Obama's International Score Card

Given that we are fourteen months into the President Obama's tenure I thought it would be a good time to see how he is doing in the international arena. It is pretty obvious his administration has been pretty much a failure on the domestic front considering:

• Unemployment has risen to about 10% and looks like it will stay at that level for the near term future.


• Federal government spending and deficit levels are at all time high levels and threaten the fiscal soundness of the country's financials.


• Health care costs continue to rise and the current health care reform bill, if it passes, will be an absolute disaster that does not solve the problem, basically because the political class and Obama never defined and quantified the underlying root causes. And it took us fourteen months to get to this point.


• Public schools continue to fail, the War on Drugs continues to be lost, we continue to have no national energy plan or strategy, Social Security and Medicare continue to stagger towards insolvency, our borders continue to leak relative to illegal immigration, etc.


• The country has never been more divided with names such as un-American, racists, knuckle dragging Neanderthals, smelly, a%#holes, etc. being thrown around to describe those that disagree with the President's programs, name calling that is not renounced by the President.

Not a great status update on the home front. Fourteen months into his administration and the President cannot claim anything close to an accomplishment. But how is he doing on the international stage where he was supposed to increase America's prestige, standing, and cooperation with other countries:

• Iran is fourteen months closer to having the capability to produce atomic weapons. Nothing has inhibited Iran from going forward with its nuclear weapons program development, even Obama's charm and certainly not his policies. In an Associated Press report on February 22, 2010, reporter Ali Akbar Dareini described how Iran announced that it planned to build two new uranium enrichment plants deep inside the nation's mountains to protect the plants from attacks. The report also described how Iran was also going to install newer technology centrifuges to enrich uranium more quickly than current centrifuges. Bottom line: Iran is moving forward aggressively with its plan to build nuclear weapons and the Obama administration has done nothing to slow them down.


• On the other side of the world, we are no closer to getting North Korea's nuclear program under control. The administration's efforts have only resulted in putting North Korea fourteen months further along in its development of a nuclear arsenal.


• In the midst of sending Vice President Joe Biden to Israel to encourage peace talks between the Israelis and Palestinians, the Israelis announced plans to build hundreds of new homes in areas of dispute in East Jerusalem, in direct opposition to Obama's condition that settlement growth be severely curtailed in order to get the peace talks going again. Thus, it appears that Obama will not be able to charm the Israeli's into peace talks with the Palestinians since Israel just threw the settlement freeze condition back in his face.


• Sometime later in 2010, Obama will withdrawal all but 50,000 U.S. troops from Iraq which many would consider good news. However, a recent AP article described the views of a leading U.S. general that the withdrawal may not happen if there is a major disruption in the country by the time of the withdrawal. Thus, a major plank in Obama's Presidential campaign, withdrawal from Iraq, could be pushed off into 2011 or later. In any case, even if there is no major disruption, he will still leave 50,000 troops in the country for an open-ended length of time, in clear violation of his pledge to get us out of Iraq. In this area, he appears no better than if a Republican had been elected, U.S. troops will be deployed for far too long.

The problem with the above failures is that I doubt any member of the political class could have done any better. Obama, McCain, Rangel, Pelosi, Reid, etc. are just politicians who need to maintain the status quo in order to maintain their little fiefdoms, at the expense of the good of the country. There are no leaders of any degree in positions of power in D.C. today. Without leadership, the country will continue to drift until it falls off of some precipice, be it domestic or international. That is why implementing many of the steps in "Love My Country, Loathe My Government" are so critical. From term limits to the elimination of gerrymandered Congressional districts to minimizing the funding of re-elections campaigns by businesses, unions and lobbyists, new ways need to be implemented to get real leaders, not shallow politicians, into those positions of power and allow them to bring in new ideas and approaches. Obama's approaches are certainly not working.

Our new book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at www.loathemygovernment.com. It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble.