Obama the GOP’s greatest salesman

It’s New Year’s Day. This is a time to think positively and give thanks for all the great things in your life. This is the time to see the glass as half full, not half empty.

So I want to thank President Obama. Because Obama is without a doubt … the greatest Republican salesman in history.

I’m not just talking about the 1,042 federal and state seats he lost for the Democrat Party in his eight years in office. No, I’m talking about the sales job Obama is doing on the way out the door. He is cementing the Democrat Party as a party of arrogant, bitter, ultraleftist, sore losers. What a parting gift.

I could not have scripted a better finish to Obama’s tenure if I tried. At least not if the goal was making a majority of Americans run away from the Democrat Party like it’s the plague. Let’s look at the last days of Obama’s presidency:

Americans hate regulations. They know regulations are strangling the economy and killing middle-class jobs. Yet Obama just dropped thousands of pages of new regulations on the U.S. economy at the last minute. Is he bitter? Is he looking for revenge? It appears he’s giving us the middle finger on the way out the door.

Americans love Israel. Yet Obama just committed the worst backstabbing and betrayal toward Israel of any president in history. And Israeli official say they have proof this entire U.N. resolution condemning Israel was Obama’s baby — he created it, orchestrated it, secretly lobbied for it. Bravo, Mr. Obama. What a great way to alienate every Jew and Christian in this country. Another middle finger.

Americans who live out West in places such as Nevada and Utah aren’t fans of federal government intrusion. They are skeptical of the feds owning so much of our land. So what does Obama do? On the way out the door he designates vast swaths of Utah and Nevada as “national monuments” over the objections of our governors and congressional delegations. He ignores the will of the people. Another middle finger.

Americans like lawabiding citizens, not criminals. Yet Obama has set all-time records for presidential pardons and commutations in his last days, with many more certain to come. Another middle finger.

Americans have a love affair with oil. Silly us — we like cheap energy prices. But Obama just used executive action to declare a permanent ban on oil drilling over most of the Atlantic and Arctic oceans on the way out the door. No discussion or cooperation with Congress. Just a dictator deciding to ban drilling as a parting gift. Another middle finger.

Americans want to keep our children safe at night. Yet Obama has dramatically accelerated the importation of unvetted Muslim refugees in the final days of his presidency. Another middle finger.

Americans don’t want a war with Russia. Unfortunately Obama seems eager to damage our relationship. Only days ago he announced sanctions against Russia for “election hacking.” But where’s the proof? The American people have seen none. Is Obama trying to escalate tensions for the incoming President Trump? Another middle finger.

Obama is a great salesman. Unfortunately for Democrats, he’s the greatest Republican salesman in history. This bitter, sore loser, radicalleftist ideologue is turning America red for many years to come.

Now that’s what I call a happy new year.

Even the best things come to an end. After enjoying a quarter of a century of writing this column for Creators Syndicate, I have decided to stop. Age 86 is well past the usual retirement age, so the question is not why I am quitting, but why I kept at it so long.

It was very fulfilling to be able to share my thoughts on the events unfolding around us, and to receive feedback from readers across the country.

During a stay in Yosemite National Park last May, taking photos with a couple of my buddies, I went four consecutive days without seeing a newspaper or a television news program — and it felt wonderful. With the political news being so awful this year, it felt especially wonderful. This made me decide to spend less time following politics and more time on my photography.

Looking back over the years, as old-timers are apt to do, I see huge changes, both for the better and for the worse.

In material things, there has been almost unbelievable progress. Most Americans did not have refrigerators back in 1930, when I was born. Television was little more than an experiment, and such things as air-conditioning or air travel were only for the very rich.

My own family did not have electricity or hot running water, in my early childhood, which was not unusual for blacks in the South in those days.

Most people living in officially defined poverty in the 21st century have things that most Americans did not have as late as the 1980s.

In some other ways, however, there have been some serious retrogressions over the years. Politics, and especially citizens’ trust in their government, has gone way downhill.

Back in 1962, President John F. Kennedy, a man narrowly elected just two years earlier, came on television to tell the nation that he was taking us to the brink of nuclear war with the Soviet Union, because the Soviets had secretly built bases for nuclear missiles in Cuba, just 90 miles from America.

Most of us did not question what he did. He was president of the United States, and he knew things that the rest of us couldn’t know — and that was good enough for us. But could any president today do anything like that and have the American people behind him?

Years of lying presidents — Democrat Lyndon Johnson and Republican Richard Nixon, especially — destroyed not only their own credibility, but the credibility which the office itself once conferred. The loss of that credibility was a loss to the country, not just to the people holding that office in later years.

With all the advances of blacks over the years, nothing so brought home to me the social degeneration in black ghettoes like a visit to a Harlem high school some years ago.

When I looked out the window at the park across the street, I mentioned that, as a child, I used to walk my dog in that park. Looks of horror came over the students’ faces, at the thought of a kid going into the hell hole which that park had become in their time.

When I have mentioned sleeping out on a fire escape in Harlem during hot summer nights, before most people could afford airconditioning, young people have looked at me like I was a man from Mars. But blacks and whites alike had been sleeping out on fire escapes in New York since the 19th century. They did not have to contend with gunshots flying around during the night.

We cannot return to the past, even if we wanted to. But let us hope that we can learn something from the past to make for a better present and future.

Goodbye and good luck to all.