Are you as disappointed in Obama as I am?

(The title is supposed to be sarcastic. I’m not sure that’s coming through.)

Gosh, the administration started with such high hopes.  Elect him, Obama promised, and we would get the following:

I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth.

That’s pretty basic. Let’s see how the promises stack up.

“We began to provide care for the sick.”  Obama did push his health care reform through Congress.  The results to date?  This year, we finally got to see a decrease in the number of uninsured.  Before you start celebrating, though, a majority of those were unemployed young people who got to hang onto their parents’ coverage.  The rest — they got more government coverage:

But for most other age groups, the numbers largely reflected the continuation of a long-running shift away from private insurance toward government coverage — with Medicare and Medicaid picking up much of the slack left by the steady erosion of employment-based insurance.

Socialized medicine here we come.  Is this a good thing?  I don’t know.  I do know that, in my family, when my parents and my sister started being blinded by cataracts, they were immediately lined up for outpatient surgery, almost all of which their insurance covered.  In England, under government medicine, those blinded by cataracts aren’t so lucky:

Thousands of elderly people are having to put up with deteriorating sight because they are denied cataract surgery on the NHS by ‘cruel and random’ rationing, campaigners warn.

Some health trusts offer the procedure only to patients whose sight is so poor it has led to them having a fall, research has found.

Nearly half of health trusts ration operations, with many turning patients away unless they can no longer drive, read or recognise their friends.

Doesn’t sound good to me and, if it’s our future, it’s a broken promise.

Obama can also boast that insurance premiums increased by only 4% this year, a historically low number.  The problem, though, is that most peoples’ wages increased by, at best, only 2%.  In other words, under ObamaCare, the rise in insurance costs vastly outpaces the rise in people’s income.  So, if my math is correct, if one considers the ratio of insurance payments to actual wealth, people paid significantly more under ObamaCare.

I’d therefore characterize caring for the sick as a broken promise because, barring those young ‘uns sponging off their parents’ insurers, everyone else is getting less or paying more — or both.

Oh, and about those unemployed young people and underpaid American workers….  Obama definitely promised that his presidency would mean that the government would provide “good jobs to the jobless.”  Hmm. Let’s see how that worked out.

Real unemployment (i.e., counting those who have given up looking) is close to 18%, and has been for months, or even years.  Those Americans who are working are underemployed — working at jobs below their capacity or getting paid less than before (count me in both of those last categories).  Let’s not even talk about the record number of Americans on food stamps (’cause apparently that’s racist).  Only government workers have thrived, but even the massive growth in their employment rolls cannot offset those jobless numbers.  I guess that’s another promise broken.

Obama made an even grander promise than employment.  He guaranteed that his presidency would mark the moment when “the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”  Okay, I don’t know how the fugue to measure this promise.  I do know that Mother Nature has been doing her usual spectacular show of earthquakes, volcanoes, droughts, floods, etc.  I’m pretty sure the oceans have been holding steady.  This is an impossible promise to quantify but, given the droughts, earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, etc., I’d say that, for Obama, this was a massive fail.

The last of Obama’s promises had to do with national security.  His presidency, said, would mark the moment “we ended a war and secured our nation.”  Yeah.  We did pull out of Iraq, but that was on the timetable Bush started.  Take away Iraq (which is blowing up) and things don’t look so good.

We’re still in Afghanistan, and we’re losing more young Americans than ever to a war the president is prosecuting in a half-assed manner.  By the way, the link I just gave opens with a lede sentence that is a perfect example of the liberal inability to match cause and effect:  “The number of American casualties in war-torn Afghanistan continues to rise despite plans of the withdrawal of US troops, Press TV reports.” I dunno. Could it be that the number of casualties is rising, not despite plans to withdraw, but because of those plans? Just asking, you know….

Obama also added more wars to the plate, sending drones into Pakistan and sucking us into supporting Libyan rebels for reasons Obama was never able to enunciate.  Regarding Libya, let’s ask Ambassador Chris Stevens how that worked out.  Oh, I’m sorry, my bad.  I had an Obama moment and saw dead people.  Poor Chris Stevens was horribly murdered by those same Libyan rebels, may his soul rest in peace.

And about that “secure nation” stuff that wrapped up the Obama promise series.  Keeping in mind that an American embassy, no matter where it is in the world, is American soil, I don’t think we’re very secure at the moment.   This Daily Mail article has a staggering photographic run down of American soil under aggressive attack all over the Middle East (except Israel, of course). We are in a crisis posture.  God Bless our Marines, because they’re being sent in to sort out this crisis, and they really need our prayers.

Meanwhile Jay “Baghdad Bob” Carney assures the world that the carnage has nothing to do with America, and everything to do with one stupid video that nobody would have seen if the Islamists hadn’t publicized it (and, possibly, created it).  More than that, Baghdad Bob Carney cannot say enthusiastically enough that Obama is doing a great job.  That may be, but one has to ask whether his “great job” is for the benefit of the Americans who elected him or the Islamists who are trying to destroy America.  Meanwhile, the White House has acted decisively to berate Romney and check out things with YouTube.  It seems possible that the administration is getting its First Amendment tutorial from the Libyan Ambassador.

Yup — that’s another promise broken.

The media is working overtime to shill for Obama and hide his record, but my Facebook account says that even the most stalwart liberals (which is how I would identify almost all the people who live in my corporeal, as opposed to cyber, world), while unable emotionally to blame Obama directly, aren’t buying the gauzy Potemkin Village the media is trying to create.

I have to go back to my low-paying underemployment now, but I’ll leave you with a heart-warming video: