I’M NOT PROUD THAT WE ELECTED OBAMA

When politics becomes personal it can lose perspective.

In an interview that was broadcast last night on 60 Minutes, retiring Oklahoma Republican Senator Tom Coburn proclaimed, “I’m proud of our country for electing Barack Obama.”

Senator Coburn is to be admired for his years as a watchdog on the spending habits of Congress and bureaucrats in the federal government. While I was certainly well aware of Coburn’s friendship with Obama, which developed when they were in the Senate, I am nevertheless disappointed to hear that he is proud this country elected Barack Obama to the White House.

Senator Coburn might very well love Barack Obama as a man and with it the content of his character. Alas, I do not love Barack Obama much less admire his character. I’m not proud that we elected Barack Obama to be President of the United States.

I’m not proud of President Obama when he says we’ve entered a new era of responsibility and then spends his entire presidency blaming President Bush, ATMs, the Arab Spring and tsunamis and a myriad of other excuses for his woes.

I’m not proud of President Obama for his contempt for our allies whether through abandoning missile defense in Poland and the Czech Republic, his unwillingness to secure Ukraine’s sovereignty against Russian aggression, and his vilification of the State of Israel. Nor am I proud of him for leaving Chris Stevens and three other Americans to fend for themselves in Benghazi and then claim the attack was a result of a silly Internet film about Muhammad rather than a well-coordinated terrorist attack that just happened to occur on the 11th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

I’m not proud of President Obama’s endless apologies for America’s ills to countries who have far more to be ashamed of than us. It is these kinds of apologies that led Obama to normalize relations with a Cuba that is totalitarian now as it was half a century ago. I’m not proud of President Obama for giving the Castros not only a lifeline, but the entire store. I’m not proud of President Obama for giving Cuban dissidents the back of his hand just as I wasn’t proud when he did the same to Iranians clamoring for democracy when he said it wasn’t our place to meddle in Iran’s “elections.”

I’m not proud of President Obama when he refers to corpsman as “corpsemen.”

I’m not proud of President Obama for exchanging five top Taliban officials in exchange for one army deserter.

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