Here Is What I Think

I got a letter from Michele (yeah, right) asking me to continue being an early supporter (and asked for money) so I thought about it and here is what I am sending back to her.

June 19, 2011

Dear whomever is going to read this…………

I understand that you will be the only person who will ever read this, but I am going to write it anyway to get my complete thoughts organized.  The story comes in four parts.

1) I was a life long Republican and the first president I voted for was Dwight Eisenhower.  But when George Bush said torture was O.K., I quit the party because that is not who Americans are.  Then appears Barack Obama, promising to stop everything I hate about Washington, and I was sold.

I was at a meeting on the day he announced from the court house steps and I wrote the first of a dozen or more $100 checks.

I attended meetings, put up yard signs, and had bumper stickers on both cars that said “Veterans for Obama”.  I wrote letters to newspapers and magazines.  Even got them published in the Los Angeles Times and in The Economist.  I made telephone calls to voters in California, Texas and South Dakota.  I even met him behind the Convention Center in San Diego after holding up signs for TV cameras. On Election Day, I drove little old ladies to the polls.

2) But over the past two years, I have been increasingly disappointed in the reality of Barack Obama’s performance as president.  He has failed to show leadership at every crucial juncture.  If you want to read how a former ardent supporter became disillusioned, read htt://thegreatrecessionconspiracy.blogspot.com from the beginning.

3) I am fully aware of the good stuff he has done.  Bob Gates, Hilary Clinton and Arne Duncan are (was) doing brilliant work.  While this is good, it is not nearly sufficient.

4) At every crucial juncture, Barack Obama has been a complete failure.  The only way I would ever vote for him again is if the Republicans nominate Sarah Palin.  There are five of those crucial points when he had the opportunity to do the right thing for the country, and instead failed us completely.  Here they are;

a)     We spend twice as much on healthcare than any other developed country and we get worse results.  This cost is growing so much faster than either inflation or GNP that U.S. bankruptcy is a foreseeable possibility.  And yet there is absolutely nothing in the bill he signed to even begin to slow that growth.  Absolutely nothing!  Hence, everything else in the bill is worthless.

b)    The Financial Reform bill does absolutely nothing to prevent TBTF in spite of the fact that every non-Wall Street banker in the U.S. knows we are now counting down to the next big explosion.  He is now busy playing kissy face with exactly the crooks who stole $14 TRILLION from the rest us.  First, he bailed out of public financing in the first campaign and pretended that he was happy with checks like mine while Wall Street bankers (same old, same old) were really financing him.  Now he has announced the $1 BILLION war chest for re-election.  This is the guy who was going to get money out of politics.  Disgusting!  And his treatment of Elizabeth Warren (the only person who always tells the truth) is disgusting and cowardly.  Shame on him.

c)     When he had the chance to end the Bush tax cuts, he rolled over and extended them.  The real effect was to take a huge amount of the U.S. wealth and give it the richest 5% of families, create a huge operating deficit, while making all of the rest of us poorer. No civilization has ever survived when a tiny majority controls all the wealth of the country, and that is exactly where we are headed, thanks to Barack Obama.

d)    Fifteen million Americans are unemployed.  Another fifteen million are underemployed.  That is fully a fifth of the entire U.S. workforce, and he has done absolutely nothing to remedy the problem.  The largest creator of new jobs in the last quarter was McDonald’s!  There are no jobs for college graduates and they moving back into their parent’s homes.  Five to six million Americans have been unemployed for 99 weeks or longer.  They have no incomes.  The longer they stay unemployed, the less likely they will ever work.  We are rapidly creating a subclass of people with no jobs and no future.

e)     Signing the extension of the Patriot Act should have been criminal!  Benjamin Franklin said it perfectly; “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty or safety”.  There is nothing more needed here.

And that is why I can no longer support Barack Obama, and I am confessing my error in judgment to everyone who will listen, and especially to the people I convinced to vote for him.

And I have spent a lot of time thinking about what happened, and I can only think of two plausible explanations.

1)     Once he became a millionaire, money became his only consideration, hence Wall Street kissy face.  I could have forgiven him anything if just one Wall Street crook had gone to jail, or even faced prosecution.

2)     He just didn’t have the courage to be what George Bush used to call, “The Decider”.

I just don’t know, but I do know that as a country we are deeply in trouble.