This is all just too much fun. The numbers are amazing in this article by John Podhoretz and Noah C. Rothman — here is their opening:
In 1723, Christopher Wren was buried in St. Paul’s, the magnificent cathedral he had rebuilt following a devastating fire in London. His epitaph concludes with the Latin phrase Si monumentum requiris, circumspice—“If his monument you seek, look around.” In 2017, Barack Obama will leave the White House after eight years during which he presided over the Democratic Party. If you wish to see his monument, look around.
Look to your right and you will see that his designated successor lost her bid for the presidency to a man Obama himself had not only campaigned against ferociously but declared unfit to hold the nuclear codes. Look to your left and you will see the news stories detailing the possible strategies for the repeal and the replacement of the president’s signature piece of legislation, Obamacare. Then look up and down at the partisan cathedral he helped to rebuild. Its benches are, as Shakespeare said of tree branches in winter, “bare, ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.” While he was the one with the nuclear codes, the Democratic Party has been hit with a neutron bomb. And on the bomb’s nose, written like the “Dear John” message on the nuke in Dr. Strangelove, were the words: “Barack Obama was here.”
The Democratic Party cathedral stands, to be sure, as structures will after a neutron-bomb attack. But it has been denuded of its priestly caste—the elected officials who were teeming within it when Barack Obama was first elected in 2008 and had every reason to believe they would move inexorably from the back rows of American politics to the front. There are some 8,000 elected officials in the United States at the state and federal levels. Between 2009, when Barack Obama took office, and today, as he prepares to retire from it, more than 1,100 Democratic elected officials lost their jobs to Republicans. That number is unprecedented.
Read more: Commentary Magazine
Image credit: www.familysecuritymatters.org.
