Do I Worry Too Much?

Occasionally I wonder if I'm too caught up in the anti-Obama hype from Conservative pundits. Sure, he had all those problems I addressed during the campaign, but once he became President, didn't he, wouldn't he, pretty much run the country like Bush did, with some Liberal policies tossed in? Don't cynics always claim it doesn't matter who gets elected?

Then I read a column such as Mike Gallagher's, which delineates just what's happened in the first 100 days of the Obama presidency (some of my own observations are tossed in):

• Obama goes to Europe and the Middle East, bowing and scraping and apologizing for the United States of America. Even so, he gets no offers from anyone to help in Afghanistan and a stout nein to the idea of implementing his economic policies in their own countries.
• His friendly encounter with anti-America dictator Hugo Chavez provides a photo op for Chavez. Obama listens to anti-American rants at an international summit without ever defending his country.
• The Obama administration forces the CEO of General Motors to resign, and Obama's Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner says the same thing could happen to executives of banks who took bail out money. The arbitrary conversion of the government's preferred stock in banks to common stock -- mentioned as a possibility by Obama -- essentially gives ownership of the banks to the federal government. That is, they would be nationalized. [Edit: It was not Obama himself who mentioned the stock conversion, but "White House and Treasury officials" according to the New York Times.]
• Obama's Homeland Security Secretary issues a memo claiming that military veterans and those who believe in state's rights or who are pro-life should be considered a possible terrorist threat.
• That same HS Secretary, Janet Napolitano, later claims -- as qualified for her post as anyone else in this administration -- that the 9/11 terrorists came across the Canadian border.
• Against the advice of his own CIA director, and four former CIA directors, Obama releases memos detailing interrogation techniques used by the CIA, providing information to our enemies.
• Obama first says that Bush administration officials will not be prosecuted for their parts in waterboarding, then a week later says they may be prosecuted. (Political pressure from the moveon.org and the Daily Kos crowd? Or mere wishy-washiness? This is blatant political revenge. A good policy for a President? And when a Republican is President again, maybe Obama should be prosecuted for revealing national secrets to the enemy.)
• Obama and his Democrat Congress have already quadrupled the budget deficit. Through 2008, President Bush increased the federal debt by $2.5 trillion, for which he has been criticized from all quarters. Obama proposes to add $4.9 trillion to that amount.

This is in just 100 days. I'm not sure those of us who opposed Obama during the campaign worried enough.