150 Reasons Why Barack Obama Is the Worst President in History (15 page)

Is our right to free speech in jeopardy? Perhaps you should ask Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, the man behind the anti-Islamic video that the Obama Administration tried to blame for inciting the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi.

While it is now clear that the Obama Administration knew al Qaeda was connected to the attacks early on, they made a strong effort to blame Nakoula’s little seen YouTube video “Innocence of Muslims” for inciting the violence. On September 12, 2012, Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi called on the U.S. government to arrest Nakoula. Three days later he was brought in for questioning by federal authorities. He was arrested on September 28, 2012, for allegedly violating the conditions of his probation.
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Nakoula’s arrest caused alarm for some who believe Nakoula was unfairly targeted so the Obama Administration could make an example of him.

“As someone who has had clients accused of violating conditions of probation, this is not standard operating procedure for these violations. It is relatively rare to see people incarcerated in relatively minor violations,” said George Washington University law professor John Turley.

“There were great suspicions raised by the speed and intensity of investigation of the filmmaker. Many people viewed it as something of a pretext investigation,” he said. “It seemed obvious to many of us that the administration wanted a picture of this man being handcuffed and put in the back of a cruiser so it would play around the world and in the Arab street.”
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The day after Obama was reelected, Nakoula was sentenced to spend a year in jail.
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Those actually responsible for the attack on the consulate that killed four Americans have yet to be brought to justice.

136.
Assault on Religious Freedom

The Catholic Church has long held the position that access to health care should be available to everyone. This is in keeping with Catholic teaching, which holds that access to health care is so fundamental to human life that it cannot be denied due to inability to pay or other factors. So, many Catholics initially did support Obamacare.

But, when the health care law was passed, it was found to have provisions that would require institutions such as Catholic schools and hospitals to provide birth control and abortion services to their employees—in direct violation of Church teaching. Obama held that these mandates were required because things like birth control and abortion are “basic” health care.
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This is akin to believing pregnancy is a disease and that birth control is the preventative, abortion the cure. That is disgusting enough, but it becomes worse when the President of the United States demands that people with religious objections go along with the idea.

Despite the fact that freedom of religion is guaranteed by the First Amendment to the Constitution, American businesses are finding themselves being persecuted by the Obama Administration for standing up for their religious beliefs.

By February 5, 2013, The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty had filed forty-seven lawsuits on behalf hospitals, universities, and businesses with religious affiliations over the birth control mandate.
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One of those businesses is the Christian-owned Hobby Lobby, a chain of arts and crafts retail stores. After an attempt to get an injunction against the mandate failed, Hobby Lobby announced that the company would refuse to provide birth control coverage and, also, would not pay the $1.3 million per day fine required by the Obamacare law.
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It’s hard to believe that that in the United States of America, standing up for your religious beliefs would have you fined by the government.

137.
Assault on Free Press

In 2013, when the so-called sequestration budget “cuts” were looming, Barack Obama tried to blame the cuts on Republicans. He’d been playing the blame game for months. It was during his third presidential debate with Mitt Romney that Obama first claimed it was not his idea, but that Congress had proposed sequestration.

Not so, according legendary journalist Bob Woodward, who pointed out, both in his book, “The Price of Politics” and in an opinion piece in the Washington Post, that automatic spending cuts were proposed by the White House and personally approved and signed into law by Obama.
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Less than a week after that piece was published, Woodward revealed during an appearance on CNN that a senior White House official warned him that he would “regret” criticizing Obama for his true role in the genesis of the sequester.
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Soon after Woodward’s story came to light, other journalists started coming forward with similar stories about threats and abusive treatment they’d received for merely asking tough questions of members of the Administration, or for unflattering coverage.

The
New York Post’
s Maureen Callahan spoke with several reporters. David Brody, the chief correspondent for CBN News told her, “I can tell you categorically that there’s always been, right from the get-go of this administration, an overzealous sensitivity to any push-back from any media outlet.” Liberal journalist Jonathan Alter also said he’d been subject to similar abusive treatment from the Obama Administration for writing something they didn’t like. A young female reporter was called crude names in an email for merely asking important questions of an Obama Cabinet Secretary.
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Ron Fournier, editor-in-chief of the
National Journal
, also came forward, “I received several e-mails and telephone calls from this White House official filled with vulgarity, abusive language, and virtually the same phrase that Woodward called a veiled threat.”
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Washington Times
columnist Lanny Davis, a centrist Democrat and Obama supporter, was threatened with having his access to White House officials limited for being critical of the administration’s policies.
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This kind of thuggery from the White House, which flies in the face of our First Amendment rights to freedom of the press, has been standard operating procedure in the Obama Administration.

138.
Selective Enforcement of The Law

The President of the United States doesn’t just sign new bills into law. He also has to enforce existing laws. Unfortunately for the rule of law, Barack Obama has a hard time enforcing laws he doesn’t like.

In February of 2011, Barack Obama unilaterally decided that the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), signed by President Bill Clinton in 1996, was unconstitutional and instructed his Department of Justice to stop defending the law in court.
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Obama decided that instead of working with Congress to repeal it, or pass a new law, he’d simply instruct his administration to not enforce it.

In August of 2011, the Obama Administration announced that it would start using its discretion in enforcing the country’s immigration laws, by suspending deportation proceedings against illegal immigrants “who pose no threat to national security or public safety.” According to the
New York Times
, “The new policy is expected to help thousands of illegal immigrants who came to the United States as young children, graduated from high school and want to go on to college or serve in the armed forces.”
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Obama’s actions, the
New York Times
conceded, would improve his image with Latino voters before Election Day. A week prior this announcement, Obama was criticized by Hispanic organizations for not doing enough on issues important to Latino voters’ particularly immigration.
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Obama’s refusal to fully enforce immigration laws helped him win reelection. According to exit polls, Obama won 71 percent of the Hispanic vote,
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up from 67 percent in 2008.
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It may be easy for some to excuse Obama’s selective enforcement of the law simply because they feel the ends justify the means. Selective enforcement of the law can only lead to trouble. Dr. Milton R. Wolf, a
Washington Times
columnist and cousin to Barack Obama, called selective enforcement of the law “the first sign of tyranny.”
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If tyranny is what Obama wants, he’s clearly done his part to set us down that path. If Obama can pick and choose what laws to enforce, all future presidents will see no reason not to do the same, however they see fit.

139.
Bypassing Congress on Gun Control

Obama has, more than once, tried to impose new gun control laws on the American people. Early in his first term, he supported the United Nations Arms Trade Treaty talks, reversing U.S. policy set by the previous administration.
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But, since U.N. treaties require a two-thirds majority of the U.S. Senate for ratification, United States participation in the treaty seems unlikely.

But, the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting gave Obama the political cover he needed impose new restrictions on the Second Amendment, without Congress. Days before his second inauguration, surrounded by little children, he signed 23 gun control executive orders further restricting Americans’ Second Amendment rights. These executive orders were never debated in Congress, and would never have passed Congress.

Obama’s executive orders were so egregious, that many leaders in many states immediately announced plans to resist compliance with any executive action that violated the Second Amendment.
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Soon after Obama’s executive orders were signed, several states began taking action, declaring that they would not enforce any of Obama’s gun regulations that violated the Second Amendment.

One might say it’s presumptuous, despite the aforementioned evidence, to call Barack Obama the worst president in history halfway through his presidency. As much as we’d like to believe that Barack Obama will see the error of his ways and attempt to redeem himself after the failures of his first term, it appears far more likely that things will only get worse.

With his second election behind him, is it really likely that Obama will be more willing to work with the Republican Party? Of course not. In fact, with electoral accountability no longer a factor, Obama is starting to show his true colors.

From his earliest second-term Cabinet choices, to plans to circumvent Congress, Obama seems determined to stay the course that has already earned him the honor of being the worst president in history.

140.
An Overtly Partisan Inaugural Speech

Elections can be bitter, poisonous contests, but inaugurations are times to put all that partisan bitterness behind us and come together for the good of the country. Barack Obama, having just been reelected with fewer votes than his first election, started his second term with a country more divided than when he first took office. But, instead of signaling a shift towards the center, and a willingness to bring the two major parties together to address the country’s problems, he gave what many described as the most partisan inauguration speech in our country’s history.
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Republicans may have still been licking their wounds after the election just a couple months earlier, but the first step in breaching the partisan divide is for the country’s chief executive to reach out to the opposition. Instead, as Senator John McCain noted, this was the first inauguration speech where such a call for both parties to work together was absent.
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Sarah Tanksalvala of the Washington
Examiner
called the speech, “an ode to collectivism while quoting the founding fathers and documents. It was partisan while claiming to speak for the identity of the American.”
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National Review
’s Yuval Levin described it as follows:

The president probably didn’t even quite see that his second inaugural was almost certainly the most partisan inaugural address in American history — more partisan than one delivered on the brink of civil war, or in the midst of it, or after the most poisonous and bitterly contested election in our history. He accused his political opponents of rabid (even stupid) radical individualism, of desiring to throw the elderly and the poor onto the street, of wanting to leave the parents of disabled children with no options, of believing that freedom should be reserved for the lucky and happiness for the few, and of putting dogma and party above country.
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Ron Fournier of the
National Journal
wrote, “What happened to the idealistic young politician who argued against dividing the country into red and blue Americas? It seems we’re not going to see him again.”
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The
Washington Post
’s David Ignatius called Obama’s speech “flat, partisan and surprisingly pedestrian—more a laundry list of preferred political programs than a vision for a divided America and disoriented world.”
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Ignatius continued:

[Obama] gave a progressive speech that Democrats will like; he affirmed the importance of climate change and gay rights, defended by name the sanctity of Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, and made a pitch for infrastructure and education spending.

All worthy causes, but the speech lacked the unifying or transcendent ideas that could help Obama do much more than continue the Washington version of trench warfare during his second term. If you were hoping that the president would set the stage for a grand bargain to restructure America’s entitlement programs and fiscal health for the 21st century, you wouldn’t have found much encouragement.

Missing from the speech was the first inaugural address’s perhaps naïve dream of uniting America. This second speech seemed to accept that America is divided and, as Obama put it, “progress does not compel us to settle centuries long debates about the role of government for all time.” He called out those who would “treat name-calling as reasoned debate”—I wonder who that could mean?—but Obama’s plan seemed to be to roll the negativists, rather than try any longer to reason with them.
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It’s telling that Obama spoke of unity in 2009 when his party controlled both Houses of Congress, but did not in 2013 when he had divided government. It’s a stark contrast to the attitude of his predecessor, George W. Bush, who had majorities in both the House and Senate at the start of his second term, but still made extraordinary efforts to include Democrats on big issues, such as his goal to reform Social Security.

Obama signaled an unwillingness to compromise, or even work with the Republican Party in his second term. It’s
extremely
unfortunate. America is more divided now than ever, and Obama
apparently
wants to keep it that way.

141.
The Nomination of Jack Lew

If there was any nominee Obama could have chosen to replace Tim Geithner as Secretary of Treasury to prove he is serious about the country’s fiscal situation, Jack Lew is furthest thing from it. When Obama announced Lew as his pick, he picked someone who, as the director the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), claimed on national television that Obama’s budget proposals wouldn’t add to the nation’s debt, despite the fact that the OMB’s own estimates had the gross federal debt going up nearly $11 trillion over ten years. These claims were repeated in testimony before the Senate Budget Committee.
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Meaning he either lied in his testimony or is just grossly incompetent. Considering Lew crafted two Obama budgets that were unable to earn a single vote, even from Democrats, the incompetence defense is plausible.
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Lew, just like Obama, has shown an inability to work with Republicans: his actions have shown that he’s just not a man who is willing to work fairly with the other side.
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Lew also repeatedly made the false claim that the Senate needs 60 votes to pass a budget, effectively blaming Republicans for the country’s fiscal problems.
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Obama’s pick for Treasury seems designed to ensure a maximum amount of political warfare without any real prospect of genuine budget reform.

In addition to ensuring long, nasty fights with the Republicans, Obama’s choice of Lew also ensured that the Wall Street bankers who had done so much to wreck the economy continued to have a friend in Obama’s Administration.

Lew has spent most of his career in the public sector, but he did have a stint in the private sector, which can only be described as short and disastrous. As a top executive for Citigroup, he was directly involved with the bank’s riskiest investments when it nearly went under.
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When Citigroup received a taxpayer-funded bailout after massive losses under Lew’s management, he received a $950,000 bonus.
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Obama’s decision to nominate Lew signaled only two things: his lack of interest in solving our debt problems, and his lack of interest in working in a bipartisan manner.

142.
The Nomination of John Kerry

While former Senator John Kerry received bipartisan support for his confirmation as Secretary of State (he was confirmed 94-3), his nomination to replace Hillary Clinton as the country’s top diplomat was a troubling indication of Obama’s vision for his second term.

Kerry’s radical past was brought front and center during his 2004 presidential bid. After briefly serving in Vietnam, Kerry joined the radical group, Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), which was responsible for the bogus “Winter Soldier” investigation alleging war crimes by American soldiers.
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While a member of VVAW, he was present at a meeting during which the group considered a plot to murder of US government officials that supported the war.
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Kerry’s animosity towards America was so strong that he falsely claimed to have been sent illegally to fight in Cambodia during the Vietnam War,
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and had long claimed to have thrown his service medals over the White House fence during an anti-war protest.
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Even if we were willing to forgive his radical past, his career in politics gives us plenty to be concerned about with his new role as America’s top diplomat:

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His desire to normalize relations with Vietnam caused him to whitewash whether or not Americans remained in captivity after the 1973 peace agreement, even though he was chair of the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs, and there was evidence that American POWs were still there.
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When running for Senate in 1984, Kerry scorned our 1983 liberation of Grenada from communism as a “bully’s show of force.” He would later change this position when running for president in 2004.
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He supported massive defense cuts. When he ran for U.S. Senate in 1984, he said would have voted to cut or eliminate funding for several weapons programs that would later become crucial to future military successes.
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He opposed the 1991 Gulf War to liberate Kuwait but changed his mind when the war was easily won. So swiftly did Kerry change positions that one particular constituent in Massachusetts received two letters, one dated January 22, announcing Kerry’s opposition to the war, the other dated January 31 announcing that he supported the effort all along.
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He strongly supported military action in Iraq in 2003, until it was politically necessary to be anti-war to win the 2004 Democratic nomination.

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He was opposed to Israel’s security fence, until he needed Jewish support for his 2004 Presidential campaign.
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He has called for Israel to cede the Golan Heights and eastern Jerusalem to the Islamists who wish to destroy the State of Israel.
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In 2006, he opined that only ignorant, stupid Americans get “stuck” in the military.
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Kerry later tried to backtrack when a firestorm erupted, calling it a “joke.”

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As late as March of 2011, he considered the murderous Assad regime in Syria a reformist government.
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Kerry’s history of siding against America and America’s allies make him a good fit for the Obama Administration, but an unfortunate choice for our country’s top diplomat.

143.
The Nomination of Chuck Hagel

In a time when America’s budget is strained and when our military is stressed by more than ten years of active operations, it would appear that Obama needed to find a clear thinking and effective nominee for the Defense Department.

Hagel’s foreign policy positions have been consistently inconsistent:

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He co-sponsored a resolution to give then-President Clinton retroactive approval for the Kosovo War, but later called President George W. Bush (who got Congressional approval before going to war) “reckless.”
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•
He voted in favor of the war in Iraq, but later called it our biggest policy blunder.

•
He voted in favor of the PATRIOT Act, only to later call for it to be repealed.

•
During the 2008 presidential campaign he said he’d be happy to serve in either a McCain or an Obama Administration.

He has often been on the wrong side of foreign policy issues:

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He opposed the “surge” of troops in Iraq, calling it our worst mistake since Vietnam.

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He claimed Iran was being “helpful” to the United States in Afghanistan.
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In July of 2001, he was one of only two senators to oppose sanctions against Iran.
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In August of 2006, he refused to sign a bipartisan Senate letter calling on the EU to declare Hezbollah a terrorist organization.
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Hagel has also been consistently wrong on his positions on Israel over the years:

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In October of 2000, he refused to sign a Senate letter in support of Israel.
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In November of 2001, he refused to sign a letter to President Bush urging him not to meet with Yasser Arafat until his forces stopped attacking Israel.
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In March of 2009, he signed a letter urging Obama to open direct talks with Hamas leaders.

•
In March of 2007, he claimed that there is a “Jewish lobby” which intimidates American government officials into doing Israel’s bidding.
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