brigette-russell2Anyone who reads my blog will know that I did not support Barack Obama in last year’s election, but that I was gracious in defeat and more restrained in my criticism than many conservative voices online.  I was willing to give him his hundred days.  Now he’s had them.

Fiscally, the Obama presidency has been a disaster, but that’s only partially Mr. Obama’s fault.  He could not have spent those ungodly sums of taxpayer money without Congress, after all. It took Harry and Nancy and Barney and all the other big spenders on Capitol Hill to pass the spending bills, but President Obama signed them all too gladly,  and so he bears part of the blame.

On the military front, Mr. Obama handled the Somali pirate affair with cool competence.  To his credit, he recognizes that the U.S. cannot simply pull our troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan as many of his supporters want, but that we must finish what we started, even though he wasn’t the one who started it.

In diplomacy, however, he has been less successful.  I’m not talking about trivialities like giving the British P.M. an unimpressive gift, but about the impression he gives of being more respectful — more deferential, even — to foreign leaders who have not been staunch allies of the U.S. than to those who have.  If he was cool and polite but no more to all foreign heads of state, then it would be no big deal that this was how he treated Gordon Brown. But he was positively jovial with Hugo Chavez, gracious in the face of anti-American rudeness from Daniel Ortega, and he actually bowed to the Saudi king.

President Obama’s Cabinet appointments have been shockingly disappointing. A staggering number of appointees had not paid their income taxes and had to withdraw from consideration on this account. Ironically, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, whose job includes heading up the IRS, did not have to withdraw, and became head tax-collector after not being able to figure out how to pay his own. Other members of the administration weren’t kept out by tax problems, but Obama may be wishing now they had been.

I speak, most notably, of Janet Napolitano, who thinks the 9/11 terrorists got into the U.S. through Canada, and believes crazy right-wingers and U.S. military veterans are a major threat to our homeland security.

And then there’s Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who was so unprepared for her visit to the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City that she asked who did the painting of the Virgin, and who recently replied to a question about U.S. policy toward Venezuela and other Latin American countries hostile to the U.S.:

Let’s put ideology aside; that is so yesterday.

Totally.  Like, so yesterday. We don’t, like, actually believe in anything.  We’re, you know, like, postmodern.  Not patriotic.  Patriotic is really, really so yesterday.

And speaking of yesterday — somebody in the administration (not the president himself, of course, because I really can’t believe a guy who’s as smart as Obama would have signed off on something  as asinine as this) gave thousands of terrified New Yorkers a little homeland security drill when Air Force One buzzed the Statue of Liberty for a photo op.  Not exactly how the president would have liked to wrap up his first 100 days, I’m sure.

But all levity aside,Mr. Obama has set an ominous and disturbing precedent in his treatment of the previous administration.  Intimations of criminal prosecutions of members of the Bush Administration abound, and while the president has not said definitively whether he will or won’t prosecute, even the threat of prosecutions is disturbing.

In this country, it has not been our practice to follow a partisan change in power with a witch hunt against the party out of power.  When John Adams and the Federalists stepped aside and made way for Thomas Jefferson and the Republicans in 1801, and the new administration carried on the business of governing without personal attacks on the faction it had replaced, it was a momentous occasion in American history, setting a felicitous precedent — one that appears, sadly, about to be overturned.