The old adage runs “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” In George W. Bush, it degenerated into “fool me twice…er…can’t get fooled again,” similar to The Who refrain “we won’t be fooled again.”
The history of the last eight years: fool me once, elect Obama. But, as The Who also sang, “old boss, same as the new boss.” Fool me twice, Trump.
I remember 2008. The housing bubble had burst and trillions of dollars in American paper networth vanished. The crash of markets was in full swing. The war in Iraq had given us no gains and many dead.
Obama, selling himself as the outsider who had opposed the war and would rein in Wall Street, seemed like something different. He was an African American, and it was time. So we gave the junior Senator his chance to usher in a new era of healing and change.
In an unspoken act of catharsis and expiation of racial guilt, millions voted for the first Black president. Poof, proof we’re not all racists, because, after all, we’re not.
With a hopeful nation behind him, the messianic bum proceeded to waste all his oratory, charisma and political capital to bail out Citicorp, AIG, and the rest of the looters on Wall Street, and to push through a healthcare law written by lobbyists, for corporations, throwing the underwater homeowner a lead life preserver.
Elected by the blue collar white worker and the black underclass, in its record turnout, Obama left them both for dead.
Were you surprised? Millions were.
What’d we really get from Obama? A summation:
Instead of helping the indebted homeowner, he went on a hairsplitting crusade over the minutia of racism and police insensitivity, sparring words with some Massachusetts cop over a local disorderly conduct arrest. At the same time, he tossed the voters who had crossed party lines to elect him to the wolves of Wall Street.
This set the paradigm Obama (and the modern Left) would follow: ignore the interests of the worker; throw red meat to the frothing factions of identity politics.
Obama entered office with great political clout and the votes needed to reform the banking system and punish its bad actors. He had the clout to bail out homeowners (saving the banks in effect). He did the opposite.
None of the worst frauds were prosecuted. The supposed concern for moral hazard (inadvertently encouraging bad behavior through bailouts), the excuse for not bailing out homeowners, was no obstacle to bailing out the bankers.
Obama had the votes to pass a healthcare law written for Americans and not insurance companies. He chose not to. Under the Affordable Care Act, healthcare was destroyed for millions of Americans.
Job outsourcing accelerated. Politically powerless wage slaves abroad produced the shoddy goods Americans had to settle for, and the profits accrued to the corporate middleman junk peddlers like Wal-Mart, where employees are given the (mostly white) privilege to sleep in their cars in the parking lot before their shifts start.
Illegal immigration, while emotionally satisfying for someone like Obama as payback against western colonialism, is actually a very unprogressive policy. Open borders is a club to beat down wages and workers on behalf of big business. Selling open borders as progressive is one of the greatest tricks global capitalism ever pulled on an unsophisticated leftist.
The irony of Obama, after being elected by white-guilt stricken Irish, Italian, Polish, and other Americans, whose ancestors had nothing to do with the slave trade, acting to enable slave-like conditions of labor around the globe, in competition with American workers, is not lost on me. The added irony of the Right calling Obama a Marxist is almost too much.
As the great recession rolled on, Obama’s touted infrastructure stimulus fizzled.
Many federal employees were added to the rolls of the TSA bureaucracy. Here we have Obama in form: bloated, inefficient government staffed by racial spoils system beneficiaries. Federal largesse and identity politics? Check. Continuation of the Bush expansion of the national security police state? Check.
The rubber gloved intrusion of American orifices flying in and out dilapidated airports by a largely unprofessional civil service, not permitted to profile terrorists, and so forced to absurdly search old men and women, WW2 veterans and breast cancer survivors at random, was vintage Obama.
The nation’s door was left wide open to drug traffickers, cartel gangsters and exploitable workers from the south.
As Americans’ housing wealth collapsed and their debts remained intact, the national net worth shifted ever upward.
Over eight years, Obama did nothing for American students, stricken with fraudulent debt burdens at absurd tuition rates. He did nothing to protect Social Security and Medicare from future attacks.
Bush started bad wars. Obama ended one, with the pedantic fulfillment of a paper promise to leave Iraq, without any regard for the real world consequences. In doing so, he created the civil war and power vacuum that led eventually to ISIS under the tutelage of his gun-mol, Secretary Hillary.
He kept the other war, Afghanistan, as his baby. A fifteen year war, still not won, has had as its primary product the world’s heroin supply, which now rages as a worldwide epidemic. Obama is America’s opium president.
Under Obama, Clinton was allowed to turn the State Department into a front for her private foundation business dealings. Her efforts to topple secular dictators like Gaddafi and Assad have led to the migration crisis, now pushing Europe’s nations into the arms of the populist Right. Thanks, O. No, sincerely
Terrorism inside American borders, formerly considered a rare catastrophe, has become a normalized, simmering reality, bubbling over every so many months.
Obama’s response: more tired attempts to restrict gun ownership to law abiding Americans, while his own home city descends into gang warfare.
The rise of criminal flash mobs organized on social media, of mini riots following every police shooting, gave Americans pause. The realization dawned that the more concessions were given, the worse race relations got. The fire was always stoke by Obama rather than smothered.
Americans realized they aren’t hated for what they do, but for who they are. The educational and cultural dogmas of western evil and guilt had begun to come home to roost. The bifurcation began: politically correct in public, politically incorrect in private. The closet Trump voter arrived.
Taking a risk on wild card Trump is what a population balanced precariously on the precipice does, and of course it scares the hell out of the comfortable beneficiaries of elite looting and excess. Thus, the specter of over-rich suits in Davos cowering over 40 dollar hotdogs.
Master of timing, Trump seized the moment. Americans, fed up with their decline, gave him the gavel. It was the last chance for a rebellion of the Old America against the Empire, mocked as a last gasp. Well, it was a powerful gasp, and it has redrawn the American political map.
The insanity of Washington made Trump the voice of sanity. Under Obama, normal opinions had become radical. Thus, Trump.
If Trump goes off the rails, it will be the result of the governance structure of the American establishment, which gave us the conditions of anxiety and despair that put Trump in the White House. What comes next is on the rulers, not the ruled.
With that, good luck to the incoming president! You will need it.