Until recently, I thought Obama was a lot like Jimmy Carter.
There are some similarities to be sure, but he is not a Carter 2.0 by any means. He is however just like the person described in the following paragraph.
Who was this man? It sounded like I was describing Obama, didn’t it? The answer is Mikhail Gorbachev. Yes. I’m talking about the former leader of the Soviet Union, the man with the red map of Afghanistan on his head. If you recall, he is also the leader who presided over the dismantling of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Gorbachev
On June 22nd, Obama delivered his final phase of the Gorbachev Afghanistan strategy, the reversal of the surge followed by a handover of responsibility to the Afghan national forces. The numbers are different. Gorbachev’s surge took place in 1985. Obama’s in 2009. But both Gorbachev and Obama approved the surge in the same year that they took office
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The Russian surge took their troop numbers to 140,000. Our surge took them to 100,000. The Soviet’s Afghan allies also had much higher troop numbers than our Afghan allies do, but similar rates of desertion and non-performance. The Russian counterinsurgency strategy was more aggressive than ours, but it came with a much higher casualty rate. Almost five times higher. But beneath the numbers, the trajectory was nearly the same.
The similarities however go beyond this. Obama has been chosen to play a similar historical role. That is the role of dismantling a major world power. Obama won his election by 53 percent. Gorbachev won his by 59 percent.
To many liberals, America looks like the Soviet Union did to conservatives back then, an empire built on a discredited economic and political philosophy that is standing in the way of history. And they see themselves as reformers guiding it into a new era. A Post-Communism era for the USSR and Post-Capitalism and A Post-Nationalism era for the US and Europe.
While Gorbachev was introducing a certain amount of private enterprise into a socialist system, Obama is tearing out the last remains of free enterprise and replacing it with socialism. These reforms are opposite in direction, but identical in nature. Both men were and are slowly dismantling a system that their backers did not believe in anymore. Rather than reform it through revolution, they avoided confrontation with a process of slow reforms that would let them keep their power while slowly turning the system into something fundamentally different, while preserving their own wealth and power.
The end result of that approach in Russia, after some twists and turns, is a crony capitalist government run by the former KGB. What it will look like in the United States isn’t as obvious, but the EU provides a likely road map. If Russia went from a Communist government with no democracy to a crony capitalist one with very limited democracy—the United States is going from a federalized democracy to a socialist government with no democracy. There will still be people at the top and at the bottom, but far fewer people in the middle who are not members of the ‘Party’. And there will be no legal way to change the system.
The people behind this think of themselves as being on the right side of history. The United States, as well as any nation state based on free elections, free enterprise and common national identities, is to them a historical aberration being set right by global unions, open borders and progressive government.
May God save us and what is left of our country.
During the first two years of his term, Obama has continually blamed all problems on either Bush or the Republicans in Congress. What we are witnessing is the duplicity of a man who appears incapable of telling the truth from day to day.
ReplyDeleteThe nation is in for a week of “high drama”, all of which could have been avoided had Obama agreed to any of the proposals put foreword by Republicans from Paul Ryan to members of the so-called “gang of six.” In the Democrat controlled Senate there has been nothing but obstruction.
One senses that this is exactly what Obama wants. While saying he does not want the U.S. to default on its obligations, what better way to destroy the nation than to destroy its “full faith and credit” regarding its debts?