Ten Reasons Why Obama Should be Fired!

It occurs to me that a presidential election is like a job interview (for the challenger) and a performance review (for the incumbent). Barack Obama is the people's employee. We are his employer. The time has come to determine whether he should be retained as our employee.  The analogy makes perfect sense to me. Obama is not entitled to keep this job. We (voters) need to evaluate him on job performance alone--not fancy rhetoric, not the color of his skin, not the "cool" factor. Just the facts. 

How is the average voter supposed to be able to evaluate Barack Obama's job performance when all we have for reference is a fawning dominant media that camouflages Obama's flaws and magnifies his opponent's? 

Enter Hugh Hewitt. 

Mr. Hewitt has written a devastating critique of Barack Obama’s first and hopefully last term in office called The Brief Against Obama: The Rise, Fall & Epic Fail of the Hope & Change Presidency. The introduction itself is worth the cost of the book, but each chapter that I’ve read so far contains enough factual, documented information as to easily convict Obama of gross incompetence. It’s impossible to deny Hewitt’s claim that Obama is the ultimate “Peter Principle President.”

I'm about a third of the way into the book, and it occurs to me that some people may not be inclined to read this book, so I’ve decided I’m going to try and write abbreviated summaries of each chapter for those who won’t be purchasing the book, and post them here. Maybe someone reading this blog who might otherwise have thought Barack Obama deserves another term will change his or her mind. 

So here are 10 reasons why I think Obama doesn't deserve a second term in office, based on summaries of Hugh Hewitt's The Brief Against Obama first ten chapters, along with a few personal comments. Anyone who disputes these statements might want to read the book and check the sources Hewitt provides. As I said, these chapters are extensively documented. Also, for the record, lest I be accused of plagiarism, in summarizing these sections, I've decided not to put quotations marks around Hewitt’s wording.


PART I: DOMESTIC POLICY FAILURES

ObamaCare (from chapter 1)

• A bill of this magnitude has never been passed in Congress on a purely party-line basis and in the face of such widespread public opposition.
• Even though the Supreme Court ultimately found the bill to pass Constitutional muster, four of the nine justices did not agree with that assessment.
• It was passed on false premises with impossible-to-keep claims.
• The consequences of the law are dire: the cost of health care continues to skyrocket even as employers drop hundreds of thousands from their coverage.
• Created a massive breach of faith with Roman Catholics and an assault on the First Amendment in authorizing his Department of Health and Human Services to require Roman Catholic institutions to provide insurance coverage for sterilization, “morning after pills,” and birth control.
• Creates an Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB) comprised of 15 unelected bureaucrats to oversee health-care futures for all Americans.
• The president lied about his core promise of ObamaCare. He promised that if you liked your doctor, you could keep him, and that if you liked your insurance, you could keep it.

Stimulus 1 (from chapter 2)

• Obama promised that his “American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan (aka “Stimulus Plan”) would “save or create” millions of jobs. The amount of the stimulus was $862 billion—all borrowed at 3% interest, so the actual cost of the Stimulus has reached $940 billion (at the time of Hewitt’s book’s publication). Yet there is nothing to show for it. Again...where did all that taxpayer-funded money go?
• Spending decisions for this money went to Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi for “shovel-ready “ projects, which never actually materialized. Where did this money go?

And Stimulus 2 (from chapters 3)

• That was 2009. In 2011 Obama asked for a second stimulus in order to deal with rising unemployment. 
• Right around this time, the “Occupy Wall Street” movement was born, which Obama  used politically to turn attention away from his failed stimulus programs and blame the wealthy, the free market, and the private sector, for the economy.

Deficit Spending (from chapter 4)

• Obama added more than $4 trillion to the national debt in his first three years of his presidency, with another trillion in borrowing certain (in his 4th year of office).
• Obama borrowed more money in 48 months than George W. Bush did in his entire 8 years.
• The ramifications of this borrowing are huge when you consider the interest rate on borrowing is sure to rise higher than the current low rates.

Housing Market (from chapter 5)

• Under Obama’s (and the Democrats’) watch:
• Home foreclosures rose from 2.2 million in 2006 to 2010 3.8 million in 2010 and the numbers are still rising.
• The average price for the sale of a new home fell from $303,500 in 2006 to $267,900 in 2011.
• The current average foreclosure sales price is $175,968.

Unemployment (from chapter 6)

• Unemployment figures have gone from 4.0% in 2000 (Bush’s last year in office) to 8.95% in 2011. Unemployment rates were 4.6% in 2007 (Bush’s last year in office).
• Under Obama’s watch, unemployment rates were:
• 5.8% in 2008
• 9.3% in 2009
• 9.6% in 2010
• 8.95% in 2011
• Gross Domestic Product under Obama’s watch actually dropped in his first year of office.

Domestic Energy (from chapter 7)

• The price of gas went from $1.89 in 2008 to $4 per gallon by May 2011.
• In March 2010 Obama announced that he was lifting a ban on offshore drilling an exploration off the Atlantic seaboard.
• On April 20, 2010, the BP Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded. It took Obama 9 days to make first public mention of this incident.
• The Obama administration completely mismanaged this disaster.
• On May 27, 2010, the administration announced a six-month extension of the moratorium on new deepwater oil drilling permits. In June 2010 a federal judge blocked this moratorium. The White House said it would appeal this ruling. In July there was a modified moratorium. In October, the White House said it would lift the moratorium  but there were new regulations that prevented approval of new drilling permits. In December, the administration reinstated the moratorium.
• By the end of February 2011, when average gas prices were $3.44 a gallon, only “a handful” of 103 applications for drilling permits were approved.
• During this time period, the federal government was losing $3.7 million in royalties on oil sales from the Gulf alone EVERY DAY.
• Other areas where the Obama White House has been obstructionist when it comes to domestic oil production has to do with placing tighter restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants and oil refineries and being hesitant to develop other sources of domestic oil production (case in point: the Keystone KL pipeline from Canada).
• Government investment in “clean, renewable energy” have been failures. The most noteworthy example of this failure is Solyndra, which was a high-risk investment of taxpayer dollars that should never have been approved. Nevertheless, the Obama administration shoveled taxpayer spending spree into this company and  not only publically  defended it but “has no regrets”  over the investment to this day.

Financial “Reform” (from chapter 8)

• Passage of the Dodd-Frank bill (officially called “The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act) on July 21, 2010 probably has contributed more to the destruction of our economy than anything else mentioned so far (note: this is my opinion, not Mr. Hewitt’s necessarily).
• Both Barney Frank and Christopher Dodd are far left politicians, and Chris Dodd himself is being investigated by the FBI for accepting sweetheart deals from Countrywide, one of the very banks he denounced for their corrupt financing of mortgages.
• On a side note, both Dodd and Frank refused to cooperate with the Bush administration’s insistence on reforming Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the problem of sub-prime lending. 
• When the housing market collapsed, rather than focusing on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the Dodd-Frank bill turned its sights on “reforming” Wall Street. But instead of “reforming” Wall Street, this bill had the (unintended?) consequence of creating greater uncertainty in the financial market and ultimately squelching job creation because of all the oppressive regulations.

Fast-and-Furious (from chapter 9)

• The Obama administration had approved selling guns to Mexican drug cartels in the hope of tracing those guns to the big dealers of weapons and drugs. It was a huge and risky scheme that had tragic consequences and is now the subject of a massive government cover-up that has reached deep into the Department of Justice and perhaps the White House.

Elaine’s note: Hewitt’s book was published before Barack Obama invoked executive privilege to deny requests for documents or reject subpoenas to compel testimony by senior officials.  Hewitt’s book also doesn’t include the congressional committee’s vote to cite the U.S. attorney general for contempt.

Elaine’s personal comment: Where are the Woodwards and Bernsteins of the 21^st century? This is truly a scandal of enormous ethical and legal proportions.

Radical Defiance of the Limits of Executive Power (from chapter 10)

Note: This chapter covers three specific examples of how Obama, as Hugh Hewitt puts it, “recognizes few limits on his power.”

• Example # 1: Obama made appointments to the National Labor Relations Board and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau while the Senate was in formal recess. Hewitt points out that the dismay over this expansion of power was limited mostly to constitutional scholars, political scientists, and senators concerned with the historic balance of power between executive and legislative branches, and also to those business and individuals who would most likely be regulated by these illegitimate appointments.
• Example # 2: The president approved sweeping regulation from the Department of Health and Human Services requiring all employers, including religious institutions, to provide insurance coverage for birth control (including “morning after” pills and sterilization). Hewitt says that this action was a far more wide-ranging abuse of power, a direct attack on the Catholic Church and on the “Free Exercise” clause of the Constitution.
• Example # 3: The Obama administration unilaterally decided to not defend the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), claiming that Section 3 (definition of marriage) violates the Constitution.

Elaine’s Comments: This is HUGE.  The chapter ought to be read to understand how truly arrogant this action is. Hugh provides a bit of context, including excerpts from then-candidate Obama’s statements made to Pastor Rick Warren and also in a written questionnaire from the Human Rights Campaign, expressing his views on gay marriage and civil unions and domestic rights for gay partners.

It’s also important to understand from a legal perspective how radical Obama’s actions are. Obama “unilaterally withdrew the federal government’s opposition to same-sex marriage…despite no change in law, and no Supreme Court or federal circuit court review…”

If that’s not clear enough, how about this: The president essentially nullified “a duly passed constitutional statute, signed into law by…Bill Clinton.. by executive decree and without the benefit of judicial review.”

Elaine’s Note: This is the final chapter in section 1 of The Brief Against Obama. Here is the last paragraph:

Voters are forewarned. This is not a president who respects the Constitution as it is written but rather believes it to be a starting point for his authority, not a limiting set of binding rules.

The Brief Against Obama: The Rise, Fall & Epic Fail of the Hope & Change Presidency