How are all those promises of “change” coming along?

“Words mean something. You can’t just make stuff up” – Presidential candidate Barack Obama, September 6, 2008

1. Victor Davis Hanson reminds us of how the Messiah made all sorts of promises and guarantees during his election campaign, and how he’s now backtracked on almost every single one of them, including

“renditions, military tribunals, intercepts, wiretaps, Predator drone attacks, the release of interrogation photos, Iraq (and, I think, soon Guantanamo Bay)”

without Obama ever once being prodded by the lapdog media into admitting that he is indeed not keeping his word on those issues, the very ones that he deemed so critical last fall.

2. Let’s also look at the Messiah’s promise to not increase taxes “one dime” on those making under $250,000, shall we?

Hmmm. Where to start on this one, where to start...

Well, how about the House’s health care proposal, which Obama seemingly supports wholeheartedly? That boondoggle will immediately add another 600 billion dollars in spending on top of the 2.6 trillion dollars or so of new expenditures in the short time since Obama took office, and even Charlie “Caribbean Tax Shelter” Rangel admits that the true cost of this health scheme will likely top 1 trillion dollars all by itself before long.

Or how about the cap-and-trade bill also currently rocketing through Congress, which is estimated to cost the average American family (which earns significantly less than $250,000 annually, the last time we checked) $3900 more a year in “carbon taxes”, according to MIT professor John Reilly, who champions the theory of human-caused climate change, which has yet to be proven. (The Weekly Standard points out that Reilly insists that only $800 of this is truly robbed from families, and that the $3128 difference is somehow returned to them at some point, although he doesn’t elaborate just how that would happen, only that “no matter what happens this revenue gets recycled into the economy some way”. Presumably by giving it away to someone else, most likely. Those families who pay the thousands in a nebulous “carbon tax” will never see that dough again, and Reilly knows it.)

Additionally, President Obama signed the tobacco bill (which increases taxes on such products) into law yesterday, which by all accounts will impact lower-income families significantly more than higher-earning ones, due to the increased rate of smoking among those in the lower earnings brackets. Which brings us to

3. Remember that whole business about “transparency”, a key part of which was Obama’s promise to post bills passed by Congress on the White House web site for 5 days before signing, in order to allow the public to read and comment on the legislation?

Total number of bills signed into law by Obama: 12 (including the tobacco bill signed yesterday)

Total number posted on the White House web site for 5 days before signing, as promised during the Messiah’s campaign: 0

Yep, it didn’t happen with this tobacco bill, either. Obama signed the bill one day after it was passed by the Senate, breaking yet another campaign promise, unless one considers this bill some sort of “emergency”, because he exempted bills so labeled from his pledge. We don’t know about everyone else, but we don’t consider getting words such as “light” and “mild” off cigarette packs and controlling the level of nicotine in tobacco products to be a screaming crisis.

While we’re on the subject of transparency, we’re betting that you haven’t heard the news that

4. Obama has announced in a letter to Congress that he is going to fire AmeriCorps Inspector General Gerald Walpin. The current theory on Walpin’s sacking, according to Byron York of the Washington Examiner, seems to be that Walpin is being canned solely for investigating a non-profit organization called St. Hope, which is affiliated with AmeriCorps (St. Hope was started by Kevin Johnson, an Obama supporter and ex-NBA star who is currently mayor of Sacramento, California), and forcing the charity to pay back $400,000 in grant money from AmeriCorps. As York sums it up,

“The bottom line is that the AmeriCorps IG accused a prominent Obama supporter of misusing AmeriCorps grant money. After an investigation, the prominent Obama supporter had to pay back more than $400,000 of that grant money. And Obama fired the AmeriCorps IG.”

Curiously, York reports that Obama gives no reason for the firing other than that he no longer has the “fullest confidence” in Walpin. Unfortunately for the president, that vague statement most likely is no longer good enough, as the 2008 Inspectors General Reform Act (ironically co-sponsored by, you guessed it, the Messiah himself) “requires the president to outline the cause for his decision to remove an IG.” Presumably “I’m no longer fully confident in you” doesn’t count as cause.

In addition, the IGRA requires that the president give 30 days’ notice to both houses of Congress before a firing of an IG takes place, a process Obama seems to have tried to skirt by having White House lackey lawyer Norm Eisen (whose antics we’ve previously commented on) call Walpin “on his cell phone to tell him he had one hour to resign or be fired”, presumably to avoid that legally-mandated Congressional notification. To his credit, Walpin refused to quit on demand in an email to Eisen, and also “noted that Eisen had said any appearance of a connection between Walpin's firing and recent conflicts over Walpin's handing of high-profile investigations was ‘coincidence.’” (Emphasis mine)

This seems to be just the sort of heavy-handed, secretive and official process running-around tactics that Obama (mostly correctly) took the Bush Administration so much to task for last fall. Why, then, is he allowing the same sort of dictator-like games to be played under his watch?

5. Remember how Obama vehemently protested that he wasn’t the least interested in limiting the pay of company heads who weren’t participating in the federal bailout? Yeah, that’s been quietly changed, too:

“The administration plans to seek legislation that would try to rein in compensation at publicly traded companies through nonbinding shareholder votes and by decreasing management influence on pay decisions”

If the Messiah gets his way, companies who trade publicly will no longer be able to compensate employees however they see fit; rather, they will presumably only be able pay executives, regardless of their performance or value to a given company, what the government says they can.

Does that sound like economic freedom to you? It sure doesn’t to us. The American dream is about achieving as much as one wishes to by using their own individual effort, and certainly not artificially limiting that success because it somehow isn’t “fair” to everyone else. That type of economy failed miserably in Soviet Russia because of the utter lack of incentives and rewards for hard work, and it will undoubtedly fail if tried here.

That’s more than enough chronicling of the Litany of Broken Messianic Promises for today, although we’re sure we could find numerous other examples quite easily, should we choose to look around a little more. We do have one small ray of light, however. Apparently even execrable Obama champion Bill Maher is getting a little tired of the “All Obama, all the time” fawning media coverage:

“Remember during the campaign when John McCain attacked Obama for acting like a celebrity and we all laughed at the grumpy old shell shocked fool? Well, it turns out he was right.”

Thank God at least one of the Messiah’s celebrity sycophants is beginning to observe how over-the-top inappropriate the sucking-up to Obama by the media has been. Now if only some of the ordinary peasants who voted for him will begin to see the mistake they’ve unleashed on the country, we’ll really be getting somewhere.