UK Conservative Daniel Hannan has a wake up call of sorts on Obama

A little over a year ago, Consevative MEP Daniel Hannan became a bit of a celebrity here in the US after a video of him blasting Prime Minister Gordon Brown during a session of the European Parliament went viral. Many of us stateside marveled at Hannan’s bold critique, seeing as that so few politicos here in the US have the brass ones to take on the ‘leader’ of this country in a way that Hannan was his.

There was only one problem, though, at the time, as some of our across-the-pond allies pointed out: Hannan was a big supporter of Barack Obama. Even with knowing that UK conservatives aren’t 100% like US conservatives, it was still a shock to many of us that he could support a candidate who was more a radical rock star who sounded like a Sunday morning “progressive” preacher/healer than a so-called “reformer.”

Well, Hannan has started to wake up some to the phony that was and is Barack Obama – even if he prefaces it with Obama’s favorite fallback excuse “Bbbbut Bush”:

I was wrong. Not that Obama is without his good points, obviously. His commitment to school choice is unfeigned. His foreign policy has been a jolly sight cheaper than McCain’s would have been. The election of a mixed-race president who opposed the Iraq war has made the USA slightly more popular.

None of these advantages, however, can make up for the single most important fact of Obama’s presidency, namely that the federal government is 30 per cent larger than it was two years ago.

This is not entirely Obama’s fault, of course. The credit crunch occurred during the dying days of the Bush administration, and it was the 43rd president who began the baleful policy of bail-outs and pork-barrel stimulus packages. But it was Obama who massively extended that policy against united Republican opposition. It was he who chose, in defiance of public opinion, to establish a state-run healthcare system. It was he who presumed to tell private sector employees what they could earn, he who adopted the asinine cap-and-trade rules, and he who re-federalised social security, thereby reversing the single most beneficial reform of the Clinton years.

These errors are not random. They amount to a comprehensive strategy of Europeanisation: Euro-carbon taxes, Euro-disarmament, Euro-healthcare, Euro-welfare, Euro-spending levels, Euro-tax levels and, inevitably, Euro-unemployment levels. Any American reader who wants to know where Obamification will lead should spend a week with me in the European Parliament. I’m working in your future and, believe me, you won’t like it.

Unsurprisingly, given his enthusiasm for corporatism at home, Obama is an unqualified supporter of the EU. “In my view there’s no Old Europe or New Europe,” he announced at his very first overseas summit, silkily repudiating Donald Rumsfelt’s distinction. “There is a united Europe. I believe in a strong Europe, and a strong European Union, and my administration is committed to doing everything we can to support you.”

Read the whole thing as Hannan blasts Obama on the foreign policy front as well.

While I’m glad to see he’s experiencing a wake up call regarding our celebrity President, I have to ask: Where the hell was he the two years Obama was campaigning for the position? Numerous respected conservatives warned that Obama would be exactly the kind of President he has been: A radical liberal who doesn’t believe he’s a citizen of America but instead a ‘citizen of the world,’ one who doesn’t believe in American exceptionalism in any way, and one who will willingly sacrifice longtime alliances with countries like the UK and Israel as part of the process of extending an “open hand” to Islamofascistic countries like Iran who want to blow us and allies like Israel and the UK off the map.

Don’t know if this phrase originated here or there, but if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and talks like a duck, it usually is a duck. And let’s hope that the more people stateside and abroad wake up to this President’s dangerous agenda for America that next year he will be a lame duck President in the traditional sense of the term. Hey, the guy has said himself he’d rather be a “one-term” President who “gets a lot done” than a two-term President who gets very little done. Problem is, he already thinks “too little” has been done, while the rest of the country is coming to the conclusion that he – and the Democrats in Congress – has/have done way too much.

I’ll take that one term.

Oh, and welcome to our world, Mr. Hannan.