Obama Legacy

The Obama administration ends not with a bang, but a sorrowful whimper. We have the juxtaposition of a President golfing in Hawaii, while the remnants of starving and battered Syrian children are bussed from the rubble of Aleppo. 

So much for the “Leader of the Free World.”

President Obama abandoned his “leading from behind” policy to not leading at all. Russia, a Third World country with nuclear weapons, moved into the Middle East with military force because President Obama left, nay created, a vacuum that Russia, under a strong leader, simply filled without paying a price.

Even the Democrat Party candidate selected to replace him offered more robust ideas, including a “no fly zone” and a sanctuary on the Turkish border. Our current risk-averse President, who could not even bring himself to enforce a red line that he had personally announced, was not as strong as Hillary.

Aleppo, which is Obama’s Rwanda, was simply the culmination of a completely flaccid foreign policy, enunciated by the most foppish Secretary of State the President could have found. It’s no wonder that Russia — facing the overwhelming might of our U.S. Sixth Fleet — felt emboldened to bring a mere squadron of Russian aircraft into Syria. Either our intelligence could have warned President Obama that “the Russians are coming” and he could have warned them away (assuming the Russians would have taken him seriously) or our FA-18 fighter pilots would have made short work of it.

But from that toehold the Russians flew support and the Syrian Army counterattacked and pounded Aleppo, a toehold that could have been avoided altogether by cratering the runways with little loss of life, although that really was the purpose back in the day…causing loss of life until the enemy desisted. (That was back when America actually won wars

But once Russia was safely on the ground, the Syrian Army and Air Force with Russian bombers felt they could safely attack rebels, and hundreds of thousands of civilians in Aleppo.

Yes, Virginia, the knee bone is connected to the thigh bone and thousands of innocents died because while we were playing by the Marquis of Queensbury Rules, the Syrians and the Russians were playing by the Marquis de Sade’s Rules. (Sade always wins!)

It was Sins of Omission not Sins of Commission that led Aleppo to be Obama’s Rwanda. It’s terrible to have such a legacy, but he earned it! 

Unfortunately for him, what was to have been his legacy was Obamacare, but the great flaw in that was that the insurance premium increases that came due on the month before the national election contributed to, but didn’t cause, his candidate’s political demise.

The wreck of Obamacare, and the coming cancelling of so many of President Obama’s Executive Orders, leaves the outgoing President with few items on the plus side, and Aleppo as one huge negative on the minus side.

The President can’t recoup his legacy by granting thousands of pardons that endanger the public, or by assigning a “permanent” status to the offshore drilling in sections of the Artic and the East Coast. Unfortunately for him, he gave future Presidents a roadmap to avoiding laws with his treatment of immigration law: Simply ignore them!