You learn things from the question sets posed on such a tour. "The Brief Against Obama" is intended as a comprehensive guide to the promises, predictions, platitudes and polemics President Obama has issued since he began his campaign for the Oval Office five years ago. It rejects personal attacks and dismisses the absurd rhetoric on the president's citizenship and his religion which have never been representative of even a sliver of the conservative movement.
It isn't a book about what other people have said about the president. It is a record of what he himself has said and done.
Each of the book's 25 chapters begins with a set of presidential quotes, such as the president's pledge before the American Medical Association on June 15, 2009:
"And that means no matter how we reform health care, we will keep this promise: if you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor. Period. If you like you health-care plan, you will be able to keep your health-care plan. Period. No one will take it away. No matter what."
Such details of this and his many other abysmal failures and broken promises are more than fair game, of course, and in fact ought to be the central issues for every voter. The book is aimed not just at conservatives but at independents and even at the growing number of "Romney Democrats" who are staring at the smoldering heap of expectations they indulged four years ago and wondering what happened.
It is for your annoying brother-in-law who cannot be bothered with the facts, for the co-worker with the Obama bumper sticker still on her Prius, for your fellow church-goes who thinks the president cares more for the poor than the GOP.
Here is the most often asked question after the first dozen interviews: Is the president merely incompetent, or was this wreckage intentional?
I was at first surprised by this question and then came to realize that many people are asking themselves if the president has some grand plan that would make sense of the chaos of his 40 months in office. This desire for an explanation is really the desire for some excuse to cover the wild gamble that a majority of voters indulged in four years ago. If the president is operating off of some secret Alinksyite playbook, the folks he fooled can comfort themselves that they were conned.
The president is an Alinskyite, but that doesn't mean he intended to wreck the economy. It means he believes in massive expansion of government, confiscatory levels of taxation and an enormous regulatory reach.
He didn't intend for the mullahs of Iran to play him for a fool, or for Egypt to be lurching towards an Islamist theocracy or Syria to be convulsed by mass slaughter.
The president didn't intend for unemployment to be at 8.2% and rising as he rounded the turn into November, but he did intend for a lot of the new jobs in America he thought would be coming to be government jobs supported by much higher levels of taxation than prevailed in the country from 1980 to the present.
He didn't intend most Americans to be receiving shocking rate hikes for their health insurance or for their pump price to be at $4 a gallon --at least not before his re-election.
He didn't intend for Solyndra to be bankrupt, for "Fast and Furious" to be shorthand for cover-up, or for Dodd-Frank to be the obvious job-killer it has become.
But the president did demand and adopt the policies that have produced these consequences. He's the architect, the contractor and the owner of this mess of an economy and this circus of corruption and scandal.
"The Brief Against Obama" is a collection of the president's words, not those of his critics, and a compilation of the hard, cold facts of his failures.
This is why Mitt Romney will win in November: Barack Obama has failed, and in spectacular fashion. There is no reason to believe a second term would be anything accept a replay of the first, and the consequences of that are too dismal to contemplate.
http://townhall.com/columnists/hughhewitt/2012/06/20/the_brief_against_obama_the_rise_fall_and_epic_fail_of_the_hope_and_change_presidency/page/full/
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