What We Deserve

Bill DeBlasio's approval rating has fallen to 43% just two months into his term as New York City mayor. His cratering popularity is due largely to his war against poor minority children - part of the larger war against poor minorities Democrats have been fighting for decades. DeBlasio's contribution to this fight has been his determination to cripple the city's burgeoning and successful charter school system. That this was the intention of the Sandinista supporting, Mugabe honoring, Cuba honeymooning Marxist was no secret during the campaign, yet DeBlasio won the election with 73% of the vote, three times that of his main opponent, Joe Lhota. That only a quarter of eligible voters participated doesn't get the electorate off the hook. Staying home is as much an endorsement of a heavily favored candidate as is voting for him.

There's also been buyer's remorse when it comes to Barack Obama. A recent poll showed that 71% of people voting to re-elect Obama in 2012 now regret that vote. What were they expecting from him in a second term? He had already demonstrated his incompetence, his mendacity, his anti-Americanism. Was there any illuminating negative that emerged in the past 12 months that wasn't clearly evident in the 4 years prior? Was it the Obamacare rollout? Getting rolled by Putin and Assad over Syria? Well, maybe. Maybe those were the proverbial straws that broke the camel's back. But the back should have been broken long ago. After all, Obama had placed a big "Kick Me" on his back when he confided to the Russian PM Medvedev that he would have "more flexibility" to be manipulated by Russian leaders after the election. With that unintentionally broadcasted confession, the electorate had been warned by Obama himself that in a second term, without the constraint of having to work for its votes, he would be free to follow his ideological instincts whether or not that served the national interest.

The evidence was overwhelming that nothing good was ever going to come out of this administration.
There was the ill-advised and strategically impossible promise to close Guantanamo; the trillion dollar "stimulus" payout to left wing benefactors; the shafting of bondholders with the GM bailout; the Fast and Furious gunrunning to Mexican drug cartels, the dereliction of responsibility to protect Americans in Benghazi despite a clear and present danger and then the failure to respond to the consulate attack as it was happening, and then the shameful "the video made 'em do it" coverup; the AP scandal; the enlistment of the IRS to hinder and intimidate Democratic Party opponents; the Snowden affair; the trillions added to the crushing debt; the incredible shrinking workforce; the racial and partisan divisiveness; the disdain for allies; the appeasement of enemies (foreign, that is; Obama's exhortation to his followers to "punish our enemies" referred to loyal domestic political opponents); the abandonment of Iraq and (soon) Afghanistan; the caving to Iran's nuclear ambition; the war against success and innovation ("you didn't build that"); the celebration of sloth and dependency (Sandra Fluke and "Julia"); taking what was wrong with our health care system and making it much worse despite the objections of a large majority of Americans and zero support from the GOP; Valerie Jarrett, Harold Koh, Van Jones, Eric Holder, Kathleen Sibelius, Thomas Perez, Janet ("overseas contingency operations") Napolitano, Lisa (a photosynthetic ingredient is a pollutant) Jackson, Steven ("somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe") Chu, Chuck ("the surge is the most dangerous foreign policy blunder since Vietnam") Hagel, Susan Rice, Joe Biden; all that and much more...

And yet a substantial cohort of apparently swayable voters selected this TV gazing*, basketball bracket obsessed, golf addicted, and yes, Marxist**, deadbeat over an impeccably decent, hard working, conciliatory American patriot who had been successful in every endeavor he had ever undertaken. (National electoral politics excluded).
Well, we get what we deserve. Barack Obama and Bill DeBlasio are prime examples of the truism elucidated by H. L. Mencken, "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it, good and hard."

*NY Times list of Obama TV favorites - House of Cards, Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad, Homeland, The Wire, Boardwalk Empire, Downton Abbey, Mad Men, Parks and Recreation, Modern Family, Sportscenter. Where does he find time for all that golf?

**Barack Obama described his brief incursion into the capitalist world (aka, real work) this way - "Like a spy behind enemy lines, I arrived every day at my mid-Manhattan office and sat at my computer terminal..." Compare this to longtime Communist Party USA leader Gus Hall's description of his quixotic quest for the presidency as a battle fought from the "belly of the beast."