Progressive politicians and activists, from President Obama to NBC News, love to talk about “moving America forward.” But what does that mean? Forward into what?
They never have an answer to that. Or, more accurately, they are never asked that question. But given how things are going in this country in terms of the economy, national security, race relations, etc., it’s a question worth exploring.
On the issue of the economy, President Obama spent a good bit of time in Tuesday’s State Of The Union address telling us how well it’s going. The facts, on the other hand, tell a different story.
After six years of “moving forward,” there are record numbers of Americans on food stamps, the national debt has doubled, and the largest factor in lowering the unemployment rate has been people giving up hope of finding a job and dropping out of the workforce.
While the president talks about how his “middle-class economics” is making people’s lives better, median income in the United States has dropped by more than $3,000 since he took office. I’m no Magellan, but that doesn’t seem like “forward” to me.
On the international stage, the leadership of the Obama administration has seen large swaths of the globe plunged into chaos. Strife is nothing new to the planet, but much of this current disorder can be traced back to action or inaction from this White House.
Libya was no wonderland, but it was stable. Muammar Gaddafi was an evil man who’d perpetrated acts of evil on Americans and the rest of the world. But he was contained. He’d voluntarily surrendered his weapons of mass destruction capacity to the U.S. after the invasion of Iraq over the fear he’d be next.
He posed a threat only to the citizens of Libya. While that threat was real and he was an awful human being, the world is full of awful human beings, many of whom lead countries and oppress their people. So why did we bomb Gaddafi and not others?
Iran certainly has had a hand in killing more Americans through the funding, training and harboring of terrorists than Gaddafi did, yet we ignored the so-called “Arab Spring” when it came to Tehran and intervened when it hit Tripoli. Don’t get me wrong, the world is a better place with Gaddafi no longer in it, but Libya isn’t. Libya is a nightmare of civil war, terrorism and slaughter.
So a country that was not a threat to our security or national interests is now unstable, and a country that has terrorized its people and region for decades is slow-rolling State Department officials while its bomb makers hurriedly work to build a nuclear weapon.
When George W. Bush came into office, he was determined to focus domestically, having criticized the Clinton administration for “nation building” and ignoring the home front. Sept. 11, 2001, changed that. The events of that day forced President Bush to focus where he didn’t want to, but that is the nature of the job. Barack Obama has never let any single event, or culmination of events, turn his focus from “fundamentally transforming America.”
President Obama hasn’t been a failure on the world stage because of the mistakes he’s made, though there have been those. He’s a failure on the world stage because he more often than not refuses to get up on it and lead.
He was going to withdraw the troops from Iraq no matter what. He did, and Iraq is now on the verge of being overrun by exactly what experts warned would happen if the United State withdrew for the sake of withdrawal.
The president couldn’t close Gitmo, so he’s going to empty it. He can’t empty it completely as long as Khalid Sheikh Mohammad and a few other indisputable monsters reside there, but he’s perfectly willing to make it a Spandau Prison situation for them by letting as many others go as he possibly can.
Gitmo, the president believes, inspires terrorism, or “radical extremism.” For a man who can’t bring himself, or allow his staff, to admit Islam inspires the unstable among them to terrorism, he is certain a tiny prison on an island in the Caribbean serves as the best recruiting tool our enemies have.
It’s unclear what we’re moving “forward” toward in a world where we are alienating our great ally Israel, destabilizing non-threatening nations and repopulating our enemy’s side of the battlefield. But you can be relatively certain there will be a rather large American body count when we get there.
On the issue of race, one can only conclude that the current state of tension is by design. Has the president weighed in on any criminal case that didn’t involve race? And has he ever been on the side that was proven to be right when he did? Be it his friend Henry Louis Gates, Trayvon Martin or Michael Brown, the president’s comments were not only wrong, they were wrongheaded.
When asked about the case of Kermit Gosnell, the abortion doctor who murdered hundreds, the president said he couldn’t weigh in because the case was ongoing. But then Gosnell is black, and so were most of his victims. The president had no problem speaking out on ongoing cases when the victims were black and the accused white. He was ultimately proven wrong on all those cases but never held to account.
Division is the progressive’s greatest weapon. If you convince people they aren’t an American first, that they are something else, they will identify as that other first. Then any affront, real or perceived, against a member of that group will be seen as an affront to every member who identifies with that group. Manipulation is a day at the park once you get to that point.
Like pawns, various groups can be manipulated into believing another group is working against them or holding them back. Progressives remove the responsibility for an individual’s life by herding them into groups and telling them they’re being held back by another group. There’s no point in trying if you can’t win.
Futility breeds resentment and dependence on the “protector.” Aspiration dies and bitterness takes its place. Those who don’t subscribe are ostracized, “not really part of the group in the first place;” a different, more nefarious type of “other.”
Segregation was the way of life in the South, and elsewhere, long before I was born. It not only was the law, it was the desire of racists. It was defeated long before I was born, and the country is a better place for it. But it’s coming back.
NBC News launched a new website this week – NBCBLK. What is it? “NBCBLK covers stories by, for and about the black community. Our product is meant to elevate America's conversation about black identity, politics, and culture. We share positive, solution-based journalism and report on challenging issues that communities of color face today.”
I had no idea news had a skin color. Apparently it does.
NBCBLK is segregation – not government-mandated segregation like the Jim Crow Democratic South, but the end result is the same. NBCBLK and the many other race-based websites like it might as well have been created by the Klan or the Nation of Islam because it’s exactly what they would have wanted. They’re the antithesis of Rev. Martin Luther King’s dream, yet they’re being done as some extension of it.
Information with pigment. Reports with melanin. A mainstream news organization creating an outlet for people based on their skin color… that seems an awful lot like backwards to me.
These are but three examples, but there are many more and none are good. So the next time you hear the president, or a candidate, or anyone say we have to keep moving the country “forward,” take a minute and ask the question that should have been asked a long time ago: “Forward” toward what?
Some great things are “forward,” but so are less positive things like cliffs. I’m all for good things, but once you go charging over a cliff, “forward” becomes “down” really fast, and it’s nearly impossible to come back from “down.”
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