The Next President Is Going to Be Hated

[Geee]

PJ Media:

Everyone hates the sourpuss who says the party is over. The next president will have to tell the American people that a reckoning is on the horizon—and that it is not going to be pretty.

 

President Obama has created lots of mythoi about the landscape he inherited in January 2009: the Iraq war was lost and al Qaeda ascendant; the September 2008 meltdown had wrecked the economy; the immigration system “was” in shambles; and Obama would have to restore fiscal sobriety after George W. Bush (all “by his lonesome” with a “credit card from the Bank of China”) in “unpatriotic” fashion had alone piled up U.S. record debt.

 

In reality, the 2007-8 surge had all but ended al-Qaeda in Iraq; and the American fatality rate in the Iraqi theater of operations had plunged to fewer than the military’s monthly losses to accidents and illness. To be sure, the economy was still shaky, but the recession that had started in December 2007 was all but over, ending in a natural fashion about five months after Obama took office. The so-called bailouts and TARP rescue measures were already in place to stop the panic of four months prior. Bush’s nearly $5 trillion profligate increase in the national debt would be doubled by Obama, despite an increase in income taxes, a fortuitous fracking bonanza, and near-constant zero interest rates. Obama shattered the old Clinton-Gingrich formula of balancing the budget by raising income tax rates and curbing spending. The bipartisan Simpson-Bowles committee recommendations to address the debt were ignored. There is no need to compare the status of health care in 2008 to the present mess.

[Valin]

PJ Media:

Victor Davis Hanson

April 11, 2016

 

Everyone hates the sourpuss who says the party is over. The next president will have to tell the American people that a reckoning is on the horizon—and that it is not going to be pretty.

 

(Snip)

 

An adult president is going to have to tell the American people that a mandated equality-of-result economy is fossilized, entitlements are insolvent, the debt is unsustainable, interest rates are going up, the medical system is pure chaos, and people have to get over expecting to live off government, not because it is unethical, but because it is untenable.

 

Then we come to the world abroad.

 

(Snip)

 

History in the short term adores appeasers. They pontificate and pose as sober and judicious humanitarians who will do anything to avoid confrontation on their watch, even as they light the fuse of Armageddon for their successors. The restorers of deterrence are always smeared as war-mongers—and only praised as Churchillian largely when they are dead. So it will be for the next president if he or she chooses to stop the decline and restore the American-led postwar order.

[nickydog]

It's not just health care that's a mess -- everything is a mess. And reading the comments just confirms it.

[Valin]

It's not just health care that's a mess -- everything is a mess. And reading the comments just confirms it.

 

For What It Is Worth

 

There's something happening here

What it is ain't exactly clear

There's a man with a gun over there

Telling me I got to beware

I think it's time we stop, children, what's that sound

Everybody look what's going down

There's battle lines being drawn

Nobody's right if everybody's wrong

Young people speaking their minds

Getting so much resistance from behind

It's time we stop, hey, what's that sound

Everybody look what's going down

 

Stephen Stills. 1966