Be thankful for Obama's broken promises

Victor Davis Hanson:

Given the recent arrests of several jihadist plotters, we can be thankful that Obama did not, as once promised in various early manifestations, end renditions, wiretaps, intercepts, and the Patriot Act ("shoddy and dangerous"). So far he has not closed Gitmo; and it does not seem that he will do so within the promised year. Then 95 percent of the public was promised either no new taxes or a tax credit; that now seems quite impossible, given the vast new spending proposals and commensurate $2 trillion annual deficit. Given federal shortfalls, we have already seen massive new state income taxes and higher user taxes at the local level; and the crushing deficits will mean higher income or payroll taxes, or else a new value-added tax; the latter would raise taxes on everyone at rates heretofore unknown.

Meanwhile, the health-care bill has gone from a public plan to a public-option plan to no one quite knows what, when, or if — other than if it's passed, taxes will soar there too. No need to go into depth on the sensational promises of new transparency — not when the NEA is trying to run a ministry of correct art, a government website wants the addresses of "fishy" opponents, bills are not posted as promised, and town-hall dissidents are demonized as a Nazi-like mob and, by administration supporters, as racist. On the foreign front, in Iraq we have seen not the Obama "combat brigades out by March 2008" plan, but rather the Petraeus plan. And the grand talk of October reengagement with Iran was predicated, as we know now, on suppressing intelligence estimates of a second nuclear facility whose disclosure would have rendered inoperative the always suspect 2007 "no bomb" National Intelligence Estimate on Iran.

Bottom line? It would have been a lot simpler just to have told the truth, and now to adhere to the truth, rather than all this deceptive hope-and-change hocus-pocus.