by Lorendiac

Created on: January 22, 2009

Some people were already passing judgment on the Obama presidency before then-Senator Obama even had the Democratic nomination locked up.

I thought that was a trifle premature.

More people were passing judgment on the Obama presidency in the gap between his gaining the necessary majority of convention delegates (last June) and the actual election (last November).

I thought that was a trifle premature.

Many more people were heard passing judgment on the Obama presidency in the gap between Election Night and Inauguration Day.

I STILL thought that was a trifle premature.

Even passing judgment on the success or failure of his administration on the basis of the speech he delivered immediately after taking his oath of office struck me as needlessly hasty.

Instead, I preferred to calmly sit back and give him a fair chance to settle into the White House, start exercising executive authority, and build up enough of a track record for a reasonable observer such as myself to be able to project some trends and form a dispassionate verdict based on honest-to-goodness evidence instead of endless quantities of rumor and speculation. Not for me the shallow nitpicking arguments of people who quote one sentence from a political speech and then offer us hundreds and hundreds of words of "analysis" of what the speaker "obviously meant to imply" he would do, if and when he gained the practical ability to do anything at all.

But as I write this, the new president has had over twenty-four hours to make his mark on history. I gave him a fair chance, and now, in the best traditions of political pundits everywhere, I'm going to deliver my well-considered verdict!

Some of the rhetoric from and about President Obama had given me high hopes . . . for a while . . . but let's look at the record. Just how much has President Obama accomplished so far?

Precious little.

To name just a few of the problems which this administration has not yet squarely addressed:

A significant percentage of each of my paychecks is still being siphoned away to serve as a blood transfusion for other investors in the elaborate Ponzi scheme which is laughingly known by the name of "Social Security." I have no faith in that Ponzi scheme as a way of financing my far-in-the-future retirement, I don't want to "invest" in it, and nobody ever bothered to ask me if I wanted to take my chances on getting by without it. Nevertheless, money is extorted from me in each pay period.

I haven't seen President Obama doing anything to stop that.

Nothing

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