They Weren’t “Failures”

     A lot of people have been blathering about the Obama and Biden presidencies as colossal failures. Would you like to know who is most heartened by such statements? Then read on.

     Failure is an evaluation. It requires an assessment of several things:

1. What the operator intended to achieve;
2. Whether he actually achieved it, or any part of it;
3. At what cost;
4. Within what time constraints;
5. And with what unintended consequences.

     All those things matter. We begin, of course, with intentions, as they point the direction in which the operator wants to go. If he doesn’t get there, or make any substantial progress toward his ends, then the rest of the criteria cease to matter. But if he does, then at minimum we must grant him that much.

     There is every indication that the Obama and Biden regimes sought to expand the federal government, both in size and in scope, well beyond any extent it had previously attained. Washington arrogated powers no one had previously contemplated. It added several percent to the federal payroll and trillions of dollars to annual federal spending and the federal debt.

     Those changes were intended to be permanent. Moreover, they were intended to be extended further over time, until Washington had taken over most of the American economy. There is no other explanation for the actions of both regimes to suppress traditional American energy supplies, to squander the nation’s oil reserve, and to subsidize “sustainable energy” programs that were doomed ab initio. There is no other explanation for the blank check granted to the alphabet agencies. There is no other explanation for the attacks on the military, opposition voices in the press, Constitution-minded jurists, or Donald Trump. I could go on, but it seems unnecessary.

     When government action is at issue, costs and unintended consequences always fall on Us the People. As for time constraints, the applicable ones were the eight year term limit on presidents and the all too obvious ingressive senility of Joe Biden. To me, it looks very much like the Obamunists – in which I include Biden’s handlers and supporters – were wildly successful.

     Yet those regimes are often styled “failures.” It is not so – and the people happiest to hear themselves called “failures” are the Obamunists themselves. It means that their actual motivations are less recognized than might otherwise be the case.

     Their boughten allies in the media are beneficiaries of that misunderstanding as well. Remember that the media require a trusting audience. They will have one as long as they can convince enough Americans that their “reporting” is objective and impartial. The public has not yet disaffiliated itself from the media sufficiently to topple them and their talking heads from their perches.

     A closing thought: Politics has been called “show business for ugly people.” There’s some truth in that, though actual actors don’t need facility with lies nearly as much as politicians do. Contemporary American “journalism” – the grab-bag term for everything the American media do, expect for openly admitted entertainment – requires the skills of politicians more than ever before in the nation’s history. While is an old saying that to know when a politician is lying, one only needs to watch his lips move, it will soon apply with equal force to the emissions of medial figures… if it doesn’t already.