Last night featured a terrific national championship college football game, but tonight, it will be President Obama spiking the football. Obama’s State of the Union address tonight will be a triumphalist reading of his massive accomplishments.
The New York Times’ resident faux-conservative David Brooks says today that “Obama has championed a liberal agenda, but he hasn’t made the country unrecognizable,” but he isn’t right – Obama has indeed succeeded in transforming the country, and he’ll pat himself on the back with both hands, presumably until he begins crying from a case of broken ribs.
Here are 12 ways Obama has transformed America and the world:
Executive Amnesty. It’s not just that President Obama has effectively legalized millions of illegal immigrants. It’s that he’s prevented deportations and gotten Republicans to pay for it. Obama has accomplished the signal achievement of forcing Republicans to break a key promise to their own base on executive amnesty – they ran on the basis of stopping Obama’s program in 2014, but now have funded it twice. Rage at that surrender has driven Donald Trump to the top of the polls, but Obama’s betting that no president will undo what he has done. Given the establishment’s support for Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) and former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, that’s not a terrible bet.
Executive Gun Control. Obama’s crying jag at last week over gun control hid the fact that he’s setting the groundwork for his Department of Justice to target individual gunowners. Last week, Obama chief advisor Valerie Jarrett said that the ATF would prosecute people who sold guns as a dealer – but then defined dealer down to include even a single weapon, explaining, “The ATF and DOJ did not identify a magic number of weapons that makes you engaged in the business because that would limit their ability to bring prosecution.” Attorney General Loretta Lynch stated, “It can be as few as one or two depending upon the circumstances under which the person sells the gun.” The only way to set up such a regime would be to create a national gun registry.
Obamacare. Republicans have pledged since 2010 to stop Obamacare. Aside from Senator Ted Cruz’s (R-TX) ill-fated attempt to defund the program, Republicans have instead done nothing. Meanwhile, President Obama brags about skyrocketing enrollment as he forces the government gun to the head of consumers. He ignores the fact that he’s forcing religious institutions to cover contraception; he ignores a boost in premiums. He ignores the fact that a huge chunk of new subscribers are coming in via Medicaid, which means they aren’t paying at all for their healthcare. Nonetheless, Republicans continue to fund the program.
Planned Parenthood. Obama hasn’t just enshrined Planned Parenthood’s abortion business – he’s done it while defanging the single largest scandal ever to engulf the abortion mill. After news broke that Planned Parenthood was dissecting dead babies and selling their body parts for research, the Obama administration stood firm against defunding efforts – and when Republicans refused to attach the defunding issue to a broader budget, Obama simply vetoed the stand-alone bill. Republicans went ahead and funded Planned Parenthood in the end. As always.
The Iran Deal. President Obama’s Iran deal hands the mullahs nuclear weapons in a decade, and hands them massive financial power, which will be channeled into terrorism and territorial expansionism, immediately. Incredibly, the Republicans signed off on this one too by greenlighting the asinine Corker proposal, which allowed Obama to get away with his perverse deal with far more than half the Senate and House objecting. Instead of holding Obama accountable under the Constitution by insisting that the Iran deal was a treaty, they ended up protesting loudly as Obama simply did what he wanted. The result: Iranian expansion throughout the region, more moderate regimes in danger, ISIS on the rise, and the possibility of a nuclear arms race.
Slashing The Military. Republicans, in attempting to stop Obama’s spending spree, jumped on board with the foolhardy sequestration deal that would supposedly slash future spending – but in actuality served mainly to stop spending on the military. Obama insisted that half of all cuts come from our military. The result is a military that has been dramatically weakened. On top of that, Obama has insisted on using the military as a vehicle for his social experimentation on behalf of women and transgenders.
Destruction Of America’s Traditional Alliances. Israel used to be our strongest ally in the Middle East. Other allies included Egypt and Saudi Arabia and Jordan. All are now looking elsewhere as Obama forges alliances with the Muslim Brotherhood on one hand and the Iranians on the other. Despite Congress’s best attempts to reach out to Israel and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Obama has succeeded in crafting a regime of international isolation for the Jewish State, even as he boosts the terrorist Palestinians. The new Egyptian government has already begun looking for allies in Russia and China, and Saudi Arabia is making clear its displeasure with the Obama administration.
The Dependency Society. Obama has spent $8 trillion in order to craft a permanent dependency society in which almost four in ten Americans of working age don’t work, in which millions of college-age students will enmesh themselves in debt before working for the government, in which 46 million Americans are on food stamps and eight million are on disability. Those numbers will continue to grow – and Democrats will never allow a revamp of Social Security or Medicare, either.
The Enshrinement of Same-Sex Marriage. President Obama says that the most important moment of his presidency was the Supreme Court mandating state-sanctioned same-sex marriage. He even used the White House as a canvas for his polarizing social politics, shining a rainbow flag on the People’s House. Obama’s destruction of traditional marriage in the legal sphere means that First Amendment religious freedoms are now under permanent assault, as religious businessowners face the backlash of a mobilized left. They will be forced to shell out hundreds of thousands of dollars simply to avoid participating in sin – and if they do it repeatedly, they’ll be forced out of business altogether.
Mobilization of The Bureaucracy Against Political Opponents. The IRS has targeted Obama’s political opposition. Obama stacked the National Labor Relations Board in order to target businesses that did not comply with the demands of his union cronies. Obama has used the DOJ to target his political opponents, too, and to avoid prosecuting his political allies like former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The Bureau of Land Management continues to expand its grasp upon state lands, and in doing so, target those whose land it wishes to grab. Every area of the Obama bureaucracy has become politicized. And they all have SWAT teams.
Racial Breakdown. Obama’s DOJ is targeting police departments around America; Obama himself continues to press the message that America is deeply racist, and that such racism is embedded into our DNA. Because he is the first black president, that critique bites all the more, and it has caused more racial polarization than at any time since the Los Angeles riots. Riots have broken out in major cities; murder rates are up, too. Policing is down. None of this will be easy to reverse – yet another generation of minorities in America have now been trained that “white privilege” is to blame for any problems they suffer.
Stacking The Supreme Court. Obama has put in place two new Supreme Court justices: Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor. Both are relatively young, and both are wildly leftist. Obama is one justice away from complete dominance on the Court – all he needs is Anthony Kennedy to resign, and the Constitution turns to ash.
That is your actual State of the Union under President Obama. Most galling, he’ll cheer himself to the skies tonight for it.
Ben Shapiro is Senior Editor-At-Large of Breitbart News, Editor-in-Chief of DailyWire.com, and The New York Times bestselling author, most recently, of the book, The People vs. Barack Obama: The Criminal Case Against The Obama Administration (Threshold Editions, June 10, 2014). Follow Ben Shapiro on Twitter @benshapiro.