RKMBs Forums .::Important::. Politics and Current Events 5 Reasons Obama Will Be Remembered As One Of The Worst Presidents

by John Hawkins,
December 3, 2016


Compiling a list of reasons why Barack Obama is a terrible president seems like a project for a book rather than a column. However, when we start looking at the catastrophic mistakes he’s made that may reverberate for years to come, it’s clear that he’s been a disaster for America on a scale that few other Presidents can match. Just look at his record.

1) Nearly Doubling The National Debt: Let’s see, what was it that Barack Obama said about our debt back in 2008 when he was trying to convince Americans to vote him into office?

• "The problem is, is that the way Bush has done it over the last eight years is to take out a credit card from the Bank of China in the name of our children, driving up our national debt from 5 trillion dollars for the first 42 presidents -- number 43 added 4 trillion dollars by his lonesome, so that we now have over 9 trillion dollars of debt that we are going to have to pay back -- $30,000 for every man, woman and child. That's irresponsible. It's unpatriotic."

Meanwhile, once he got into office, Obama added more debt than all previous presidents combined (which even the liberals at Politifact admit is true). Before Obama, it would have taken some real work to stave off a debt-driven economic collapse down the road, but because of the amount of debt he added on, it’s now probably unavoidable. This country survived the Brits burning the White House in the War of 1812, Pearl Harbor, and 9/11, but all of those horrors combined will pale to the long-term damage to this country Obama will cause with his reckless spending.


2) Unleashing The Genie From The Nuclear Weapons Bottle In The Middle East:
Preventing the spread of nuclear weapons has been a high priority since those weapons came into being. It was obviously worrisome when nations that are not friendly to America acquired nuclear weapons capable of reducing our greatest cities to ash in a moment, but there were important considerations that kept those countries from ever acting. You nuke us, we nuke you. Okay, we have a stalemate because no functional state wants mutually assured destruction.

Of course, that kind of stalemate doesn’t work with basket-case nations run by totalitarian dictators or religious fanatics… which brings us to the Iran Deal Obama signed that will end with that monstrous nation acquiring nuclear weapons. Inevitably, if Iran develops nukes, various other countries across the Middle East will also develop nuclear weapons to protect themselves. Israel may already have nukes, but it’s also not going to try to subjugate nations like Saudi Arabia and Egypt. The same can’t be said of Iran.

In other words, Obama’s Iran Deal marks the beginning of a nuclear arms race in an area largely run by religious fanatics and anti-American dictators. The chances of a nuclear war or even more importantly, a nuke going off on American soil, have increased astronomically because of Obama’s foolishness.


3) Facilitating Illegal Immigration:
The federal government has never put the amount of money and resources needed into shutting down illegal immigration. Unfortunately, crooked businesses that benefit from the practice have always paid off enough politicians to keep that from happening.

However, the Obama Administration’s practice of actually encouraging illegal immigration was a new low in our nation’s history. Obama illegally tried to give millions of illegal aliens the ability to stay here without fear of deportation; states and localities that enforced immigration law were harassed by the DOJ; he blocked the border patrol from doing its job and increased the number of refugees being imported. By doing so, Obama destroyed the rule of law, created a protected criminal class and imported poverty into the country because he thought it would benefit him politically even if it hurt the country in the process.

4) Encouraging Racial Polarization:
No president ever had a better opportunity to encourage racial reconciliation than Obama. Instead, America’s first black president went in exactly the opposite direction and tried to create as much racial polarization as possible because he thought it benefited him politically. Unlike Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton, Obama is subtler. His administration encouraged hatred of police, turned a blind eye to race riots and did nothing to slow down the incessant cries of “racism” from his supporters that greeted every disagreement with Obama’s policies. During Obama’s presidency, the Left openly used race as a political weapon and it created a level of racial strife in America that we haven’t seen since the sixties.



5) Losing A War We Had Already Won In Iraq: Today in 2016, people tend to forget that Bush had largely pacified Iraq with the surge before he left office. By 2010, things had gotten so stable that the Obama Administration was trying to take credit for Iraq. Here’s Joe Biden,

I am very optimistic about…Iraq. I mean, this could be one of the great achievements of this administration. You're going to see 90,000 American troops come marching home by the end of the summer. You're going to see a stable government in Iraq that is actually moving toward a representative government.

Despite the fact that our generals wanted him to work out a status of forces agreement with the Iraqi government so we could leave troops there, Obama wanted political credit for getting all our troops out of the country and he didn’t much care what happened afterwards.

So we pulled out of Iraq rather than leaving a residual force there as we have in nations like Germany, Japan and South Korea. Predictably, the whole country then fell apart. Worse yet, because of Obama’s incompetence, ISIS was able to take large swathes of territory in Iraq and it became a major player on the world stage. All the blood and treasure we spent in that nation was squandered because an incompetent politician cared more about getting a minor political advantage than winning a war.

Obama has viewed virtually every event and issue through a racial lens, acting more like a racial activist than a chief executive.

Obama has branded the entire criminal justice system racist -- cops, courts, municipal judges, even jurors. He extends the same false accusation to landlords and employers, along with home lenders, car lenders, payday lenders, credit reporting agencies, debt collection agencies and on and on.

To hear Obama, even the most liberal among us are racist. He claims teachers and principals, who have eagerly embraced multiculturalism to a fault, suddenly are conspiring to shove misbehaving black students into a “school-to-prison pipeline,” where they have no choice but to lead a life of crime, thanks to suspensions and expulsions.

If we didn’t know any better, we’d think the president suffers from paranoia.

Our own polling picked up on this trend back in 2014, when an IBD/TIPP survey found that a stunning 46% of Americans thought race relations worsened under the man who was supposed to usher in a racially harmonious era, while only 18% said they had gotten better.

Even the left laments that Obama’s "vision of post-racial America looks even further away.”

Only, he never really had such a vision. His racist preacher gave that away long ago.

Obama poisoned race relations to help sell his "social justice” nostrums, unforgivably doing damage to trust in future presidential candidates of color.

5. Race Relations

Former President Obama will occupy a place in history as the nation's first African-American president. But while his election would seem to signal that American society has overcome its past history of racial discrimination and tension, Americans' views of race relations in fact became far less harmonious during Obama's tenure in office.

In 2010, slightly more than one in 10 Americans said they worried about race relations "a great deal" (13%). By 2016, 35% of Americans said they worried about race relations, following a number of high-profile cases involving police officers shooting unarmed black men and several instances of white police officers being targeted by blacks.

More Americans over the past eight years came to believe that Obama's election and his presidency made race relations "worse" in the U.S. rather than better, with 46% believing the former in 2016 and 29% saying the latter. This represented a sharp reversal of opinion from 2009, when 41% of Americans believed Obama's election and presidency made race relations better and 22% said worse.

Relatedly, Americans became less certain about whether Obama's presidency in and of itself represented "one of the most important advances" for black Americans. In 2009, 71% of blacks and 56% of whites thought this; by 2016, the figure had fallen to 51% for blacks and 27% for whites.

Bottom Line: Many spoke of Obama's election ushering in a new "post-racial" period in America. But as even Obama himself admitted in his farewell address, this has not been the case. If anything, his presidency appears to have illuminated the previously hidden fault lines that still exist in U.S. race relations.

In 2016, the United States was downgraded from a full democracy to a flawed democracy;[8] its score, which had been experiencing a persistent downward trend, crossed the threshold from 8.05 in 2015 to 7.98 in 2016. The report states that this was caused by a myriad of factors, dating back to the late 1960s, which eroded Americans' trust in governmental institutions.[8][9][10]

The U.S. military is no longer clearly superior to the threats that exist around the world, and it would struggle to win – or perhaps even lose – a war with China or Russia, according to a new report from a congressionally-formed commission.


The National Defense Strategy Commission findings released Wednesday paint a gloomy picture for the current state of the U.S. military that includes challenges from competitors in other countries vying for global power, new and creative threats posed by Iran and North Korea, the danger of extremist and terrorist groups and the global proliferation of advanced technology.


Political dysfunction and decisions made by both major parties," including the automatic spending cuts known as sequestration that began in 2013, "has significantly weakened its own defense," the report states.

The likelihood of a national security emergency is swiftly increasing, the report authors argue, and Washington is not moving quickly enough to make up for the shortcomings. The dangers would be particularly high were the military forced to fight on two or more fronts at the same time.

And the shortcomings persist, despite President Donald Trump's raising the military budget to $716 billion – even though the U.S. now spends four times more than China does on its military and 10 times more than Russia. The current efforts to prepare the Defense Department for the modern array of threats remain under-resourced, the report suggests.

"U.S. military superiority is no longer assured and the implications for American interests and American security are severe," the report states.
The commission was formed through Congress' 2017 defense
spending bill and was charged with reviewing the geopolitical priorities outlined in the Defense Department's 2018 National Defense Strategy along with other threats the military faces. It is led by Eric Edelman, who served as the Pentagon's No. 3 during the George W. Bush administration, and Gary Roughead, the Navy's top officer during Barack Obama's presidency. Other contributors are include top military, intelligence and congressional officials, including Christine Fox, the former acting deputy defense secretary, and Michael Morell, the former acting CIA director.

"We are concerned that the NDS too often rests on questionable assumptions and weak analysis, and it leaves unanswered critical questions regarding how the United States will meet the challenges of a more dangerous world," the report concludes. "We believe that the NDS points the Department of Defense and the country in the right direction, but it does not adequately explain how we should get there."

Russia and China "learned from what we've done. They've learned from our success. And while we've been off doing a different kind of warfare, they've been prepared for a kind of warfare at the
high end that we really haven't engaged in for a very long time," Edelman told Morell on the latter's podcast, "Intelligence Matters" and reported by The Washington Post. Leaders have lost sight of the complexity of modern threats, and the American public and Congress have not paid as close attention as they should, Edelman states.


The report comes at a time when other assessments affirm the Chinese government, for example, is actively working to undermine U.S. global influence.

by Matt Margolis, July 26, 2018, PJ Media


By now you’ve probably heard of polls that say Americans believe that “Donald Trump is the worst president in history” or that presidential scholars have ranked Trump “dead last.” I can tell you right now to ignore the polls and the so-called experts. While it may be too early to properly gauge presidential rankings for recent presidents, I am confident that history will ultimately judge Barack Obama as the worst president our nation has ever seen.

The mountain of evidence that condemns his presidency to the bottom of the barrel is overwhelming. In my just re-released book, The Worst President in History: The Legacy of Barack Obama, I document 200 reasons why history will prove my belief correct in the years to come. Below, I present six abbreviated reasons, which, I can’t stress enough, are just the tip of the iceberg.


6. Weaponizing the government against his enemies


Perhaps the most well-known example of the Obama administration abusing its power to target Obama’s political enemies is the infamous IRS scandal. Over a two-year period leading up to the 2012 election, tea party groups and other conservatives were improperly scrutinized by the IRS. Twelve different IRS offices across the country were involved and the entire operation was orchestrated out of Washington, D.C., and there was also evidence of White House involvement. The IRS also targeted private individuals critical of Obama, GOP candidates, and Romney donors.

There are also examples of conservative individuals being targeted as the result of gross abuse of power by the Obama administration.

Conservative author Dinesh D’Souza was indicted for campaign finance violations for a crime typically not prosecuted at all.

James O’Keefe of Project Veritas was put on a terrorism watchlist after a video was released of him dressed as a terrorist crossing back and forth over the U.S./Mexico border to demonstrate the lack of border security.

Obama’s pièce de résistance when it came to abuse of power is perhaps his spying on the Trump campaign. The Steele dossier on Trump (a partisan opposition research document funded by the DNC and the Hillary campaign loaded with loads of bogus and salacious accusations) was used to secure a FISA warrant to spy on the Trump campaign. Anti-Trump partisans were involved in the investigation, and based on text messages between investigators Peter Strzok and Lisa Page (who were having an affair) we know that Strzok saw the investigation as an “insurance policy” in case Trump won the election, and that Page, worried that Trump could win, was told by Strzok, “No. No he won't. We'll stop it.” Other text messages indicated that Obama wanted to be kept in the loop on their investigation. The independence and integrity of the FBI took a major blow during the Obama years, and we’re still learning just how bad it was.



5. Obama’s surveillance state

According to the ACLU there was a 64 percent growth in electronic spying by the United States government during Obama’s first term. The Obama administration argued in federal court in 2012 that the public has no “reasonable expectation of privacy” regarding their cell phone location data and that the government can obtain these records without a warrant. Further blemishing Obama’s record on civil liberties, his administration green-lighted a giant government database of information on millions of citizens who weren’t even suspected of terrorism or any crime at all.

In May 2017, we also found out that Obama’s National Security Agency had been conducting illegal searches on Americans for years and was rebuked by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC). We didn’t hear about it sooner because the Obama administration covered it up.


4. Purging Gitmo

As a candidate in 2007, Obama promised he would close the terrorist detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba (Gitmo), as soon as he was elected. He signed an executive order on January 22, 2009, requiring Gitmo to close within one year. Congress refused to go along, so instead of closing it, he systematically purged the prison of its terrorist inmates, as a sort of end-run around congressional opposition to closure. In 2003, there were 680 prisoners. By early January 2015, there were fewer than 130, and he continued releasing prisoners through the remainder of his second term.

One retired CIA officer estimated that at least 50 percent of those released from Gitmo returned to battle against American troops, and Paul Lewis, Obama’s special envoy for Guantanamo closure, confirmed that Americans have been killed by released Gitmo detainees.


3. Obamacare

Despite his campaign promise to bring Democrats and Republicans together to reform healthcare, Obama signed a trillion-dollar government takeover of one-sixth of the United States economy with zero Republican votes in the Senate and only one Republican vote in the House. Despite a promise of transparency, Obama and then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi made sure that the final negotiations were held behind closed doors.

And who can forget the disastrous Obamacare rollout? Aside from website problems, there was evidence that the Obama administration fudged enrollment numbers to make it appear more successful and popular than it really was. Basically, everything connected to Obamacare was plagued with failure. The 23 taxpayer-funded healthcare co-ops nationwide established by Obamacare to compete with private health insurance providers proved to be unsustainable, and by January 2018, only four Obamacare co-ops remained. The Obamacare co-ops were basically the health insurance version of the Solyndra boondoggle, but bigger.

The most insulting part of it all was that despite the high costs of Obamacare, health premiums went up and coverage got worse. Remember “if you like your plan you can keep it”? That was a lie. While the Obama administration often touted the increased numbers of people who had health insurance, the number of people who delayed seeking medical care because of costs did not improve. In fact, in November 2015, the percentage of people who reported delaying medical care over costs was higher than it was before Obama even took office. So, people were forced to buy insurance even if they didn't want it, and they still couldn't afford to seek medical care because of the higher premiums. Woo-hoo!


2. The worst economic recovery

There have been eleven recessions since World War II, each of which was followed by a recovery. Even Obama experienced an economic recovery… it just happens to be the worst one.

All jobs lost in post-World War II recessions were recovered after about twenty-five months on average. But, it took seventy-seven months for employment to return to pre-recession levels, making Obama’s recovery the slowest recovery of them all—and by a wide margin. Obama is also the only president in U.S. history to have never had a single year of 3.0 percent or greater GDP growth.


1. The largest deficits in history


When adjusted for inflation, Obama owns the seven highest deficits in history—surpassing the deficits incurred during World War II. Obama’s smallest deficit was still higher than the last deficit before he took office. While many try to argue that 2009’s spending should not count towards Obama’s spending record, 2009 was not actually constrained by the budget approved by President Bush. In fact, only three of FY2009’s 12 appropriations bills passed under Bush because the Democrats in Congress waited until Obama took office before going on a spending binge. So most of the spending that took place in 2009 was, in fact, approved by President Obama. This spending, which included Obama’s failed stimulus and bailouts, resulted in a 17.9 percent increase in spending over FY2008 compared to the 3 percent increase proposed by George W. Bush. This increase in spending was the highest annual spending increase since the Korean War.


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There are a lot more where these came from. But the truth doesn't mean much unless more people are aware of it. Liberals desperately want Obama to be remembered as a great president despite his horrible record. Don't let them succeed.
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Matt Margolis is the author of the book, The Scandalous Presidency of Barack Obama and the bestselling book The Worst President in History: The Legacy of Barack Obama. You can follow Matt on Twitter @MattMargolis