President Barack Obama reflects during a meeting with his full Cabinet in the Cabinet Room of the White House, Sept. 10, 2009. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
“How hard can that be? Saying that Nazis are bad,” former President Barack Obama asked a crowd in Illinois last weekend. David Harsanyi, senior editor at The Federalist, has a couple of answers.
Well, probably no harder than saying the words “radical Islam,” I imagine. Or maybe it’s slightly less difficult than not sending billions of dollars to Holocaust-denying terror regimes that have both the means and intent to murder Jews—in 2018, not 1942. And it’s definitely a lot easier than not meeting, posing, then smiling for a picture with Louis Farrakhan. But thanks for the lecture.
Obama may well find the presence of a few hundred pathetic white supremacists more perilous than a deadly worldwide ideological movement with millions of adherents. But just as Obama’s sins do not excuse President Trump’s inexplicable answer to the Charlottesville riot, Trump’s words don’t excuse the most divisive modern president, a man whose unilateralism and contempt for the process and the Constitution helped create the environment America now find itself in.
Then there was this: “Democrats aren’t just running on good old ideas like a higher minimum wage, they’re running on good new ideas like Medicare-for-all,” boasted Obama.
If Medicare-for-all is such a great idea — which I suppose means Obamacare is failure — why did Democrats spend every drop of political capital unilaterally shoving a wide-ranging national restructuring of a vital part of the economy through the system? Anyone who argued at the time that Obamacare was merely a step towards a broader socializing of medicine was immediately called a liar by professional fact-checkers, racist by Democrats, and an accessory to (murder) by activists.
Haughty finger wagging from Barack Obama reminds us that the Trump presidency is, in big part, a manifestation of a fracture that was the result of the systematic destruction of process and subversion of political standards by his administration and its allies. Obamacare was just one example.
Read more from David Harsanyi here.
