Everything he has touched has turned to stone

Victor Davis Hanson writes that President Obama has the un-Midas touch. VDH gives examples:

Iraq, Syria, Libya, Russia, Bowe Bergdahl, estrangement from Israel, the sar on terror, Iran and the bomb, China, wrecking our healthcare system, $8 trillion dollars more in debt, chronic unemployment,

One trillion dollars in collective debt buys a politicized college education to put twenty-somethings in a job market where 60% of newly minted BAs find jobs, to the extent the Border Patrol is not a parody of itself, it is a social services agency designed to facilitate illegal entry into the U.S. La Raza and the Chamber of Commerce, not Congress, set immigration policies.

The I.R.S. has become a Third-World extension of a partisan regime that hounds out political enemies. Ditto EPA, which mostly finds ways to circumvent Congress to punish successful companies and to pursue green statutes that Congress has no desire to pass.

NASA? We beg our enemy Putin to ferry us into space, as the director brags that the chief mission of the agency is now Muslim “feel good” outreach. Eric Holder has so politicized the Justice Department that we nonchalantly assume that racial matters determine to what extent Holder decides to enforce or ignore a law. Holder’s legacy is that John Mitchell now looks moral in comparison.

Race? We have become so inured to Trayvon Martin as Obama’s might-have been son, the stereotyping police, the “typical white person,” “my people,” “a nation of cowards,” “punish our enemies,” etc., that such polarization from on high is normal. Divide and conquer is the new old politics. After Obama won a decisive victory in 2008 that transcended race, we were suddenly told the world of the old white guy was over — ad nauseam — and race became essential, not incidental, to those who had proclaimed a need to go beyond race. In truth, the race fixation was not about justice, but raw power, the pathway to obtaining it and the mechanism for keeping it.

The presidential style? We assume that every Obama speech is an exercise in the use of the first-person pronoun. Every tired emphatic (“let me be perfectly clear,” “make no mistake about it,” “in point of fact,” “I’m not kidding”…) is proof of just the opposite. Equivocation, not clarity, is the goal of an Obama speech. In lieu of candor, there is always a macho brag that proves empty; always a straw-man, Emmanuel Goldstein-style enemy whom we are supposed to hate collectively; always some clueless clinger, devious capitalist, old Tea Party guy, or carbon polluter who is the source of all our problems.

The press? But there is no press. Long ago it became a ministry of information and decided that Obama was the rare gift to enact a so-called progressive agenda. If or when there is a non-liberal president, we will be told golf is aristocratic time-wasting, that mention of race is hatred, that tampering with the IRS, NSA, or any other agency is an impeachable offense, that ignoring enforcement of the law is treasonous, that $300 billion deficits are ruinous, that junketing to resorts is frivolous, that bombing without the approval of Congress is amoral, and that the teleprompter is proof of vapidity.

Our culture? Cool is all that matters.

the real Obama legacy: there are no politics any more, just an endless class war between patriotic progressives and counter-revolutionary clingers.

Everything our un-Midas touched turned to stone.

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