he is a uniter and not a divider?

But surely he must say things that would paint the picture of working together between parties. Except that he never does so unless he’s gotten something he wanted as the result of Republicans capitulating their ideas and goals. Consider his comments before a Hispanic crowd in 2015. He started the speech by talking about how CA Congressman Ed Roybal had been humiliated by a Los Angeles police officer 75 years earlier. Way to move forward and away from the past. He did praise the immigration reform bill of previous President Bush…except that he failed to make mention that as senator Obama he voted for an amendment that emasculated the bill’s guest-worker program and almost killed the bill. But hey, he still told the crowd that they needed Democrats to help them and that those darn Republicans were the reason for all of their problems. Again, way to unite Americans there Mr. President.

All of this has combined to divide the people of this country more than ever. Actions always speak louder than words. It’s one thing to say that we’re not as divided, it’s another to make it actually so. So many Presidents in the past have gone out of their way to speak to both sides of an issue, black and white, Republican and Democrat, rich and poor, men and women, young and old. They strived to bring people together, worked with both sides of the issues and did indeed unite the people of this country. Having lived through the administrations of ten different Presidents I can honestly say that the current one has done more to tear apart the things joined together by all previous Presidents of the past than any single President I am aware of. But then gain he did promise he was “fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”