A lot of people overseas seemed to imagine that Obama had been elected not president of the USA but CEO/Messiah of the Age of Aquarius.
TBH I regret not seeing it before. He gave off every whiff of a man who sought power for its own sake. But he was glib, he was black, and at the time he seemed better than the alternatives.
And when you say i will close Guantanamo Bay in a year - you tend to believe that kind of stuff.
The worst thing about the whole "we used to love him until he did x" misses the issue that leads to these situations in the first place; it would more accurately be "we used to love him until we realized he lied to us."
That's what American political campaigns are and have, as long as I've been listening to them, always been: A long series of lies and overstatements told in order to gain office. That people continue to believe them and lavish praise onto these liars encourages them and guarantees we'll continue to see this happen long into the future.
You want to stop the flooding? Put the shovel down.
I don't know where that quote is from -- I grew up hearing it from my father.
"Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely."
It's from a letter written by Lord Acton to Bishop Creighton in 1885. A more complete quote is:
"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority, still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it."
You most certainly aren't. I normally cite this as an international phenomenon, but it's gotten to the point where either people know that or they've had their heads buried in the sand, so it's hardly worth belaboring the point any more (not that it'll stop me, but I no longer feel quite so tied explaining it over and over).
We have to consider the possibility that Obama really did believe in the ideas he pitched during his presidential campaigns, but that once he entered in to office something very powerful changed his views. The measure of how powerful that agent of change is would depend on how deeply Obama held his convictions.
So we have two possibilities:
1) Obama is a purely evil, lying, power-hungry individual
2) Obama's ideology was forced to the sidelines by a system that is immune to such purity
I'm not sure which is more terrifying.
-- Said he could cut the deficit by half in his first term. Instead he actually added over 5 trillion to it.
-- Said he would reduce unemployment to under 8%. Today, it still hovers around 10% if you take into account the people who stopped looking for work.
-- Said the stimulus would create 3.5 million jobs. Instead, we actually lost 1.1 million jobs AFTER the stimulus.
-- Said he would make health care more affordable. You simply can't add millions of people to the health care ranks and expect rates to go DOWN. Simple supply and demand economics.
-- Said his investment in Green energy would create 5 million jobs. After spending $90 billion, instead of 5 million jobs, we had several solar companies go bankrupt after securing guaranteed government loans, many of which left tax payers on hook for hundreds of millions of dollars.
And yet, he still got re-elected.
Unless you actually read his proposed policy documents, which made it pretty clear that he had no clue what he was talking about.