What to Expect in the Next Four Years
By Matthew Vadum
Americans have narrowly voted to reelect a president who will continue policies that will — not may — eventually lead to the downfall of the American republic.
The Tuesday election was a crushing defeat for the Tea Party-energized conservative movement but as a wise person once said, all defeats in politics are temporary. It is unfathomable to many Americans that a man they see as a wrongheaded, arrogant, corrupt Chief Executive could be reelected in a harsh economic climate, but as we saw with Franklin Roosevelt’s 1936 win during the Great Depression, it can happen.
For the time being I’ll leave it to others to hold forth on how best to take on the still-expanding Leviathan that President Obama is piloting but now that some of the initial pain and shock from Tuesday evening is beginning to wear off, let’s take a look at the grim future America faces if it fails to correct its course.
The economy is a shambles and thanks to the news-suppressing Obama-worshipping media, a huge chunk of the populace seems unaware of just how rotten things are. A quick recap: More than 23 million Americans are unemployed, underemployed, or have given up seeking work. The workforce participation rate is the lowest in 30 years. Annual household income is down $4,000. A record 47 million people are on food stamps. The national debt is now an astonishing $16.4 trillion and it’s probably going to shoot up even more.
This is just a smattering of the deeply depressing economic statistics that define the age of Obama.
The Tuesday election was a crushing defeat for the Tea Party-energized conservative movement but as a wise person once said, all defeats in politics are temporary. It is unfathomable to many Americans that a man they see as a wrongheaded, arrogant, corrupt Chief Executive could be reelected in a harsh economic climate, but as we saw with Franklin Roosevelt’s 1936 win during the Great Depression, it can happen.
For the time being I’ll leave it to others to hold forth on how best to take on the still-expanding Leviathan that President Obama is piloting but now that some of the initial pain and shock from Tuesday evening is beginning to wear off, let’s take a look at the grim future America faces if it fails to correct its course.
The economy is a shambles and thanks to the news-suppressing Obama-worshipping media, a huge chunk of the populace seems unaware of just how rotten things are. A quick recap: More than 23 million Americans are unemployed, underemployed, or have given up seeking work. The workforce participation rate is the lowest in 30 years. Annual household income is down $4,000. A record 47 million people are on food stamps. The national debt is now an astonishing $16.4 trillion and it’s probably going to shoot up even more.
This is just a smattering of the deeply depressing economic statistics that define the age of Obama.
In light of the election results, House Speaker John Boehner has demonstrated that he may be flexible on what has been the GOP’s signature issue: tax cuts. However, his public pronouncements on tax cuts since the election haven’t exactly been easy to interpret. During a Wednesday press event, he said he may be amenable to raising government revenues then during an interview with ABC’s Diane Sawyer the next day he said he didn’t want to raise taxes.
It is far from clear if such increases would prevent the day of fiscal reckoning. More likely tax hikes would simply delay it a bit by propping up America’s unsustainable welfare state, a redistributionist infrastructure that President Obama and Democrats are determined to further expand.
Boehner also struck the colors on the issue of Obamacare repeal. He told Diane Sawyer that he has no plans to fight President Obama’s unpopular health care legislation further. Asked if he intended to pursue a complete repeal of the law, Boehner said, “the election changes that,” and “Obamacare is the law of the land.”
Although these matters are worth worrying about, they are short-term concerns. Many Americans viewed this past election as America’s last, best chance to at least try to right the ship of state.
What may happen to the country over the long-term is terrifying.
It is far from clear if such increases would prevent the day of fiscal reckoning. More likely tax hikes would simply delay it a bit by propping up America’s unsustainable welfare state, a redistributionist infrastructure that President Obama and Democrats are determined to further expand.
Boehner also struck the colors on the issue of Obamacare repeal. He told Diane Sawyer that he has no plans to fight President Obama’s unpopular health care legislation further. Asked if he intended to pursue a complete repeal of the law, Boehner said, “the election changes that,” and “Obamacare is the law of the land.”
Although these matters are worth worrying about, they are short-term concerns. Many Americans viewed this past election as America’s last, best chance to at least try to right the ship of state.
What may happen to the country over the long-term is terrifying.
Although erstwhile conservative John Roberts is quite young (57) and likely to remain on the high court bench for decades to come, two of the court’s non-leftists are elderly. Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy are both 76. (Clarence Thomas is 64 and Samuel Alito is 62.) President Obama is entitled to nominate replacements if any vacancies occur.
The First and Second Amendments would be likely targets for a radicalized Supreme Court. Leftists abhor the 2008 ruling in District of Columbia v. Heller which recognized the individual right to bear arms. They also froth at the mouth over Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the 2010 opinion that struck down restrictions on independent political expenditures by corporations and unions on free speech grounds. The administration is likely to seek out test cases to use to reverse these existing precedents.
President Obama will also likely continue to attack free speech protections using executive orders and bureaucratic skulduggery. He has already issued 140 executive orders and is fond of making recess appointments for key federal posts — even when Congress is not technically in recess.
After a ridiculous Ed Wood-style video attacking the Muslim prophet Mohammed surfaced in the fall, the Obama administration saw to it that the filmmaker, Mark Basseley Youssef, was promptly arrested. The administration falsely blamed riots in the Muslim world and the Sept. 11, 2012 attacks on U.S. missions on the video even though hardly anyone in the world had seen the video at that time.
Youssef has been ordered imprisoned for a year by a court, ostensibly for breaching probation terms related to another conviction of his. But conservatives aren’t buying that excuse. Many on the Right are beginning to view Youssef as a real, live political prisoner of the Obama regime, locked up because he committed the politically incorrect crime of offending Muslims. So far the ACLU and Amnesty International have been silent about this injustice. More political prisoners may follow as the administration looks for scapegoats to distract the public from the weak economy.
Obama’s appeasement of Islamists will continue and their strength both abroad and within the United States will continue to grow. Islamofascist front groups such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) will continue to operate unhindered. More Fort Hood massacres may occur and the FBI and military won’t be allowed to identify them as acts of Islamic terrorism because to do so would be an admission that Obama’s policy toward the Muslim world is a farce. We now know that al-Qaeda is, far from dead as Obama claimed, in fact resurgent and working with the Muslim Brotherhood to rebuild the old Islamic Caliphate that collapsed with the fall of the Ottoman Empire.
It wouldn’t be all that surprising if the administration embraced anti-blasphemy laws because this administration believes that not causing offense trumps free speech. Obama may release the Blind Sheikh, Omar Abdel-Rahman, convicted for his role in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. The government that Obama helped to create in Egypt by abandoning our old ally Hosni Mubarak has asked the U.S. to return Abdel-Rahman to his homeland and sources within our government have confirmed that negotiations are underway.
Over Obama’s second term, deep cuts to the military are expected. The president is on record as pledging to eliminate or reduce to a bare minimum the nation’s inventory of nuclear weapons. Troop strength will continue to fall because like all good American Marxists, Obama doesn’t like using American soldiers to fight wars and defend the country. He prefers using soldiers as social workers to deliver foreign aid to the needy nations of the world.
With the Obama campaign’s constant race-baiting and class warfare, a sour mood has descended on the land. Exit polls from the election suggest that voters have succumbed to the siren song of envy and really do want to make the so-called rich pay higher taxes. Yet they still stubbornly cling to conservative beliefs, a dislike of big government, and a distrust of both major political parties. America today bears little resemblance to the America of the Reagan era in which taxes and government were cuss words. We may not be a center-right nation anymore.
As more and more companies collapse, taking jobs with them, more super-rich people will renounce their U.S. citizenship in order to be spared the nation’s increasingly oppressive tax rates. Others will move their money abroad. Cheating on taxes will become commonplace as it is in countries with large welfare states such as Britain, France, and Canada. People will become poorer and meaner. Some companies will go Galt, to borrow Ayn Rand’s phrase from her prophetic novel, “Atlas Shrugged.” In other words, they will shut down because their owners resent being targeted for their success.
Welfare burdens will continue to grow but poverty will not disappear. Throwing money at poverty doesn’t work. As Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation has noted, an astounding $16 trillion has been spent on the War on Poverty since it was launched in 1965, which, adjusted for inflation, is more than double the sum the U.S. has spent on every non-metaphorical war since Independence. Obama’s plan is to increase welfare spending by another $10 trillion and right now it is hard to imagine anyone trying to stop him.
Bob Dole may have been right when he poignantly observed in the 1990s, “We have lost shame as a motivating factor in our society.” It may be impossible to stop Obama from escalating spending on the nonproductive in part because the stigma associated with welfare is rapidly disappearing as government gets involved in nearly every aspect of our lives. Americans like handouts more than ever before. The work ethic is being rapidly overshadowed by the entitlement mentality as Americans grow accustomed to being poked and prodded by Big Brother.
If present trends continue, racial and ethnic balkanization will grow in Obama’s second term. The president himself has encouraged it. For example, during the long campaign he urged Latinos to “punish” their ”enemies.” While the tragic Trayvon Martin saga unfolded, Obama played to his base, deliberately fanning racial tensions. He supports multiculturalism and has said he doesn’t believe there’s anything particularly exceptional about America. If the president won’t stand up for America, racial grievance mongers will tear it apart from the inside.
Eventually strife and unrest will take over America. Federal, state, and local governments will suffer credit rating downgrades, lose their ability to borrow money, and be unable to meet their continuing obligations.
When members of the public, by this point accustomed to feeding at the public teat, stop receiving the government checks they rely on, there will be an explosion that will rock society to its core. Americans will panic. The same thing has happened all over the world again and again.
Secession, revolution, foreign invasion, all these things that look mysterious and crazy and impossible right now could happen in America. We are not immune just because traditionally we’ve thought we’re special. Our ideas at that point won’t matter as we are overtaken by events and outside influences.
Not one of these things has to happen. The future is not carved in stone.
In order for the America we know and love to survive, a belief in freedom, individual rights, and self-reliance will have to resurface throughout the land.
Another four years of Obama may do just that. Americans will have to fight for their country.
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