When, this week, President Obama committed the gaffe of referring to "a Polish death camp" instead of a "Nazi death camp," some of the elite media reported that Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski demanded an apology for an "outrageous mistake" while omitting he attributed the error to "ignorance and incompetence."

My purpose here, however, is not to comment upon the ongoing reality Bernard Goldberg exposed three and a half years ago in A Slobbering Love Affair: The True (and Pathetic) Story of the Torrid Romance Between Barack Obama and the Mainstream Media.

Nor is it to get into why the reaction from Poland was so fierce, except to say history tells us Poles have every right to insist upon a meticulous adherence to truth when a person speaks of their nation and the hellish, fundamentally indistinguishable evils that were Nazi fascism and Stalinist communism.

But it is to argue that through the two words that so often went unreported, a man a world away from the tumult of American politics has, in this election year, given us something profoundly important to think about regarding our president...if we are willing to consider facts such as the ones that follow.

As all but his sycophantic supporters will agree, Barack Obama made a huge mistake not just politically but with respect to effective governance when, at the outset of his administration, he turned his attention to healthcare instead of doggedly remaining focused on solving the nation's economic problems.

But since the president chose to make healthcare his priority, it makes sense to begin an examination of his record with the following details about his performance on the issue:

Barack Obama didn't fight for a doctor developed, nationwide standard of care regimen that would save enormous amounts of money annually without detriment to patients.

Nor for tort law reform, which is necessary to making such a regimen workable. (Instead, he dutifully toed the liberal line, resulting in an Affordable Care Act defined as so easily affordable it literally doesn't need a cent from the trial lawyer industry.)

Nor for changes that would promote the use of the best performing organizational structures to make healthcare delivery better as well as more efficient and less costly.

Nor for practices that would save as much as $100 billion annually by requiring hospitals to follow simple, known procedures aimed at eliminating hospital-acquired infections.

Nor for innovative power sharing that would allow states to go after fraud in Medicare and Medicaid, thereby saving at least $50 billion annually.

But what he did fight for with every trick in Nancy Pelosi's congressional playbook is a 2,000 page, 15,000 IRS agents hiring, sixties welfare style federal law that is certain to metastasize into a mile high monstrosity when Washington's arrogant, insulated bureaucracy writes its regulations.

We now move to the president's economic record, first by observing that trying to promote economic growth is one thing but doing so with honest, intelligent maturity quite another.

That truth is revealed, sadly, by the reality that since the days of his "stimulus bill," Obama has made the egregious error of behaving as if the nation had suffered an ordinary decline in the business cycle when it is abundantly clear the country's economic woes were and still are caused by a near-collapse of the financial system that occurred at the end of what John Mauldin calls a decades-in-the-making "debt supercycle."

Now, as indicated by their many public statements, scholars such as Paul Volcker and a host of pragmatic financial experts including Mauldin know that fully climbing out of a "deleveraging" recession takes many years and requires wisdom, courage, and steadfastness in reducing public and private debt; eliminating waste and red tape in government; getting government spending under control; reforming the financial industry; and implementing monetary and tax policies that reject the fantasy of the free lunch and the corruption of crony capitalism.

Barack Obama, however, doesn't see or doesn't want to see things that way. Therefore, he ditched the notion of pursuing hard reforms in favor of proposing bigger, more expensive government (consider his healthcare law, about which he and his fellow Democrats lied at least a trillion dollar lie), his entire ideologically driven, "spread the wealth around" approach based upon the expedient hope that a robustly recovering economy would bail him out in time for the 2012 election season.

Exacerbating the nation's current economic problems and threatening to again sink the economy in the future is another monstrosity to which Barack Obama has been a principal party, this one regarding the country's banking problem.

That problem, of course, is caused by constantly growing, too big to fail banks that, cushioned by FDIC insurance underwritten by the American people, continue to make their money not through sound lending practices but by gambling on inscrutably complex, highly dangerous "derivatives," not one of which is ever bought or sold in the sunlight of an open exchange.

However, while the great majority of citizens, including small business owners whose enterprises create 50% of all news jobs, agree with the wisdom of returning to a properly regulated "vanilla" banking system, Barack Obama once again chose ideology over common sense by agreeing to Dodd-Frank, a law so certain to explode into ten thousand or more pages of bureaucratic obfuscation that professor Mark Perry has dubbed it "The Full Employment Act for Lawyers, Accountants, and Consultants."

And so it is that by protecting too big to fail casino-banks while burdening the entire financial industry with the economy constricting, job killing, small bank harming, bureaucracy bloating monster called Dodd-Frank, Barack Obama has saddled the nation with a banking regime nearly perfect in its perversity.

To what has been presented above, we must add two more facts.

First, that Obama permitted the worst of this nation's congressional porkers to write his destined-to-fail economic stimulus bill. Second, that he has directed his administration to implement a mad kill list energy policy certain to cripple economic growth even as it ravages the budget of every citizen, especially members of the besieged middle class.

Then, having carefully considered just the realities presented in this piece, we are ready to ask the following questions.

Should we accept the Barack Obama marketed to us as a fresh, bold, innovative, brave, scholarly yet hands-on leader with a vision for taking the entire nation a to new heights?

Or should we admit that with respect to the most important issues of our difficult times, Barack Obama's record reflects the wages either of ignorance or incompetence, each of those flaws born of a true-believing president's deep-seated ideology and remarkable inexperience?


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