The election of Barack Obama to the presidency of the United States was a calamitous mistake. It could be the predominant factor in the collapse of our Western civilization, which seems to be underway and gathering pace.

It was a mistake made by millions of people who meant well. 

Well-meaning, unaccompanied by intelligent thinking about consequences, is all too often the cause of calamity.

Matt Patterson, in an article at Canada Free Press, calls Obama “the affirmative action president”. Here’s part of what he writes:

Years from now, historians [if there will be any- JB] may regard the 2008 election of Barack Obama as an inscrutable and disturbing phenomenon, a baffling breed of mass hysteria … How, they will wonder, did a man so devoid of professional accomplishment beguile so many into thinking he could manage the world’s largest economy, direct the world’s most powerful military, execute the world’s most consequential job?

Imagine a future historian examining Obama’s pre-presidential life: ushered into and through the Ivy League despite unremarkable grades and test scores along the way; a cushy non-job as a “community organizer”; a brief career as a state legislator devoid of legislative achievement (and in fact nearly devoid of his attention, so often did he vote “present”); and finally an unaccomplished single term in United States Senate, the entirety of which was devoted to his presidential ambitions. He left no academic legacy in academia, authored no signature legislation as legislator.

And then there is the matter of his troubling associations: the white-hating, America-loathing preacher who for decades served as Obama’s “spiritual mentor”; a real-life, actual terrorist who served as Obama’s colleague and political sponsor.

What is more, and never as far as we know pointed out: he does not seem to have had any friends or associates who were not Marxists and/or terrorists and/or America-haters.   

It is easy to imagine a future historian looking at it all and asking: how on Earth was such a man elected president?

Not content to wait for history, the incomparable Norman Podhoretz addressed the question recently in the Wall Street Journal:

“To be sure, no white candidate who had close associations with an outspoken hater of America like Jeremiah Wright and an unrepentant terrorist like Bill Ayers would have lasted a single day. But because Mr. Obama was black, and therefore entitled in the eyes of liberaldom to have hung out with protesters against various American injustices, even if they were a bit extreme, he was given a pass.”

Let that sink in: Obama was given a pass — held to a lower standard — because of the color of his skin. …

Podhoretz puts his finger, I think, on the animating pulse of the Obama phenomenon — affirmative action. Not in the legal sense, of course. But certainly in the motivating sentiment behind all affirmative action laws and regulations, which are designed primarily to make white people, and especially white liberals, feel good about themselves.

Unfortunately, minorities often suffer so that whites can pat themselves on the back. …

Affirmative action is a racist policy, he rightly says. He goes on:

Yes, racist. Holding someone to a separate standard merely because of the color of his skin — that’s affirmative action in a nutshell, and if that isn’t racism, then nothing is. And that is what America did to Obama. …

And he concludes:

Our president is a small and small-minded man, with neither the temperament nor the intellect to handle his job. When you understand that, and only when you understand that, will the current erosion of liberty and prosperity make sense.

Add his deliberate weakening of America as a power in the world – a contributary cause of numerous wars, uprisings, civil wars, persecutions, and massacres happening now – to appreciate the size of the mistake those American voters made who elected Obama in order merely to feel good about themselves.