The blessed day is upon us. After eight long, disastrous years with a committed progressive radical at the helm of the U.S. government, hell-bent on fulfilling his promise to “fundamentally transform” our beloved constitutional republic into a run-of-the-mill European-style socialist democracy, the Error of Barack Obama has come to an end. Obama soared into office on the poll-tested but empty rhetoric of Hope ‘n’ Change™, but the leftist Icarus flew too close to the sun and plummeted to Earth, leaving a trail of broken promises in his wake.

With little hope left and the change being for the worse, the American people have overwhelming rejected his would-be successor, Hillary Clinton, and instead elected a man who had no prior political experience but who DID promise to undo every major Obama “achievement” and, thus, “Make America Great Again.”

In recent weeks, Obama has taken a victory lap of sorts, and in press conferences, interviews, and public addresses he has delusionally bragged about his supposed successes, which his sycophantic media allies have trumpeted as truth.

Obama has promised to stay in DC following Donald Trump’s inauguration in order to use his influence to undermine Trump at every turn, in what some have called a de facto “shadow government,” and the press has promised to be his willing accomplices. It is critical, therefore, that we not allow the truth to be obscured, or Trump to be blamed for Obama’s failures (though we’re sure former President George W. Bush would be glad for the reprieve in taking the blame). In that light, let us recollect on the reality of the failed Obama years.

The Economy

Obama admittedly took office in the middle of a serious financial crisis (of the Democrats’ own making), but instead of enacting pro-growth policies, he raised taxes and spending, slowing the economy to a crawl. He warned that failure to pass his nearly $1 TRILLION “stimulus” bill would result in unemployment as high as 8%, yet after passage of the bill unemployment skyrocketed to 10%. Over Obama’s first term, unemployment averaged 9.2%. Yet even today’s low rate is a mirage, as the millions of Americans who gave up hope of finding a job are not counted against the unemployment rate; not to mention those forced into part-time work just to survive.

Obama is the first president in American history to never achieve a single year of GDP growth of 3%, an astonishing result considering that, historically, deep recessions and depressions are usually followed by high growth rates. Obama has presided over a recovery, averaging just 2.1% GDP growth (the slowest since WWII), with a record 95.1 MILLION Americans out of the labor force, a staggering 18% increase under his watch. A record 46 million Americans are on food stamps (+20 million). Interestingly, considering Obama’s rants on income inequality, only the ultra-rich have prospered during his tenure.

Additionally, the massive, failed stimulus bill (which Obama later joked produced no shovel-ready jobs after all) set a new baseline in government spending, which led to a doubling of the national debt, to a mind-boggling $20 trillion. Recall that Obama once blasted $4 trillion in Bush debt as being “unpatriotic” and “irresponsible,” yet he finished with nearly three times as much debt accrued. In the end, Obama could have been more successful using a Magic 8 Ball to determine economic policies than using the oft-tried but repeatedly failed Keynesian/socialist playbook.

Foreign Policy

After excoriating the “cowboy” George W. Bush, Obama’s foreign policy was based on the idea that America should not be a world leader. After the rise of the Islamic State and another terrorist attack in Paris, he infamously declared, “What I’m not interested in doing is posing or pursuing some notion of American leadership or America winning.”

One of Obama’s first acts as president was to cancel a missile defense shield agreement with Poland and the Czech Republic, a deterrent against Russian aggression. He sent then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Russia with the embarrassingly juvenile “reset” button, which Russia took as a green light to act aggressively, knowing the U.S. would only be a paper tiger. As a result, under Obama, Russia has invaded Ukraine and seized territory there, invaded and annexed Crimea, and continued to destabilize Georgia through proxies.

Oh, and they interfered with the 2016 election because of Obama’s weakness.

In Iran in 2009, as peaceful protesters were beaten and jailed by police and paramilitary units, and more than 100 shot and killed, Obama remained silent. Eventually, Obama negotiated an agreement (not a treaty, because he refused to submit it to the Senate for ratification) with the tyrannical Iranian regime that all but guarantees Iran will have nuclear weapons within a decade. On top of that, last year he secretly had nearly $2 billion in cash flown to Iran, though Obama claims it was neither payment for the nuclear deal nor ransom for the release of hostages. Obama’s indifference with Iran extended to Iraq, where Iranian-backed terrorists attacked and killed U.S. forces.

Additionally, Obama famously issued a “red-line” warning to Syria’s Bashar al-Assad against using chemical weapons, but when Assad used those weapons, Obama complained and sat by impotently. As a result, Syria has devolved into a full-scale civil war, with more than half a million dead and millions of refugees flooding into Europe. Russian President Vladimir Putin has been protecting Assad, and now is the dominant player in the region. Russia has effectively destroyed the Syrian city of Aleppo.

Obama’s unilateral and political retreat from Iraq, against the recommendation of his military advisers, led to the rise of the Islamic State, the most brutal terrorist organization the world has ever seen (which Obama initially called the “JV team” before it conquered large areas of the Middle East). Though not a threat to the U.S., Obama launched a war against Libya, which led to Moammar Gadhafi’s death and the sinking of the country into bloodshed and chaos. Four Americans were killed by terrorists at the Benghazi consulate, and their blood is on the hands of Obama and Hillary Clinton.

Obama has repeatedly betrayed Israel, directly interfered in its elections in an effort to oust Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and most damaging, recently directed our UN Ambassador to not veto an anti-Israel resolution that lays the groundwork for formal recognition of a Palestinian state on Israeli land, without any precondition that Palestinians cease terrorist attacks on Israel.

North Korea has also grown more aggressive and belligerent, and Cuba won a public relations, diplomatic and economic coup when Obama normalized relations with the Communist dictatorship after more than half a century. The Castro regime now receives billions in U.S. dollars even as it continues to beat, jail, torture and kill political dissidents. China is exerting control over the South China Sea, a key global shipping lane, and is pressuring Taiwan, Japan, South Korea and the Philippines to submit to its will.

Obama’s foreign policy has been one of coddling tyrannical regimes around the globe, putting American security and interests at risk, and abandoning and insulting long-time allies like Israel and Great Britain. Obama once claimed to be “leading from behind”; another name for cowardly retreat. Interestingly, Obama leaves office after having spent every single day of his presidency embroiled in war … an odd situation for a man given the Nobel Peace Prize before the ink was dry on the White House stationary.

Health Care

Obama’s signature legislative “achievement” was a radical transformation of the American health care system. Passed on Christmas Eve at midnight, without a single Republican vote, it has been an unmitigated disaster, and this despite massive spending and a total disruption of the existing system. Today, nearly as many Americans (27 million) are without health insurance as before the law was passed.

Obama promised repeatedly that “if you like your doctor/health insurance, you can keep your doctor/health insurance,” that ObamaCare would “bend the cost curve down,” and that the average family would save $2500/year in premiums.

Those were just a few of ObamaCare’s web of lies.

Instead, health care costs skyrocketed, millions of Americans have been forced off their health insurance (with most of the new “beneficiaries” of ObamaCare actually being added to Medicaid rolls), and access to doctors reduced as thousands of doctors each year decide to no longer accept Medicaid/ObamaCare.

Fully 17 of the 23 ObamaCare co-ops have gone bankrupt, and the other six are on life support. Many areas are down to just one or two provider options as health insurance companies pull out, having lost billions of dollars. And visits to the emergency room, which Obama claimed would drop under ObamaCare, have increased. ObamaCare architect and MIT economics professor Jonathan Gruber was caught on tape bragging about how ObamaCare was passed by lying to the American people, who he said were “too stupid to understand.”

Obama’s signature achievement looks to soon be gone, wiped out by President Donald Trump and a GOP-led Congress who campaigned on repealing this monstrosity.

Domestic Security

In his farewell speech, Obama parsed words when claiming, “Over the past eight years, no foreign terrorist organization has successfully executed an attack on our homeland that was directed from overseas.” Boy, that sure is a lot of qualifiers! So let’s look at the record.

In mid-2009, an Islamic radical opened fire at a military recruiting station in Little Rock, Arkansas, killing one and wounding one. A few months later at Ford Hood, U.S. Army Major Nidal Hassan (who the military knew had become radicalized but feared dealing with lest they be labeled Islamophobic) shot and killed 13 fellow soldiers, and wounded 30 more (for years Obama insisted this was not a terror attack, but “workplace violence”). In 2013, at the Boston Marathon, radicalized Islamic immigrants, the Tsarnaev brothers, set off bombs at the race, killing three and wounding hundreds more. Additional Islamic terror attacks in Orlando, San Bernardino, Chattanooga, Fort Lauderdale, Brooklyn, Queens and in Texas and Oklahoma left dozens more dead and hundreds more wounded.

Too bad Obama spent the last eight years minimizing and dismissing the threat from radical Islamists, insisting they don’t represent true Islam, while also arguing that the real threat comes from Christians, combat veterans, Tea Party members, pro-lifers, and American Patriots, a claim that somehow never materializes.

Civil Discourse/Crime

Under Obama, race relations are the worst they have been in decades thanks to his habit of blaming all opposition to his policies, as well as the deaths of black criminal thugs, on racism and the idea that conservatives, Republicans and Christians are cruel, hard-hearted and evil.

This was best captured by Obama’s comments at a 2014 rally in Michigan when he declared, “They’re not necessarily cold-hearted, they just sincerely believe that if we give more tax breaks to a fortunate few and we invest less in the middle class, and we reduce or eliminate the safety net for the poor and the sick, and if we cut food stamps and we cut Medicaid, and we let banks and polluters and credit card companies and insurers do only what is best for their bottom line without their responsibility to the rest of us, then somehow the economy will boom, and jobs and prosperity will trickle down to everybody.”

How could people who actually believe as he described be anything BUT evil? Of course, that is a slanderous, hyperbolic, lie-filled twisting of what conservatives believe, but Obama doesn’t care that he is damaging the civil discourse — he just cares about winning.

Obama also repeatedly blamed racism for the deaths of black criminal thugs like Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and Freddie Gray, just to name a few. Yet even Obama’s own Justice Department was forced to admit in the riot-inducing Michael Brown case (as in other cases) that the actions of police were justified. Not that it slowed their war on cops…

Since this string of high-profile shootings, riots have broken out in major cities and police, accused of being racists hunting innocent black men, have pulled back from pro-active policing. Unsurprisingly, violent crime has skyrocketed in cities like Chicago, Baltimore, Detroit, and St. Louis. Obama’s hometown of Chicago had nearly 800 murders and 4,300 shootings in 2016 alone.

Obama’s political rhetoric has been consistently incendiary, attributing policy differences not to honest disagreement, but to evil motives by his opponents. He routinely referred to Republicans as hijackers, terrorists, bomb-throwers, bigots, homophobes, xenophobes, racists, and so forth, and then has the gall to lament that civility has not improved under his watch. Guess what, Barry — when you tell your supporters to “get in [your critics] faces” and “bring a gun to a knife fight,” it’s hard to find common ground.

Scandals

Obama senior adviser Valerie Jarrett recently claimed Obama is proud of the fact that he went eight years without a major scandal, but to believe that takes a Master’s degree in willful self-deception.

Just consider a few: Operation Fast and Furious (running guns to Mexican drug cartels, who killed people with them; AG Eric Holder held in contempt of Congress), Benghazi (four Americans dead after Obama’s actions destabilized the country), the IRS targeting scandal (using the tax agency to harass and intimidate political opponents), secretly spying on every American, spying on the press, ObamaCare (giving waivers to political allies, unilaterally changing the law illegally), illegally trading traitor Private Bowe Bergdahl for five hardened terrorists, the GSA and Secret Service scandals (lavish taxpayer-funded drunken parties and hookers at posh resorts for government employees), the 2013 government shutdown (initiated by Obama; we later discovered he’d directed his agencies to make it as painful as possible), cronyism in the “stimulus” bill payouts, the Hillary Clinton email scandal (Obama knew about Hillary’s private server and lied, and in fact had emailed her himself using a fake name), the EPA dumping of millions of gallons of toxic sludge into the Colorado River… And even all these barely scratch the surface.

Democrat Party

There is one area where Obama’s legacy thrills us, and that is the destruction of the Democrat Party. In 2009, Obama walked into the Oval Office with super-majorities in both houses of Congress and the ability to shove any legislation down the GOP’s throat without them being able to do anything about it.

But Obama’s decision to force through radical progressive policies against the will of the American people was his undoing. In 2010 his Democrat Party suffered historic losses in the House and Senate, the worst losses in three-quarters of a century. In 2012, Obama became the only U.S. president to win re-election with fewer popular votes and Electoral College votes than his first election. In the 2014 midterms the Democrats again suffered huge losses, and Republicans regained control of the Senate as well. And in 2016, despite massively out-spending Republican Donald Trump; despite the media openly and actively working to destroy Trump; despite Obama actively campaigning for Hillary and telling us that with Hillary, though his name was not on the ballot, his policies were; and despite being well behind in the polls in the final weeks, Donald Trump won a YUGE electoral victory, an appropriate final nail in Obama’s coffin.

Under Obama, Democrats lost a net 68 House seats, 12 Senate seats, 10 governorships, and 949 state legislative seats. Under Obama, Democrats now control just 31 of 99 state legislative chambers, a loss of 29. In fact, the GOP “trifectas” (controlling both branches of the state legislature and the governor’s mansion) now number 25, compared to the Democrats’ five. The Republican Party is the strongest it has been since the 1920s.

This has destroyed the Democrats’ political “bench” from which to recruit new leaders, and they go into the next election trying to figure out how to win with a motley crew of old, white, wealthy Northeastern progressives (Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, etc.) in a country that is solidly populist and center-right. This will be an uphill climb for a party that, after eight years of Obama, faces a country where nearly two-thirds say we are on the wrong track.

It’s clear Obama is desperate to secure his legacy as a transformative, consequential president; a progressive Reagan, if you will. Yet most of his policies never gained majority support from the American people, with many of his actions taken with “a phone and a pen” and without the approval of Congress and therefore without the force of constitutional law. As a result his “legacy” might as well be written on wet toilet paper. President Trump can, and has promised to, reverse nearly every major Obama policy, and the stellar, accomplished cabinet nominees that he has put together shows he means to do just that.

After eight years, the Obama legacy will be little more than a stain to be washed away, leaving lofty sounding but vacuous speeches (the only thing he excelled at) behind as a testament to his ultimate fecklessness. In 2013, Obama taunted and mocked Republicans as he shoved through his radical agenda, telling them, “You don’t like a particular policy or a particular president? Then argue for your position. Go out there and win an election!”

Guess what, Barry? Republicans did just that. The GOP is now in solid control of the country at the federal and state level, determined to undo the damage you’ve done.

Don’t let the door hit you on the way out!