Thursday, January 26, 2017

15 Yards for Piling On

        In a gratuitous  swipe at the outgoing POTUS, a recent letter to the local "news" paper  attempts to  minimize and/or refute Obama  accomplishments. The list is long and wrong.

        It cites what he calls  Our military  being "In worse shape than before Pearl Harbor."  The US military, as real military leaders will attest, is strong today. Technology has made less into more as we reshape the force to meet challenges that are uniquely  different from those of WWII. A battleship navy like the USN of WWII would be  almost immediately littering the seabed due to modern submarine technology. Less is more if less can kick ass.

        "Obamacare" is a complete disaster? That is only true to the extent that all US private healthcare (which is what the ACA is) is a disaster. Don't like price increases? Blame Big Pharma, not the President. All private health care plans  have seen increased premiums, and private insurers have been more than willing to lay said increases at the feet of the ACA. Of course the other side of the story is that people with conditions which, in the absence of healthcare coverage would go untreated are now able to get medical care. So it really comes down to what we think a society should do for all its citizens, not just the ones who own hotels. Moreover, this statement is risible coming from a person (the author of the letter) on Medicare , ergo having zero interface with the ACA.

        Benghazi "lying" largest scandal in history? How about Reagan ignoring the House report of 1983 on Embassy security, warning of serious security issues, followed after several  months of neglect by another attack which featured the filmed torture death of the station chief? Seven months later it happened again, Reagan explaining away failure to enhance embassy security by analogizing it to "Delays in redoing a kitchen!" The cost of the delays runs to over 200 deaths!  Biggest scandal?  How about the My Lai massacre? How about Watergate? How about  Iran Contra, Teapot Dome, or The Keating Five? Or more to the point, how about Republican partisan posturing and the expenditure of more time and effort than Watergate, the JFK shooting and Pearl Harbor hearings combined in an attempt to smear a prospective Democratic candidate?  
  
      Obama "caused more debt than..."  Obama inherited a Bush budget (2009) with a record deficit. We were in the grip of the worst economic collapse since 1929 (not Bush's fault). Of course it's easy to snipe from the sidelines when one has no burden of proof to show that they could do it better. Remember TARP was a Bush project.  This really comes from the same racist place as "Obama wants to give 'stuff' to people who don't deserve it"

        Having traveled extensively overseas, I can say with certainty that the only thing in recent years which has "made the US a laughingstock " other than the entire Kardashian family, is the recent election. I have yet to meet any person of another nationality who dislikes Obama and  has any positive regard for Donald Trump.  Most casual conversations over the  Month of May, 2016  in France, Portugal,  Spain and Morocco eventually turned to questions from the local involving Trump and was he really as crazy as he seems. Earlier acquaintances from the UK, where Trump is almost universally loathed, echoed this thread.


The writer ended by opining that with the help of God and Donald Trump, things would hopefully soon be right as rain.   Invoking God and Trump in the same sentence should be  offensive to any person of faith. 

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