America was better when? ... (Obama again demonstrate just how utterly vacuous he really is)

It’s almost ironic, really, that less than two weeks after he once again excoriated the United States — this time to a second-grader — Sen. Barack Hussein Obama suddenly finds himself having to respond in some way to reality — and, in the process, once again demonstrate just how utterly vacuous he, and the political party that is promoting him, really is.

A nasty little shooting war has broken out in the Republic of Georgia, a shooting war in which Russia is flexing its military muscle. In reaction to what has transpired, Obama immediately called for action on the part of the United Nations, unaware, perhaps, that since Russia is a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council, and therefore can exercise veto power, there is absolutely nothing the U.N. can do. In fact, there has never been anything that the U.N. could do, other than to give dictators and petty tyrants some sort of patina of respectability.

The real irony, however, was in what Obama said to that youngster when he was asked why he wanted to be president.“America,” Obama replied, “is no longer what it could be, what it once was. And I say to myself, I don’t want that future for my children.”

So what was America? Was he talking about the America of the late 1960, when the Great Society unveiled its welfare state, now credited with having done more to destroy the black family than the organization established by Southern Democrats following the Civil War, an organization called the Ku Klux Klan?

Certainly Obama must be familiar with the 1960s. True, he was still very young and spent a big part of that decade in Indonesia, but his close association with his friends William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn must have enabled him to familiarize himself with the wonderful world of domestic terrorism.

Perhaps Obama was thinking about the America of the 1970s. In the early part of the decade, a Congress controlled by the Democrat Party did more to undermine America’s standing in the world than just about anything that has happened since. That was the Congress that cut off aid to South Vietnam, an ally, allowing North Vietnam to overrun the country and establish another communist stronghold, leading, later to genocide in Cambodia.

It was during that Cambodian genocide that Democrat President Jimmy Carter would simply wring his hands in frustration. Despite his pronouncements about “human rights,” he never did a thing about Pol Pot, leaving that instead to the North Vietnamese. Carter further undermined American standing in the world by abandoning another ally, the Shah of Iran, thereby helping to create an Islamic dictatorship that now threatens the nuclear destruction of one of its neighbors, and allowing a group of American citizens to be held hostage for well over a year.

That same president continually backed down from a Soviet dictatorship — a dictatorship his successor wound up destroying — and reacted to a Soviet act of aggression — not entirely unlike what Russia is now doing in Georgia — in Afghanistan by boycotting the 1980 Olympic Games.

Interestingly, Obama seems to have hinted that he would follow the lead of Carter when he mentioned that Sochi, Russia, would be the host of the 2014 Winter Olympics. Are you threatening an American boycott if the Russians don’t leave Georgia?

Maybe Obama was talking about the 1990s, when, under the stewardship of President Bill Clinton, Islamic terrorists discovered they could attack American interests with impunity while a saber-rattling dictator could demand the return of a child who had escaped from the island prison, a return ultimately facilitated by a federal raid on a private dwelling in Miami.

What kind of future does Obama want for his children? Once an American named Harry Truman, a Democrat, drew a line in the sand in Korea, demonstrating to the world that the United States would not allow communism to roll unchecked through Southeast Asia. Once an American named Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican, declared that a group of young black students had every right to attend Little Rock High School and dispatched troops to uphold that order. Once an American named John Kennedy, a Democrat, stated that America would “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” Once an American named Ronald Reagan, a Republican, refused to compromise with the Soviet Union, putting into motion a series of events that would not only lead to the collapse of the Soviet Union but to underline the promise of John Kennedy. Once an American named George W. Bush, a Republican, reacted firmly and forcefully to an attack on the United States, and despite having to fight enemies both external and internal, has kept the U.S. safe from similar attacks.

Perhaps it is time Obama recognized that it is only the left, those who so embraced the Soviet Union and all it stood for, and who could never fully accept its demise, that really sees America in decline.

Major programs of Great Society:

Civil rights
Historian Alan Brinkley has suggested that the most important domestic achievement of the Great Society may have been its success in translating some of the demands of the civil rights movement into law.[4] Four civil rights acts were passed, including three laws in the first two years of Johnson’s presidency. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 forbade job discrimination and the segregation of public accommodations. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 assured minority registration and voting. It suspended use of literacy or other voter-qualification tests that had sometimes served to keep African-Americans off voting lists and provided for federal court lawsuits to stop discriminatory poll taxes. It also reinforced the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by authorizing the appointment of federal voting examiners in areas that did not meet voter-participation requirements. The Immigration and Nationality Services Act of 1965 abolished the national-origin quotas in immigration law. The Civil Rights Act of 1968 banned housing discrimination and extended constitutional protections to Native Americans on reservations.

War on Poverty
The most ambitious and controversial part of the Great Society was its initiative to end poverty. .. The centerpiece of the War on Poverty was the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, which created an Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) to oversee a variety of community-based antipoverty programs. The OEO reflected a fragile consensus among policymakers that the best way to deal with poverty was not simply to raise the incomes of the poor but to help them better themselves through education, job training, and community development. Central to its mission was the idea of “community action,” the participation of the poor in framing and administering the programs designed to help them.

The War on Poverty began with a $1 billion appropriation in 1964 and spent another $2 billion in the following two years. It spawned dozens of programs, among them the Job Corps, whose purpose was to help disadvantaged youth develop marketable skills; the Neighborhood Youth Corps, the first summer jobs established to give poor urban youths work experience and to encourage them to stay in school; Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA), a domestic version of the Peace Corps, which placed concerned citizens with community-based agencies to work towards empowerment of the poor; the Model Cities Program for urban redevelopment; Upward Bound, which assisted poor high school students entering college; legal services for the poor; the Food Stamps program; the Community Action Program, which initiated local Community Action Agencies charged with helping the poor become self-sufficient; and Project Head Start, which offered preschool education for poor children.

Education
The most important educational component of the Great Society was the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, designed by Commissioner of Education Francis Keppel. It was signed into law on April 11, 1965, less than three months after it was introduced. It ended a long-standing political taboo by providing significant federal aid to public education, initially allotting more than $1 billion to help schools purchase materials and start special education programs to schools with a high concentration of low-income children. The Act established Head Start, which had originally been started by the Office of Economic Opportunity as an eight-week summer program, as a permanent program.

The Higher Education Act of 1965 increased federal money given to universities, created scholarships and low-interest loans for students, and established a National Teachers Corps to provide teachers to poverty stricken areas of the United States. It began a transition from federally funded institutional assistance to individual student aid.

Living conditions in areas where people had been unjustly oppressed were horrendous. I still believe that AT THE TIME these programs were implemented, they was necessary, but over time the extrapolation of these concepts and programs became distorted and out of kilter.

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