Thursday, the White House YouTube channel uploaded a video in which citizens and celebrities talk about their favorite moments from Barack Obama’s presidency. The video is filled to the brim with saccharine nostalgia, but three moments stood out.
Tom Hanks on Cuban Relations
Actor Tom Hanks said: “When he just changed all the rules on the table in regards to Cuba with the most succinct motivation imaginable, which is, ‘What we’ve been doing hasn’t worked,’ which made all the sense in the world.”
What Hanks forgets to mention is that Obama’s normalizing of relations did nothing for Cuban dissidents. According to an August, 2016, piece in The Wall Street Journal:
“Independent groups that monitor civil liberties on the island say conditions have deteriorated in the 20 months since the Obama decision to normalize relations and ease Cuba trade and travel restrictions for Americans. Many dissident groups opposed any U.S. thaw without human-rights conditions attached and say they feel abandoned by the U.S., which they had long relied on for moral support.”
In March 2016, USA Today reported:
“Just hours before President Obama landed Sunday in Cuba for his historic visit to the communist island, Cuban authorities arrested more than 50 dissidents who were marching to demand improved human rights.”
Tom Hanks thinks Obama did a good job. The dissidents being imprisoned and tortured might disagree, but you can’t please everyone.
Leonardo DiCaprio on Climate Change
Actor Leonardo DiCaprio said: “When I was at the UN, and I heard our president say that climate change is the most important issue facing not only this generation, but all future generations, it was inspiring.”
Anthropogenic climate change is one of the Left’s magic bullets. The earth is dying; we care enough to save it; vote for us. What many progressives fail to mention is that a growing number of scientists disagree with the idea that man is causing climate change, and that man can do anything to stop it.
Joseph Bast and Roy Spencer write in The Wall Street Journal:
“Of the various petitions on global warming circulated for signatures by scientists, the one by the Petition Project, a group of physicists and physical chemists based in La Jolla, Calif., has by far the most signatures—more than 31,000 (more than 9,000 with a Ph.D.). It was most recently published in 2009, and most signers were added or reaffirmed since 2007. The petition states that “there is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of . . . carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate.'”
The WSJ piece also routs the 97% consensus myth.
Much of what proponents of the theory of Anthropogenic climate change believe is being challenged by evidence. The Heartland Institute’s H. Sterling Burnett, PhD, writes:
“Anthropogenic warming theorists’ climate models assume temperatures should climb alongside rising carbon-dioxide levels, yet temperatures fell from the 1940s through the 1970s, even while emissions were rising dramatically. For the past two decades, carbon-dioxide levels have continued to increase, but global satellites have recorded no significant temperature increase for 18 years.”
He adds that despite Arctic ice melting, Antarctic ice is thriving:
“Contradicting climate models once again, Antarctica is gaining tens of thousands of tons of ice each year, even as some ice-shelves collapse. In addition, in the past few years, despite a warmer world, sea-ice extent in Antarctica has repeatedly grown at a rapid pace, smashing previous records several times.”
Many progressives want Americans to believe that the science is settled, and that man is causing the earth to warm. The science is far from settled.
Samuel L. Jackson on Obamacare
Actor Samuel L. Jackson said: “The moment that, you know, we got the Affordable Care act passed, because I have relatives that, you know, can’t afford health insurance. So, it was really a great thing to know that if something happened to them, they’d get cared for.”
What Jackson fails to mention is the fact that the Affordable Care Act has been an unmitigated disaster. Premiums and deductibles have skyrocketed; millions of Americans have been rolled onto the already bloated Medicaid system; marketplaces have collapsed in many states, leaving only one or two insurers to provide coverage; and millions are still uninsured. Additionally, as The Daily Wire previously reported: “…the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that the number of uninsured will increase to 26-28 million over the next ten years as more employers opt to stop offering insurance plans.”
What a legacy!
What this video shows is not what Obama has accomplished, but what people believe he’s accomplished. There’s a vital difference between good policy and policy that looks good. President Obama has pleased a great many people with good-looking policy. Unfortunately, the results of those policies have been almost uniformly terrible.