January 14, 2024

In 2008 the media lapped up the master of Shuck and Jive, Barack Obama and his high-falutin’ promise:

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Now, Mizzou, I just have two words for you tonight: five days. Five days. After decades of broken politics in Washington, and eight years of failed policies from George W. Bush, and 21 months of a campaign that’s taken us from the rocky coast of Maine to the sunshine of California, we are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.

“In five days, you can turn the page on policies that put greed and irresponsibility on Wall Street before the hard work and sacrifice of folks on Main Street. In five days, you can choose policies that invest in our middle class, and create new jobs, and grow this economy, so that everyone has a chance to succeed, not just the CEO, but the secretary and janitor, not just the factory owner, but the men and women on the factory floor.

In fact, what he instituted, endorsed, and placed the federal government’s many resources behind was the Marxist division of America into oppressed and oppressor groups — using race and sex as substitutes for workers and producers. The destruction of national unity, the downplaying of merit and equal opportunity (in pursuit of equal outcomes) and the deliberate favoring of our enemies over our allies is now manifest.  Some two decades later, we have seen how these policies have led to wars in the Middle East, the destruction of our educational systems, danger to our lives from poor management, and a substantially weakened military capability. From the personnel and policies that resulted in the wars in the Middle East to the appointment of the antisemitic Claudine Gay, I see Obama’s heavy hand.

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Harvard

Penny Pritzker, senior fellow of Harvard Corporation (in effect, its Board of Trustees), was instrumental in both the election of Barack Obama and the selection of Claudine Gay as Harvard’s President.

“Without Penny Pritzker, it is unlikely that Barack Obama ever would have been elected to the United States Senate or the presidency. When she first backed him during his 2004 Senate run, she was No. 152 on the Forbes list of the wealthiest Americans. He was a long-shot candidate who needed her support and imprimatur. Mr. Obama and Ms. Pritzker grew close, sometimes spending weekends with their families at her summer home.”

She chaired his 2008 finance team and aided in his re-election campaign. Pritzker also chaired the team that selected Gay as Harvard president. When Gay’s presidency was on the shoals after her disastrous congressional appearance, Obama lobbied the Corporation to retain her, but ultimately failed when the evidence of Gay’s professional lifetime of plagiarism was exposed and even Pritzker could no longer save her.  Gay, like Obama, had achieved a prestigious role, not on merit, but on the very characteristics DEI weighed more heavily, and Harvard suffers and continues to suffer from the departure from the norm of earned merit as a criterion for advancement.

The Middle East

Antony Blinken, Biden’s Secretary of State, is an Obama holdover. Under Obama, he was deputy national security advisor and then deputy secretary of state. When he assumed his position under Biden, Trump had diplomatically isolated Iran, which was under international arms embargos. Biden adopted pro-Iran, pro-Qatar, and pro-Palestinian policies. These policies empowered our most dangerous Middle-Eastern enemies which finance Hamas, Hezb’allah, and the Houthis, all of which are fanatically anti-American and anti-Israeli. To take one example, immediately upon taking office, Biden reversed Trump’s designation of the Houthis as a terrorist organization. Blinken’s explanation for the reversal was that designating the Houthis as a terrorist organization would cause famine in Yemen. In recent months, the Houthis, in violation of international laws, have fired upon and pirated ships passing through the Red Sea. This week, after countless provocations the U.S., allied with the U.K., the Netherlands, and others, has been forced to attack Houthi assets to permit uninterrupted transit on the Red Sea. On Friday Biden said he considered the Houthis terrorists. Once again, the policies and personnel of Obama have created chaos and war in the Middle East.