Barack Obama and the Myth of the Unforced Error

Many believe that the current administration – or perhaps more broadly, the current Democratic regime, by the triumvirate Obama, Pelosi, and Reid since the 2006 elections – will be remembered and condemned for its “unforced errors”… that is, for the unnecessary mistakes it has made, through mishandling programs and clumsily creating needless trouble by misreading economic cause-and-effect or societal trends.

Much of the damage done by this administration has in fact been intentional – either out of some arrogant belief that “we elites know better than you do” or out of a vengeful desire to punish the Republicans, or the conservatives, or the entrepreneurs, or the bourgeoisie, or whoever they choose to detest most at any given moment. Upon reflection, few of the nation’s ills during the Obama administration can honestly be called anything but their conscious plans.

Take people who own typical, comfortable American cars that get 18 miles per gallon or so, and bribe them with $4500 in tax money to destroy that car and replace it with a new 28 mpg Japanese or Korean car.

This took hundreds of thousands of devoted Detroit customers and turned them into import car buyers. It literally destroyed billions of dollars of assets, taking that value out of the economy.

It raised the prices of used cars (by vastly reducing the number available) and increased the cost and difficulty of major repairs (by removing replacement parts from scrapyards, a common source for affordably repairing used cars). The long term damage of this one will still be seen a generation from now.

Take a perfectly fine 100-year-old appliance, the cheap and efficient US-made incandescent light bulb, and forbid its manufacture or purchase, mandating instead a competitive product made in China that costs four to ten times as much.

Compared to the huge cost of an automobile, this may seem puny, but everyone buys dozens of light bulbs per year, and it adds up. This utterly unnecessary closure of American light bulb factories, combined with a barely noticeable increase in every American’s cost of living, has been a key part of the “nickel-and-diming” of the modern Leftist agenda.

If every American household spends a conservative $30 more per year on light bulbs (an average of $40/year for CFLs, vs. $10/year for cheap incandescents), that’s billions of dollars less in discretionary spending across our economy. This one seemingly tiny change in our lives will directly cost the economy tens of thousands of jobs, and for no real benefit whatsoever.

Take a perfectly functional private health insurance market - not perfect, but functional - and devastate it by decreeing that half its plans are now illegal – or "substandard," to use the president's repulsively arrogant adjective for normal health insurance plans.

What will happen to the employees of those insurance companies that once had a million customers and will now be down to twenty thousand? How many insurance salesmen do you need when people all buy the product on the government’s website (assuming it ever works)?

And how will Americans live with the thousands of dollars in higher deductibles, the loss of options as doctors and hospitals flee the bankruptcy-factories of Obamacare’s and Medicare’s low reimbursement rates?

Obamacare is what kept this nation from recovery when the recession finally hit bottom; it’s the reason we didn’t start climbing again after our fall.

Take the default currency of the world - the United States Dollar - to which a hundred other currencies across the planet are pegged - and devalue it with an 85 billion dollar printing party every month.

The Federal Reserve, in recent years, with the avid encouragement of the White House, has implemented a Ponzi scheme that makes Social Security look like a legitimate investment program. The main job of the Fed has long been to protect the value of the Dollar, to resist dangerous inflation.

The fundamental ingredients in any medium of exchange are rarity and near-universal acceptance, and the Dollar was long the most stable and respectable currency on Earth. Our Dollar is still accepted worldwide, but it’s lost its title as the preferred one.

Just about anybody will still accept the US Dollar, at least in small quantities, but its rarity takes an 85 billion dollar hit- yes, every month – thanks to the Fed’s policy of Quantitative Easing, a rather verbose way of saying “running the printing presses at full speed,” with absolutely no economic expansion to justify “creating” the additional dollars.

Take a country teetering on an unemployment cliff... starting at a comfortable 4.5% or so, generally defined as full employment, but heading in the wrong direction by the end of the Bush administration... and triple the figure by throwing the borders wide open to encourage rampant immigration of an endless, unassimilatable horde of new low-price workers.

The availability of such numbers of legal immigrants lowers the earning potential of low-end skilled and unskilled labor by native born Americans, and the presence of unethical competition employing the even lower-cost illegal immigrants has destroyed honest businesses, from fast food restaurants to window-and-siding firms, from landscaping firms to manufacturing plants.

Take a nation blessed by Providence with the greatest Constitution in human history – a document that carefully split the powers of government into three branches, enabling each to be a check on the others – and brazenly disregard all the Constitutional checks on the Executive branch.

He appoints regulatory authorities without submitting them to Congress for approval; he abuses the recess appointment power by leaving fraudulent appointees in position, even after directly being instructed to fire them by federal judges.

He violates the Bill of Rights in his Executive Orders, and turns his very position on its head by executing not the laws passed by Congress, but only parts of the laws he likes, and the unconstitutional executive orders he writes himself. Here in particular, the next administration will indeed have a great deal to clean up.

Take a country with which we have nothing to do – a country whose internal problems don’t concern us at all, one of the few islamic countries that respected us enough to have stopped causing us trouble a decade earlier – and join a French and English effort to pummel the country into overthrowing its dictator. Oh, not that Moammar Qadaffi was anyone worth defending… but he wasn’t our problem.

Even so, when our country was in virtual bankruptcy, adding a trillion more dollars to our national debt EVERY YEAR, this president – without a declaration of war, without so much as the guidance of Congress – fired hundreds of half-million dollar Tomahawk missiles into the worthless shacks and deserts and tents of Libya.

This is no exaggeration; the value of the high-tech artillery we burned up in Libya was higher than the value of much of that beleaguered land. Long before the Obama presidency, we had gone from declarations of war to Congressionally-authorized police actions. That slippery slope reached its ultimate conclusion with Libya, as an executive branch unilaterally made war on a foreign sovereign.

Early on in the Obama administration, it was suspected that the new president’s appointees would be the type to abuse their offices. Numerous appointees had histories of extra-constitutional actions during their previous jobs in the Clinton Administration or the state governments, or had radical writings among their published works. But few anticipated the lawlessness we would uncover as this administration laid down its record.

It virtually began with Attorney General Eric Holder dismissing the convictions of Pennsylvania’s New Black Panther thugs who had dressed in paramilitary garb and ejected white voters from polling places in 2008. The administration gave ACORN, the vote fraud organization, lucrative taxpayer-funded contracts in the 2009 stimulus act and again in Obamacare.

The administration appointed a known abuser of the public trust, Lois Lerner, formerly of the Federal Election Commission, to head up a division in the Internal Revenue Service that they chartered to deny nonprofit status to Tea Party groups and other religious or conservative organizations.

They implemented convoluted methods to ensure that the votes of military bases would never make it to the polls on time; they built a voting registration tool into obamacare (without a citizenship or felon status check), in order to create as many duplicate or otherwise illegal voters as possible on the rolls.

All these are criminal acts, all deserving of impeachment and imprisonment. And all to enable the various types of vote fraud upon which the Democratic Party has learned to depend for victory, cycle after cycle.

We could review more; the list of violations and abominations of this era grows by the day. But this is enough to make the point: none of these required a government action that bore risk. The nation would have been better off with inaction from the White House than the actions they performed. These were not mistakes; they were in fact just cog after cog after cog in the construction of a program of destruction that has devastated our foreign policy, our social policy, and our economy.

Historians know that there have been several administrations that ought to have ended in an impeachment; this however is the rare one in which virtually the entire White House staff (presumably with the exception of the cooks and housekeepers, but who knows, anymore?) ought to spend the rest of their days in jail, for the mass impoverishment of whole sectors of the American public, and the continuous, willful violation of their oaths of office.

John F. Di Leo is a Chicago-based Customs broker and trade compliance trainer. A former Milwaukee County Republican Party Chairman, he has now been a recovering politician for over sixteen years.

Permission is hereby granted to forward freely, provided it is uncut and the IR URL and byline remain included. Follow John F. Di Leo on Facebook or LinkedIn, or on Twitter at @johnfdileo.

Bob: “Hey Jim, did you hear about the Obama administration scandal?,
Jim: “You mean the Mexican gun running?”
Bob: “No, the other one.”
Jim: “You mean SEAL Team 6?”
Bob: “No, the other one.”
Jim: “Obama saying the avg family would save $2,500 on their premiums?”
Bob: “No, the other one.”
Jim: “Forcing businesses to violate their religious beliefs by paying for drugs that abort the unborn?”
Bob: “No, the other one.”
Jim: “Violating the rights and sanctity of our Churches?”
Bob: “No, the other one.”
Jim: “Spending $634 million on a website that doesn’t work?”
Bob: “No, the other one.”
Jim: “Obama calling for an increase in our debt when he lambasted Bush for the very same thing?”
Bob: “No, the other one.”
Jim: “Obama having NSA spy on 124 Billion Phone Calls in One Month?”
Bob: “No, the other one.”
Jim: “Saddling our kids with $17 trillion in debt of which they can never get out of and will not have as good a life as we have?”
Bob: “No, the other one.”
Jim: “Bailing out Detroit after decades of corrupt Democratic management?”
Bob: “No, the other one.”
Jim: “You mean the State Dept. lying about Benghazi?”
Bob: “No, the other one.”
Jim: “You mean voter fraud?”
Bob: “No, the other one.”
Jim: “Intentionally trying to hurt Americans during the sequester?”
Bob: “No, the other one.”
Jim: “Blocking veterans who secured our freedoms from their monuments but giving the green light for Illegals to use Monument Mall?”
Bob: “No, the other one.”
Jim: “Denying school kids the ability to tour the White House but still spending lavishly on his parties?”
Bob: “No, the other one.”
Jim: “You mean Obama saying we can keep our insurance and doctors if we wanted to?”
Bob: “No, the other one.”
Jim: “You mean the military not getting their votes counted?”
Bob: “No, the other one.”
Jim: “The NSA monitoring foreign diplomats?”
Bob: “No, the other one.”
Jim: “You mean the use of drones in our own country without the benefit of the law?”
Bob: “No, the other one.”
Jim: “Giving 123 Technologies $300 Million and right after it declared bankruptcy and was sold to the Chinese?”
Bob: “No, the other one.”
Jim: “You mean the president arming the Muslim Brotherhood?”
Bob: “No the other one:.
Jim: “The IRS targeting conservatives?”
Bob: “No, the other one.”
Jim: “The DOJ spying on the press?”
Bob: “No, the other one.”
Jim: “Sebelius shaking down health insurance executives?”
Bob: “No, the other one.”
Jim: “You mean Obama spending $3.7 Trillion on Welfare Over Last 5 Years”
Bob: “No, the other one.”
Jim: “Giving SOLYNDRA $500 MILLION DOLLARS and 3 months later they declared bankruptcy and then the Chinese bought it?”
Bob: “No, the other one.”
Jim: “The NSA monitoring our phone calls, emails and everything else?”
Bob: “No, the other one.”
Jim: “Millions of Americans losing their health care coverage?”
Bob: “No, the other one.”
Jim: “Forcing Americans to include coverage in their insurance policies of items they do not want?”
Bob: “No, the other one.”
Jim: “Ordering the release of nearly 10,000 illegal immigrants from jails and prisons, and falsely blaming the sequester?”
Bob: “No, the other one.”
Jim: “Denying Arizona the right to protect its borders?”
Bob: “No, the other one.”
Jim: “Providing weapons to Syrian rebels many of whom apparently are Al Queda”
Bob: “No, the other one.”
Jim: “The president’s repeated violation of the law requiring him to submit a budget no later than the first Monday in February?”
Bob: “No, the other one.”
Jim: “The 2012 vote where 115% of all registered voters in some counties voted 100% for Obama?”
Bob: “No, the other one.”
Jim: “The president’s unconstitutional recess appointments in an attempt to circumvent the Senate’s advise-and-consent role?”
Bob: “No, the other one.”
Jim: “The State Department interfering with an Inspector General investigation on departmental sexual misconduct?”
Bob: “No, the other one.”
Jim: “Clinton, the IRS, Clapper and Holder all lying to Congress?”
Bob: “No, the other one.”
Jim: “The President using nearly $1 trillion dollars of stimulus money to fund his cronies?”
Bob: “No, the other one”
Jim: “You mean Fast & Furious?”
Bob: “No, the other one.”
Jim: “I give up! ...Oh wait, I think I got it! You mean that 65 million low-information voters who don’t pay taxes and get free stuff from taxpayers and stuck us again with the most pandering, corrupt administration in American history?”
Bob: “THAT’S THE ONE!”

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