Preparing For The Obama Years

Z. Dwight Billingsly in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch offers some great advice on how to prepare for the Obama years (h/t Gateway Pundit). Read the whole thing:

As Jack Buck once said, "I don't believe what I just saw!" Americans on Nov. 4 turned over control of the United States of America to a management team possessing no executive experience, having never run, as I liked to put it, nothing.

Well, Americans usually get the government they deserve, and I urge you all to get ready for this 21st century version of amateur hour. It's going to be an embarrassing and dangerous time for America and American ideals. There won't be much, I'm afraid, to be thankful for.

Bill Kristol, writing in The Weekly Standard, reminded me that every 16 years we get a Democrat president with no experience in national security or international affairs who's elected after Republican presidents have made and kept America safe: After Eisenhower, we got Kennedy; after Nixon/Ford, we got Carter; after Reagan/Bush, we got Clinton. And after Bush II, we get Barack Obama.

Every strong Republican president who succeeded in protecting America has allowed Americans to become complacent about national security, thereby opening the door for weak Democrats who allowed enemies to threaten and attack America without penalty. Obama will be no different, and Americans will have to learn again that there can be no economic security without national security.

That's not to say that Obama's election doesn't come with a couple of interesting side effects. For example, henceforth no black man in America may be called unqualified for any job that he might seek, no matter his prior education or experience level. Want to be a nuclear scientist but lack a Ph.D. in physics? If the applicant is a black man, it's no problem. Just offer hope to the profession and promise change from all those stuffy theorems that have given the discipline its structure over the years, and you're in.

That's on a par with throwing out the fact that tax cuts lead to more investment, job creation and increasing government revenues, just because the black man, that transcendent agent of change, says it's OK.

Another side effect has been white people contacting me to say that I should be proud to see a black man become president. Could there be a comment that is more condescending, more insulting, than that? If I believed that in America a black man could not be president, then I would be proud to see any black man elected president. But because I always have believed that nothing in America prevents a black man from becoming president or anything else he wants to be, I can be embarrassed, not proud, to see someone as unqualified and inexperienced as Obama become president.

Jackie Robinson, the first black man in modern-day major league baseball, illustrates my point. He was the right man with the right combination of talent, temperament and character at the right time to be successful for that important "first." Obama? An empty suit who will fail.

I'm going to approach the Obama years the same way liberals handled the Iraq war. Just as they claimed to support our troops while opposing the war, I'm going to support my country while opposing Obama and what he stands for in every way that I can. It's only four years and with the astute Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky as Senate minority leader, Republicans can stop the Obama extremists for two years until mid-term elections in 2010 give Republicans the boost in Congress that inevitably will come.

And in 2012, we'll have Sarah Palin to clean up Obama's mess and remind us again of America's exceptionalism.

Billingsly is exactly right: Obama is the most wholly unqualified man to take the White House we've ever seen, and we're in for a rough and embarrassing ride. During the primaries, someone said that the Presidency wasn't the place for on the job training. A more accurate statement has never been uttered! Ironically, the person who said that was Joe Biden. Apparently he had a change of heart when Obama offered to buy him off with the VP spot.

Anyway, Obama hasn't run anything in his career, he hasn't accomplished anything significant in his career, and the safety that George W. Bush has guided America into has lulled the ignorant masses into complacency. Sure, there is a huge mess in the economy, but that has been created almost entirely by Congress, and firmly entrenched by Democrats for years. Regardless of who caused the economic mess, there is absolutely no way -- based on history and basic economics -- that Obama's policies will get us out of it.

It's going to get ugly, especially with his almost iron-clad control of Congress. I like Billingsly's suggestion: support the country, but oppose the President. It's completely accurate, it retains integrity and perspective, and the irony is delicious.

There's my two cents.