Just Another Rock In The Pile

If you have a rock that you want to hide, where is the best place to hide it? Obviously enough, in a rock pile. This is a concept that Obama has found greatly to his liking. Bill Clinton once complained about not having a major crisis during his administration so he could look more presidential. I think he just didn't take advantage of what he had. Obama, on the other hand has had more crises than a bunch of administrations.

I booted up my word processing program the other day and started listing the crises, large and small, real and manufactured, that have occurred over the past four years. I did this from memory. No research. I admit that I do not have the best memory in the world but I still came up with twenty-eight. That is more than one crisis every two months.

Some of these were inherited, like unemployment and the bank failures. Some were grabbed onto as a political ploy, like the automotive failures and the housing bubble. Some were manufactured, like demonizing Mitt Romney, the war on women, and the war on the Catholic Church. Some were just consequential, like Sandy and the Petraeus scandal. Finally some were a result of inept management, like Benghazi, the follow up stories on Benghazi, and the kill list.

One benefit of all these crises is that the last crisis gets lost in the coverage and concern about the newest crisis. The administration can put older crises on the back burner and let them simmer. They can later claim to have solved some of them or that there is an ongoing investigation of others. Of course, the results of any investigations never become public. I wonder, is the investigation of "Fast and Furious" still ongoing. 

They claim to have fixed the automotive crisis. They poured billions of our dollars into it. They flipped the rule of law on it's back to protect the unions. Now one American car company is owned by an Italian company and the other, while being touted as a grand success, is still only borderline and still may not recover. This with billions of your money unrecovered. 

Some of the crises we live with day to day and appear to have become the new normal. Have we accepted the price of gasoline? Have we accepted that this administration is never going to make us energy independent even though we have the resources. Have we accepted good Americans being sacrificed in the middle east. Have we accepted a president digging us ever deeper into a financial hole based on what he sees as fairness. Have we, finally, given up the Republic.