On Thursday, former President Barack Obama will appear in a primetime interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour to discuss “the state of democracy” in the United States. Some smart money bettors are wagering Obama is being trotted out to sanctify the Department of Justice’s attack on Trump and downplay its cover-up of Biden family corruption.
But whatever happens, the state of democracy is indeed a subject that the 44th president is uniquely qualified to speak on, since with his legacy now being brought to a culmination by a Biden presidency that many rightly regard as Obama’s third term, his own domestic and foreign failures and abuses of power are increasingly coming in for disillusioned commentary and often harsh judgement.
And while in what will probably be a typical fawning CNN interview Obama will certainly not be questioned about any of this, here, for the record, are the six ways by which the decline of American culture and democratic institutions seen in the Biden administration are merely a follow on to what Obama started and then institutionalized.
An Administration’s Right to Lie
From claiming gas was over $5 when he took office to calling the Afghanistan debacle an “extraordinary success,” Joe Biden has told major whoppers. But in doing so, he was only taking a page out of the playbook of his former boss, who made history with the boldest falsehoods ever told to the American people in a moment of foreign crisis or about major social legislation.
First Falsehood: The People’s Healthcare. The first of those two falsehoods – or, if you prefer, “lies,” since the evidence that they were just that is overwhelming – involved Obama’s signature legislative achievement, Obamacare. The bill was sold to the public on a series of lies – most infamously at least 37 instances where Obama or a top administration official said the program would cut costs by $2,500 per family, that people would be able to keep their doctor, and even more infamously, “if you like your plan, you can keep your plan.”
None of it was true, and the administration knew it. As MIT professor Jonathan Gruber, one of the main architects of Obamacare, infamously stated, if the administration had told the truth, the legislation might not have passed, adding that the law only passed because of “lack of transparency” and the “stupidity of the American voter.”
Obamacare and the slew of lies that accompanied it amount to a healthcare disaster for the American people, raising premium costs more than 25 percent beyond what they would have otherwise been and raising overall healthcare costs an estimated 69 percent.
Moreover, the public resented Obama’s mendacity, as Obamacare became a major factor in the famous 2010 midterm “shellacking” for Democrats – a defeat that it took them 10 years to overcome. Perhaps the clearest single instance of this failure was the loss of Ted Kennedy’s Massachusetts Senate seat.
In no small part due to the Obamacare lies, by the time Obama departed the White House in 2017, Republicans were in control of the presidency, House, and Senate – hardly a ringing endorsement of his leadership, and the first sign of things to come for the generation that had venerated Obama as an electoral godsend.
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Second Falsehood: A Moment of International Crisis. Obama’s self-bestowed right to lie extended beyond Obamacare to foreign policy. In the aftermath of the Benghazi debacle in 2012, Obama and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton knowingly lied to the American people about the attack that killed American Ambassador John Christopher Stevens in order to cover up their own failures and incompetence ahead of the 2012 election.
The mainstream media played a pivotal role in selling this lie to the public as well. During the second presidential debate in October 2012, Republican nominee Mitt Romney accused Obama of not explicitly referring to the Benghazi incident as a terrorist attack until two weeks after it occurred – a statement that was true, as the Obama administration continued to suggest it could have been a spontaneous act of social unrest rather than a planned attack. But CNN moderator Candy Crowley inserted herself into the debate to back up Obama, falsely accusing Romney of lying about Obama’s statements. The media also ran numerous stories backing up Crowley and Obama instead of correcting the record and saying that Romney was indeed correct.
The Benghazi lies harken back to the duplicity surrounding another major foreign policy event under a Democrat administration, the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, which President Lyndon Johnson used as a pretext to expand U.S. military operations in Vietnam. In both instances, the president and his administration, with an assist from the media, lied about a major foreign policy failure in order to avoid negative headlines ahead of their re-election bids.
Other members of Obama’s inner circle became known as notoriously mendacious as well. Attorney General Eric Holder repeatedly lied to Congress, including about spying on the emails of Fox News reporters.
Lying under the Obama administration became routine, to the point where former CIA Director John Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper felt empowered to also lie to Congress and the public about supposed links between Russia and the 2016 Trump campaign. Both Brennan and Clapper were secure in the knowledge they would not be punished by Obama and would in fact be treated as heroes by the media, even once their dishonesty was exposed.
Obama’s Corruption of the Corporate Media – Ethical Turning Point
The media’s constant cover-ups for Biden, from the state of his health to the suppression of the FBI-DOJ whitewashes of the Biden family corruption, have only been follow-ons to the loss of their journalistic soul to Obama. The banishment of two veteran, highly regarded women journalists at CBS and NBC who tried to do the journalistically ethical thing and tell the truth about Obama’s lies are flagship episodes of how media lost its own soul and its public trust due to its intoxication and eventual collusion with Obama.
The first was Lisa Meyers, NBC’s highly regarded investigative reporter who found evidence that the Obama administration knew it was misleading the public about Obamacare. Instead of backing their reporter and running the bombshell story, NBC shut it down, prompting Meyers to post the story on her personal Facebook page and depart NBC.
The second case was that of Sharyl Attkisson, a 20-year CBS veteran who took a particular interest in exposing the Obama administration’s lies on the Benghazi scandal. The executives at CBS repeatedly prevented Attkisson from covering the story in order to shield Obama from criticism ahead of the 2012 election.
While the far-left political tradition which Obama emerged from always talked about how the Gulf of Tonkin incident was the boldest lie ever told to the American people, Attkisson recognized that Obama and his top lieutenants had orchestrated an even more egregious lie in the Benghazi scandal, and worse had gotten the media to go along with it. Eventually, Attkisson was forced out of CBS entirely for the crime of reporting the truth about Democrat corruption and dishonesty.
While many commentators have tracked the loss of objectivity in journalism during George W. Bush’s second term, it was Obama who was the final temptation for the media elites to fully embrace covering up for a president it liked when he and his administration deliberately deceived the American people on key social legislation and a foreign crisis.
Obama’s Weaponization of Government
Along with the right to lie, Obama sanctioned an administration’s right to weaponize the government against its political opponents.
While the weaponization of the FBI against then-candidate Trump is perhaps the most egregious, it is hardly the only example of Obama using taxpayer-funded government agencies to target his political opponents. In another well-known example, Obama dismissed allegations that the IRS was targeting conservatives as “outrageous.”
But after a congressional investigation revealed clear evidence to the contrary, Obama let the architect of the scandal, Lois Lerner, off the hook. This signaled to Deep State government bureaucrats that they now had a free pass from Democrats to use the power of their offices to target Republicans.
The person at the Obama Justice Department charged with prosecuting the targets Lerner identified was none other than Jack Smith – the same Jack Smith who is now leading the Biden DOJ’s persecution of President Trump.
The Lois Lerner scandal also made possible the Russia hoax. As the 306-page Durham report found, there was never any legitimate reason for the FBI to open its probe into alleged links between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russian entities. It was all politically motivated.
The FBI and the Department of Justice “failed to uphold their mission of strict fidelity to the law,” the report concluded – a finding that was already obvious to any objective observer, but nonetheless further vindicated Republican concerns about the weaponization of government agencies against conservatives and Donald Trump in particular.
One of the chief individuals responsible for perpetrating the Russia hoax, the report found, was none other than President Obama.
According to page 81 of the report, “In late July 2016, U.S. intelligence agencies obtained insight into Russian intelligence analysis alleging that U.S Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton had approved a campaign plan to stir up a scandal against U.S. Presidential candidate Donald Trump by tying him to Putin and the Russians’ hacking of the Democratic National Committee.”
Then, as recounted in his handwritten notes, former CIA Director John Brennan briefed Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, and “other senior national security officials” on the alleged plot. That briefing included evidence of an “approval by Hillary Clinton on July 26, 2016 of a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisors to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by Russian security services.”
All of this was happening as Clinton was dealing with the fallout from her own very real scandal stemming from her misuse of private email servers while she was Secretary of State. In another egregious abuse of power, it was later revealed that then-FBI General Counsel James Baker, who initially believed Clinton deserved criminal charges in 2016, was talked out of it “pretty late in the process.”
The Durham report, in other words, confirms that Obama knew about Clinton’s dirty trick, yet conspired with his top lieutenants to sell this massive hoax to the American people via a compliant mainstream media. Moreover, Obama dispatched Clapper, Brennan, and other officials to fuel the Clinton campaign’s lies through dozens of TV appearances.
While Obama likely did all of this to damage Trump and help boost Clinton over the top, he also likely did it to protect his own image – an effort that has now backfired in spectacular fashion.
Even after Trump overcame this blatant attempt to rig the election against him and won, Obama still remained silent. Recognizing that the game was up and he had lost, Obama could have told the truth, albeit at the expense of his credibility and public image.
Instead, he doubled down. In December 2016, Obama expelled 35 Russian diplomats in an apparent attempt to keep the hoax alive.
After he left office, Obama continued to say nothing as the media and Deep State bureaucrats harassed his successor and perpetrated a narrative that Obama knew was a lie. While the intention was to hurt Trump politically, Obama, as a former president, knew better than anyone how damaging the Russia hoax would be for the country and the world.
Now, the public is again seeing shades of Obama’s deceit and corruption in the anonymous whistleblowers from the IRS and FBI who have alleged that the government is “slow-walking” the investigation into Hunter Biden and the Biden family’s suspicious business dealings.
Biden has also carried on Obama’s shameful legacy of weaponization of government agencies through his use of the FBI to target both parents who speak out at school board meetings and traditionalist Catholics as potential “domestic extremists,” and through his attempt to create a “Disinformation Governance Board” (effectively a Ministry of Truth straight out of George Orwell’s 1984) at the Department of Homeland Security.
Theater of the Grotesque at the White House and the Decline of American Culture
Americans were rightly shocked and outraged to see viral videos of bare-breasted transgender activists at a White House “pride” event earlier this month. But Biden’s invitation of unsavory characters to the White House is only a continuation of a trend that began under Obama.
In 2009, Obama invited Harvard professor Henry Gates to the White House after Cambridge police arrested him for disorderly conduct. Obama also called police “stupid” for arresting him – an early hint of the left’s war on police, which would fully mature years later.
In 2014, Obama held a made-for-TV Rose Garden spectacle for U.S. Army deserter Bowe Bergdahl. Despite the fact that Bergdahl endangered his entire platoon by abandoning his post and was dishonorably discharged, Obama treated him as a conquering hero.
Obama’s disgraceful White House soirees with unhinged professors and military traitors were only one manifestation of his disdain for American culture and institutions. For instance, along with his baseless criticism of the Cambridge police, Obama also made inflammatory statements on the Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown cases that stoked racial tensions already building throughout the country.
Obama’s Enabling of Joe Biden’s Corruption
Just as he did with Hillary Clinton, Obama also increasingly appears to have ignored clear signs of corruption surrounding his vice president, Joe Biden. As a recent House Oversight Committee report revealed, associates of the scandal-plagued Hunter Biden visited the White House more than 80 times during Obama’s tenure.
This leads to one of two equally problematic conclusions for Obama: either he knew something wasn’t right and did nothing, or the Biden family carried out their corrupt business deals for years, in his White House no less, while he was none the wiser.
Foreign Policy Fiascos
Perhaps no link between Biden and Obama is as clear as the foreign policy disasters the two have left in their wake.
During Obama’s presidency, Russia became a major player in Syria and invaded Crimea, laying the groundwork for the invasion of Ukraine last year. It is no coincidence that Putin seized land under Obama but then waited until Trump was out of office to launch his invasion of Ukraine.
While Trump took a hardline stance toward Russia, Obama repeatedly kowtowed to Moscow, in one infamous instance telling then-Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in 2012 to ask Putin for “space,” going on to say that he would have “more flexibility” after the election to discuss a missile defense treaty. In other words, Obama was asking Medvedev to hand him a temporary victory on missile defense talks until after he had won a second term, with the promise that afterward Obama would make a deal with Putin that would not have been favorable to many American voters.
Obama also severely underestimated the rise of ISIS, at one point calling them a “junior varsity” team – much like Biden underestimated how quickly the Taliban would recapture Afghanistan following the U.S. departure. In the case of ISIS, it would take the election of President Trump to eradicate a threat that Obama should have quashed from the start.
Under Obama, America’s allies and enemies alike developed contempt for the United States, with Putin, China, Iran, and North Korea growing more aggressive under his watch. After a resurgence of U.S. global prestige under Trump, America’s standing in the world has collapsed once again under Biden.
Obama’s Tattered Legacy
For the media and cultural elites who hailed the 44th president as a political saint, and a generation of young liberals who grew up with him as a fixture on their TV screens, the dismantling of the “Obama myth” has been nothing short of catastrophic.
Obama’s meteoric rise to power was hailed by the press and Democrat establishment as the beginning of a new, brighter future for the country. The mainstream media compared the relatively unaccomplished senator from Illinois to a “god.” Academia, meanwhile, excitedly reported that Obama’s 2008 victory was the fulfillment of the prophecy of permanent liberal dominance laid out in the notoriously wrong 2002 book, The Emerging Democratic Majority.
But the next eight years would turn out to be far different from the liberal utopia Americans, and in particular young Democrats, were promised. There are of course the many lies and deceptions mentioned here, but also the destruction of the American economy and border disaster that President Trump would spend most of his term correcting.
The Durham report has further underscored these failures and shattered the myth the media and Democrat establishment attempted to create about Obama. Far from an aspirational leader who represented the best of America, Obama has now been exposed as a serial liar who left the country in a worse state than when he took office. Obama, the great constitutional law professor who never held a real job outside of politics or academia, ran an administration known for its mendacity, corruption, weaponization of government, repression of political dissent, military weakness, foreign policy disasters, a rise in crime, and the destruction of American cities.
All of this points to a man who deeply resented American culture – perhaps because he believed it had never accepted his absent father. But from his condescending remarks about normal Americans who “go to church” and “have their guns,” to the contempt Obama showed as a former college professor and community organizer to “Joe the plumber” when he instructed that hard-working American on how he and his left-wing friends had a right to spread around the wealth small business people like “Joe the plumber” created, to his bold statement to other American small businesses that government is responsible for their success, not themselves, Barack Obama emerges as the model of the entitled and privileged beneficiary who despises the very economic and political system that gave him so much.
Regardless, for that liberal generation which tied so much of its political identity to Obama and his legacy, these revelations must be horrifying, no matter how hard they try to deny them. This in part explains the left’s insatiable need to “get Trump” – to punish the man perceived as puncturing the Obama myth.
But no matter how hard they go after Trump, it will never erase what Trump and his movement exposed. The promise of Obama was always empty, and the shiny veneer of his political brand was always destined to lose its luster.
B.C. Brutus is the pen name of a writer with previous experience in the legislative and executive branches.
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