Big O's Right Choices

There's no shortage of confidence in the White House these days:

In an exclusive interview with ABC’s Jake Tapper, Obama essentially said that, if he could redo the first few years of his presidency, he wouldn’t have made a single decision differently.

“I guarantee it’s going to be a close election [in 2012] because the economy is not where it wants to be and, even though I believe all the choices we’ve made have been the right ones, we’re still going through difficult circumstances,” the president said.

Wow.  Really?  You want to go there?

Guy Benson makes it a personal mission to illuminate a great number of those 'right' choices:

All the choices, Mr. President?  All of them?  What about...

The choice to appoint multiple tax cheats to your cabinet, including your current Treasury Secretary?

The choice to keep insisting on closing the Guantanamo Bay detention facility, even though the public opposes this prospect -- which was repeatedly blocked by a Democratic Congress?

The choice to throw a lavish birthday party for yourself, replete with a barefoot Conga line through the White House, as the threat of a national credit downgrade cast a shadow over the country.

The choice to file a lawsuit against Arizona's law that authorizes state and local officials to help the federal government fulfill its woefully unfulfilled responsibilities -- and that your Attorney General admitted he'd never read, even as he publicly denounced it.

The choice to include two provisions -- 1099 reform and the CLASS Act -- in your unpopular healthcare bill that are so unaffordable and unworkable that your own administration has since abandoned them.

The choice of your Justice Department to file a lawsuit to overturn a small North Carolina town's democratically-enacted decision to eliminate party identifications from municipal election ballots, arguing that African-Americans need "D" and "R" labels to determine whom to support.

The choice to sell your failed $800 Billion "stimulus" package as a means to spur "shovel ready" projects -- projects you later joked weren't quite so shovel ready after all.

The choice to appoint a self-described "Communist" who signed a 9/11 Truther petition as your "Green Jobs Czar."

The choice to bow to union demands and cancel a successful inner-city school choice program, despite its soaring graduation rates, improved reading scores, cost effectiveness, and overwhelming parental satisfaction.

The choice to alienate our greatest ally -- Great Britain -- by rudely disposing of a Winston Churchill bust, bestowing the Queen with an iPod filled with your own speeches, giving the former Prime Minister a gift that literally did not work on his own soil, and signaling neutrality over the Falkland Islands.

The choice to authorize, or at least ignore, a federal program that permitted 2,000 guns to "walk" into the hands of Mexican drug cartels, by design, resulting in countless murders -- including a US border patrol agent.

The choice to violate multiple self-aggrandizing "transparency" pledges.

The choice to attempt to freeze out a legitimate news organization you viewed as inconveniently adversarial, a ploy that enraged the entire press corps.

The choice of your Justice Department to not pursue civil rights cases involving alleged minority offenders, and to drop an already-won, open-and-shut voter intimidation case against the New Black Panther party.

The choice to insist on granting mega-terrorists like Khalid Sheik Muhammad with civilian trials in New York City, over loud objections from Congress, city officials, and the public.

The choice to offend our greatest Middle Eastern ally -- Israel -- by extending shoddy treatment to its Prime Minister, and making provocative statements about preconditions for basic Israeli security.

The choice to revisit redundant and political investigations into the US intelligence community, over public objections from a bipartisan group of former CIA director, and despite low morale at the agencies that keep Americans safe.

The choice to introduce Stimulus 2.0 in a politically-timed Joint Session speech, knowing full well it would never pass either chamber of Congress.

The choice to travel the countryside, supposedly selling a plan to create US jobs, in foreign-made buses.

The choice to foist an expensive, failed mortgage bailout program upon the public -- which exacerbated moral hazard issues and actually "added to housing woes," according to the New York Times.

The choice to fast-track a half-billion dollar federal loan to a now-bankrupt solar energy company, a move even your own advisors repeatedly warned against.

The choice to demagogue and reject two separate pieces of legislation that would have placed the country on a path to solvency, and that would have averted the first US credit downgrade in history.

The choice to offer US support to the illegitimate, far-Left leader of Honduras, even as his small country struggled to retain its democracy.

The choice to produce a 2012 budget that increased the national debt by nearly $10 Trillion over a decade, ignored virtually all your own commission's recommendations for entitlement reform, raised taxes by $2 trillion, and was generally viewed as so surreally irresponsible that it was defeated unanimously in the Democrat-held Senate.

The choice to sit idly by while anti-American dictators ranted against our country, later expressing gratitude that they didn't blame you, specifically, for events that occurred when you were very young.

The choice to compare AIG executives to suicide bombers for receiving bonuses that your own administration wrote into the 2009 stimulus bill.

The choice to golf, golf, golf as federal efforts languished throughout the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

The choice to lie about what scientific experts said, in order to pursue your anti-offshore drilling agenda.

The choice to introduce a litany of sanitized descriptors into our national security lexicon, from "man-caused disasters" to "overseas contingency operations."

The choice of your Vice President to kowtow to Communist China, flatly stating that he understood, and "wouldn't question," that country's hideous one-child policy.

The choice to schedule troop withdrawals from Iraq and Afghanistan along a transparently political timeline, in the face of strenuous opposition from top military commanders.

The choice to ignore the legal analysis of Pentagon attorneys and your own Office of Legal Counsel in order to maintain the US intervention in Libya, which was not approved by Congress.

The choice to offer an apology to Japan for the use of overwhelming, devastating US force to finally end World War II in the Pacific theater, a plan so groveling and unnecessary that Japanese aborted the idea.

The choice of your State Department to extend "condolences" to the family of a terrorist killed in a US strike.

I'm pretty sure this list will be significantly longer by the time you're reading this, too.  I think I speak for a large majority of the political Right when I say yes, by all means, let's examine these 'right' choices very carefully from now right up until the election in 2012.  Let's throw them up on every TV screen in America on a daily basis, and chat about them around the water cooler.  Let's find out just how many Americans think you were 'right' about these things.

The point is that this administration is rife with a supremely dangerous combination of arrogance and dismissiveness of basic economics, the American people, and the Constitution they supposedly represent.  In that same interview, Obama said this about the Occupy Wall Street madness:

You asked earlier about “Occupy Wall Street” and what I’ve said is that I understand the frustrations that are being expressed in those protests. In some ways, they’re not that different from some of the protests that we saw coming from the Tea Party, both on the left and the right. 

I think people feel separated from their government, that the institutions aren’t looking out for them and that the most important thing we can do right now is those of us in leadership, letting people know that we understand their struggles, we are on their side and that we want to set up a system in which hard work, responsibility, doing what you’re supposed to do, is rewarded, and that people who are irresponsible, who are reckless, who don’t feel a sense of obligation to their communities and to their companies and to their workers, that those folks aren’t rewarded.

 Keith Koffler explains why this is just about as far from the truth as one can possibly get:

There is a fundamental difference between the two groups which allows no comparison.

The members of the Tea Party want to work within the system to change policies they find repugnant and think are ruining the country. The Occupy Wall Street protestors think the system itself – political and economic – is repugnant and want to overturn it. Fully a third told a Democratic pollster they would use violence to achieve their ends.

Many of those protesting are veteran malcontents who are outraged in general, not in response to the current misery of their fellow citizens.

The Tea Party is made up of people unhappy with specific policies. The OWS protestors are using people outraged by specific policies to advance long-held beliefs.

The Tea Party and the OWS extremists have absolutely nothing in common.

Personally, I think Obama and radical Leftists like him fully understand this, and they're just playing political games to acquire and retain as much power as possible by suckering as many people as possible into voting for them.  Still, even if he didn't get it, I'm not sure it matters.  Either he does and deliberately chooses to ignore or leverage it, or he is the most destructively oblivious person on the face of the planet.

Either way, he is unfit to lead this nation.