Long ago and far away, back in an America before Hope and Change changed our hope to dread, we used to have peaceful and dignified transfers of power when one party replaced the other in the Oval Office. When Bill Clinton and Ross Perot defeated George the First he left Bubba the following note:
Dear Bill,
When I walked into this office just now I felt the same sense of wonder and respect that I felt four years ago. I know you will feel that, too.
I wish you great happiness here. I never felt the loneliness some Presidents have described.
There will be very tough times, made even more difficult by criticism you may not think is fair. I’m not a very good one to give advice; but just don’t let the critics discourage you or push you off course.
You will be our President when you read this note. I wish you well. I wish your family well.
Your success is now our country’s success. I am rooting for you.
Good luck,
George
That was a class act and a hard one to follow especially for people who allow partisanship and acrimony to eclipse good taste and good manners.
Even the Clinton loving New York Times reported that the transition from the Clinton Inter-lewd to George the Second was anything but dignified. It was instead sophomoric. According to the Times:
The General Accounting Office, an investigative arm of Congress, said today that “damage, theft, vandalism and pranks did occur in the White House complex” in the presidential transition from Bill Clinton to George W. Bush. The agency put the cost at $13,000 to $14,000, including $4,850 to replace computer keyboards, many with damaged or missing W keys.
Some of the damage, it said, was clearly intentional. Glue was smeared on desk drawers. Messages disparaging President Bush were left on signs and in telephone voice mail. A few of the messages used profane or obscene language.
“A Secret Service report documented the theft of a presidential seal that was 12 inches in diameter from the Eisenhower Executive Office Building,'’ next to the White House, on Jan. 19, 2001, the accounting office said.
Six White House employees told investigators that they had seen graffiti derogatory to Mr. Bush on the wall of a stall in a men's room. Other White House employees saw a sticker in a filing cabinet that said, “Jail to the thief,” implying that Mr. Bush had stolen the 2000 election.
Following in the tradition of the now discredited and finally discarded Clintons the classless exit is being delivered not by nameless faceless staffers but instead by POTUS himself on the world stage. Unfortunately the last days of our first anti-colonialist president and his anti-American regime is marked by the only bi-partisan approach of his divisive reign. RINOs in Congress are helping him in his efforts to torpedo the incoming Trump Revolution from accomplishing the work we have sent them to the swamp-on-the-Potomac to accomplish.
From the president who sent his own campaign team to Israel to defeat Benjamin Netanyahu in his election we get hyperbolic outrage at accusations of Russian hacking and leaks during the 2016 presidential campaign. He says he knew about the hacks months ago. Yet he didn’t think they were worth mentioning until his hand-picked successor and his policies were rejected at the ballot box.
Now he fires a salvo of impotent sanction at the Russians. Putin laughs them off as the ineffective flailing of a lame duck.
Rep. Trent Franks of Arizona told MSNBC, President-elect Donald Trump was the real target of the sanctions, which booted 35 Russian intelligence operatives out of the U.S. and shut down Russian intelligence complexes in New York and Maryland.
"This administration somehow has the notion that this would change the election. They're really trying to delegitimize the election itself. That's the main motivation here," said Franks, a member of the House Committee on Armed Services.
"And I think it's just unfortunate that this president forgets that most of these e-mails came from WikiLeaks, who claimed they got them from disgruntled DNC staffers."
In addition to being misdirected they were ineffective and merely showed the impotence and ineffectiveness of the Obama Administration. According to former UN Ambassador John Bolton Putin showed utter contempt for Obama in his measured response to his President Obama’s better never than late response to the accusations of Russian hacking.
Kellyanne Conway, who will serve as Trump's counselor to the president, told CNN Thursday, "I will tell you that even those who are sympathetic to President Obama on most issues are saying that part of the reason he did this today was to quote 'box in' President-elect Trump."
Personally I would like to echo an astute observation by Fred Fleitz, a former CIA analyst “The perception that an outgoing U.S. president is trying to box in and sabotage the foreign policy of his successor hurts the global reputation of America’s democratic system.”
We also have BHO’s stunning reversal of American policy allowing the condemnation of Israel to go forward. After protecting Israel with our veto power since 1949 in the waning days of his soon to be repudiated and reversed Progressive regime BHO ordered his team at the UN to abstain from a key vote. Thus the anti-Jewish UN was finally able to condemn Israel and add fuel to the flames of hatred. Not only did the Obama administration refuse to block the move they are accused by Israel of helping to write the resolution and for pushing others to vote for it.
The blizzard of economically strangling regulations continued to pour out of the Obama White House even as it slowly sinks beneath the political horizon. President Obama poured on thousands more new regulations in 2016 at a rate of 18 for every new law passed, according to an analysis of his team's expansion of federal authority. While Congress passed just 211 laws, Obama's team issued an accompanying 3,852 new federal regulations, some costing billions of dollars.
The 2016 total was the highest annual number of regulations under Obama. The proof that it was an overwhelming year for rules and regulations is in the Federal Register, which ended the year Friday by printing a record-setting 97,110 pages, according to the analysis from the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
We only have one president at a time. We all get that. And until January 20th 2017 that is still BHO. Unless he does an abrupt U-turn, ends his attempts to undermine his successor, thwart the will of the people, and show a little class to his everlasting shame he may well be remembered as the lamest duck of all.
Dr. Owens teaches History, Political Science, and Religion. He is the Historian of the Future @ http://drrobertowens.com © 2017 Contact Dr. Owens drrobertowens@hotmail.com Follow Dr. Robert Owens on Facebook or Twitter @ Drrobertowens / Edited by Dr. Rosalie Owens
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