The Girl Next Door by Dan Bubalo

Never send the village idiot to a MENSA Convention.

That’s an apt sentiment to describe what our country has endured and what the world has witnessed for nearly four years of the Obama Debacle, a haphazard grab-bag of deceitful sound bites and self-promotion that turned out to be little more than a tutorial symbolizing the difference between marketing and managing.

…a haphazard grab-bag of deceitful sound bites and self-promotion that turned out to be little more than a tutorial symbolizing the difference between marketing and managing.

The floundering machinations of what will be remembered as a One Term Wonder serve as a disturbing reminder that style provides temporary camouflage and can be used as a deflection device from the demands of reality, but should not be confused as a surrogate for substance.

To the incorrigibly blind believers and advocates of the Left, Obama will always be remembered as a beacon when to the world at large he’s regarded as little more than a low wattage refrigerator bulb. Emotions trump facts for people with hyper-mode zealotry and do so to their detriment because rabid ardor is not conducive to rational thinking in a world of fairies and gnomes. Harsh realities, however, led more reasoned people to a justifiable skepticism once they realized they were sold nothing more than Jack’s beanstalk beans.

The sales and marketing department of the administration has never taken its foot off the gas since the campaign of 2007-08, so instead of the country benefiting from cogent and practical policies that could have bolstered the economy we were presented instead a never-ending bombardment of promotional dreck meant specifically to cover the considerable foibles and weaknesses that comprise the man and his regime. Nobody bargained for a gadfly-bon vivant; they thought they were electing a leader with a vision.

It turns out he had a vision all right, and that was to kneecap the country financially and buckle its underpinnings from within with unconscionable regulation in order to bring the country into a sordid equilibrium with the rest of the world. As things worsened from policy failures, however, the greater the onslaught of puff-pieces, from magazine covers, to a stories about his Amazonian wife looking out for our caloric welfare, to stories about golf, celebrity friends, and endless footage of him jogging up and down the stairway of his personal air-taxi and onto another dais to emphasize his youthful exuberance.

Unfortunately, youthfulness meant a shocking amount of naivete and impractical dream-sequence ideas, and the enthusiasm morphed into a maniacally driven ideologue with no management skills or experience and no inclination to learn or “unlearn” for the purpose of promoting pragmatic solutions. Failure to identify or admit to the nefarious intentions of the Arab Spring has imperiled the Middle East and ceded an unimaginable geographic stronghold for worldwide terror; an effort to appease environmentalists and curry favor to Arabs who share with him a desire to see America weakened has left us without an energy policy and vulnerable to the whims of racketeers in OPEC; an obsession with controlling business as an income producer for his grand scheme has strangled growth, productivity, and innovation.


When he spoke like an eighth grader about cutting the deficit in half along with unemployment he was either delusional and woefully uninformed or else running a misdirect play as he readied the pig for slaughter, yet he was left unchecked by the media and Congress to burnish his façade. He was either in collusion with his attorney general to foment criminal activity in Mexico with the sophomoric Fast and Furious, or too ignorant and disorganized to recognize what went on beneath his very nose, and the same could be said of his doppelganger in the Department of Justice. Finally, when it became clear that numerous security leaks conveniently designed to promote a false reputation of toughness and international brilliance were coming directly from the White House, the pattern of illegal disclosures ceased with the speed in which they inexplicably started appearing.

The EPA is no longer a watch dog organization, but instead another piece on Obama’s chessboard, allowed to regulate at will and create ex post facto law at its discretion, all with the idea of creating more government control with a cult-like commitment. The presumptuousness, of course, is that all business is bad, all business is out to pollute, and all businesses care nothing about the environment, an utterly fallacious premise, but one that resonates with this White House and one that strengthens an incestuous symbiotic relationship intended to weaken our country with higher energy prices. The question is “why?”

Energy prices rise and fall due to three things: manipulation of supply, the reality of demand, and emotionally driven speculation, and in what can only be interpreted as an effort to strengthen the hands of the Arab world, Obama leveraged the BP Oil Spill and hysterical assertions by environmentalists to shut down coastal and gulf coast drilling and avoid a joint venture pipeline with Canada that would clearly modify the three aforementioned influences on fluctuation and stability.

The following vignette is universal and involves the proverbial girl next door. You knew her as a kid, you might have known her older brother, or maybe you regarded her in a sisterly way because she played with your siblings. You watched her grow up but never really paid close attention to her, never regarded her as any more than a casual acquaintance, and gave her no consideration because you found so many other things and other people more interesting. Then one day she walks into a room and you wonder how foolish you could have been, for she embodied an ideal beyond your wildest dreams.

That brings me to Canada. “O Canada.”

Canada has arguably been our most loyal and trusted ally, a neighbor with enforceable laws and impeccable standards, one who doesn’t threaten our country in the myriad of ways of Mexico, and yet we have taken them for granted. Canada has the third most proven oil reserves in the world, and complements our role as world leader in production of natural gas with a significant role of its own. Canadians enjoy rich traditions similar to ours, believe in a non-radical common good, are not an incubator or foothold for worldwide terrorist organizations, and are quite literally the girl next door we have ignored. For reasons that remain unclear, we have felt the need to cultivate other international relationships but never paid her any mind even though she’s been sitting there all along.

Their proximity to us make them the ideal partner, the one with whom we should improve strategic alliances in energy and defense and do so with unwavering trust, and yet we willingly remain marionettes to the puppet masters in the Middle East, occasionally even bending to kiss their rings.

And there she is next door. Just waiting for the phone to ring.