FUSION JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2010
By Ben Shapiro
 Certain times in history seem to call out for certain leaders. There are moments when extraordinary personalities appear at precisely the right time. There are historic convergences of fate, when the world situation requires a particular person. This is that time and President Barack Obama is that man. |
You read that right. Glenn Beck said it, and I’ll say it with him: President Obama is the right man at the right time. John McCain’s election would have been disastrous.
When Barack Obama took office, domestic and international politics were at a crossroads. The war in Iraq was swiftly heading toward its conclusion, and the war in Afghanistan was becoming more of a quagmire. South America was gradually becoming more democratic and less replete with tinpot dictators. Palestinian terrorist groups were losing both military and economic support. The Russians were acting aggressively, but were being thwarted by American intransigence. Iran was developing nuclear weapons, but faced the threat of force from the United States and Israel. China was buying up American dollars as if they were going out of style, which they were.
Things were similarly chaotic on the home front. President Bush had just bailed out the biggest banking institutions on Wall Street, while insisting that he had “abandoned free-market principles to save the free-market system.” He had nationalized Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. He had used his Treasury Secretary, Henry Paulson, to bully private institutions into making certain deals. The real estate market was imploding. The stock market was dropping. Unemployment was increasing.
In short, it was a confusing time. Republicans like President Bush and John McCain were acting like socialists. Democrats were cheering the socialist policies while condemning Bush. And the American people were confused. They were so confused that they elected a man whose chief characteristic was vagueness: Sen. Barack Obama, a master of obfuscation, a man who was forcefully in favor of concrete goals like hope and change. He couldn’t be bothered with the details, of course. But he said lots of pretty words.
The media anointed Obama the Man of Fate. And he was. But not in the way the media intended.
President Barack Obama has taken a confused political situation and crystallized it in a remarkable way. His policies have been clear and forceful. They have not varied. They have not wavered. They have been entirely consistent: socialism at home, apologies and surrender abroad.
President Obama has nationalized the car companies. He has attempted to nationalize the health care system. He has tried to destroy American industry by pushing the “science” of global warming, stumping for cap-and-trade legislation that would cripple our economy. He has tripled the national debt, and devalued the currency to crisis levels. He has continued selling America to China, then used the money to pay off his political allies in the labor unions. He has attacked his political opponents—Fox News in particular—with the rabidity of a Hugo Chavez acolyte. He has appointed communists, allegedly pro-pedophilia education advisers, and Chicago thugs to high office.
President Obama has undermined pro-democracy movements in Iran and Honduras. He has surrendered our foreign policy in Eastern Europe to Russia. He has allowed China to call the shots on human rights and North Korea. He has targeted Israel while buttressing the Palestinians. He has dithered in Afghanistan as the Taliban regained momentum. He has apologized for America to virtually every country on Earth. And for it all he has won a well-deserved Nobel Peace Prize.
It’s an unparalleled record of selling out America and, for all that, I say: Thank you, Mr. President.
President Obama’s clarity of purpose has elicited a similar clarity from the American people. His hard-left politics of division have catalyzed us. All of a sudden, a population that was asleep is awake. All of a sudden, a nation that thought its liberties were safe realizes just how fragile those liberties are. All of a sudden, American values matter again. And they matter because they are under obvious and incessant assault from the White House.
President Obama has mobilized this country to fight for American values like no president since Reagan. For the first time in a generation, Americans are truly upset about the concept of an exponentially growing government. For the first time in decades, Americans are really thinking about governmental corruption, the incipient demise of the free market economy, and the value of an open health care system.
Who would have imagined even a year ago that Americans would descend on Washington, D.C., to protest the destruction of Constitutional principles? Who could have imagined the massive groundswell of the Tea Party movement, with dissenters cropping up in large groups around the country, simply to demonstrate their allegiance to the liberty and opportunity the American system has provided? Who could have imagined that, with 60 votes in the Senate and 256 votes in the House, the Democrats would fear the wrath of the American people?
And who could have imagined the renewed interest in exercising uniquely American liberties? Americans are taking advantage of their Second Amendment rights in droves, buying guns and ammo like they’re going out of style (which, if Obama has his way, they will be). Americans are looking past official Obama media outlets like the alphabet networks, The New York Times, CNN, and loony-bin MSNBC and instead beginning to think for themselves. Americans are gathering, protesting, writing their representatives. They are becoming passionate advocates for America’s founding ideals.
Americans have never valued their freedom of speech as they do now, when they fear losing it. They have never valued their freedom of association as they do now, when they fear losing it. They have never valued their Declaration of Independence and their Constitution the way they do now, when they fear losing the principles those documents represent.
None of this would ever have happened this fast if John McCain had been elected. He would have pursued similarly socialistic policies at home and he would undoubtedly have been more forceful abroad, but he would have left America the same confused mess President Bush did.
President Obama has made our world incredibly clear. He has wiped away the mist of party allegiance and political triangulation. He has made silence impossible and despair irrelevant.
President Obama has started a Second American Revolution, a revolution that is playing out peacefully in towns and cities across the country. He didn’t do it by being George Washington or Thomas Jefferson, but by being King George III, a man who once said, “A traitor is everyone who does not agree with me.”
President Obama has not kept very many of the promises he made while campaigning, but there is one promise that he has fulfilled: uniting America. The only problem is that we’re uniting against him.
