Saturday, September 17, 2011

Worst president ever

Herewith is a letter to the editor of the SB NewsPress that I sent today. I'll update this post if/when it's published.

Update: The letter was published on September 24, 2011.

Several liberal bloggers and essayists predict that an “Arab spring” will soon come to America: that after three years of Democrats’ (read Obama’s) failures (1) to rein in the excesses of wealthy traders and profiteering corporations; (2) to support the needs of the poor and middle class for jobs and decent incomes; and (3) to end Bush’s wars and egregious violations of our privacy, a mass of disaffected Obama voters (acronym: a D.O.V. movement) will take to the streets to force their representatives to fundamentally change America’s international and domestic policies.

To which predictions I reply: LOL. Americans are too chained to cable TV and Internet connections; too stressed by falling values of their homes and retirement accounts; too fixated on consumption and maintaining incomes to support that consumption. No, the time for an American “Arab spring” has passed; its people are too cowed, too lost in the maze of distractions created by those in power: power over our finance, our media, our governance.

The most Americans can hope for is that our inevitable decline ends in a soft landing. And the most Obama can hope for after his single term as president is that, having presided over the demolition of the hopes and aspirations of his constituents—traditional progressives and, most appallingly, minorities and the youth—by his repudiation of his campaign promises, he ends up being second on the “worst president ever” list, behind only Harrison, who died after thirty days in office.