Krugman believes that the president has “[changed] the country for the better,” despite bitter opposition from the GOP in Congress and people from the left, right and center on the outside.

Krugman believes that the supposedly positive incremental changes the president has made are better than nothing. “No president gets to do everything his supporters expected him to,” he writes.

Reading Krugman’s assessment of the Obama presidency, one must assume that the president’s hands are tied on some issues, that he sometimes necessarily stands by, helpless to do anything while the machinery of the state churns onward, unrelenting. But the policies the Obama administration has carried out have not passed under his nose unnoticed. He is not ignorant of some of the most egregious civil liberties violations his government has perpetrated. It is true that the president is merely one man, but he is a man who stands atop a structure that relies on violence and pain to continue its existence, and he took the position knowing full well that that was the case.

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A popular conservative news site writes, “we would do well to also remember the choice he made that became the spark, spirit and driving force of his vision for the country.” Ah don’t the rhetoric and buzzwords fill you with a sense of patriotism? If it doesn’t you probably hate America…or something.

Contrary to the right-wingers ahistorical love affair with the Reagan presidency, he didn’t, “build his politics around a profound respect for the honest, hardworking men and women who made America work”…whatever that means. He was a big government, war-mongering, statist with little concern for anyone not entrenched in his administration.

Reagan raised taxes 11 times. He tripled the federal budget deficit. Overall federal spending ballooned. He bailed out the absurdly regressive social security program. He doubled the size of the department of education, increased farm programs by 140%, and more that doubled foreign aid. Perhaps worst of all, he funded the rise of Osama bin Laden.

What kind of small government hero is this?

Why are so-called “limited government conservatives” praising one of the most statist presidents in recent memory? Perhaps it’s because they are simply ignoring history and buying into the propaganda. On the other hand, it might be that conservatism isn’t actually all that dedicated to freedom and liberty like it says it is. Maybe it’s all just rhetoric. Maybe the conservatives are just as tyrannical and statist as liberals. Just maybe.

Writing in response to Reagan’s fetish for military spending, that has plagued the Republican Party since, Murray Rothbard wrote, “How can we reconcile the plea for individual liberty, the free market, and the minimizing of government with the call for global confrontation and increased power to the FBI and the Pentagon?”

The answer is we can’t. There is no reconciliation. It’s the conservative contradiction.

Of course, we can’t be that surprised modern conservatives ignore this contradiction and buy into the “war on terror” rhetoric and other such statist nonsense. After all, they are caught up in the game of politics. But how on Earth do libertarians get caught up in the Reagan fetishizing?!

In an attempt to find common ground or work with the right, libertarians have often fallen into the trap of Reagan worship; somehow spinning a few select quotes into evidence that Reagan was a libertarian. Does the above track record look remotely libertarian to you? If you have the slightest knowledge of the work of Spooner, Mises, Hayek, Rothbard and others you’ll quickly realize the Reagan presidency was the total opposite of libertarianism. It ought to be frowned upon by any principled libertarian.

Fusionism is a strategy doomed to fail. Libertarians aren’t just “republicans who smoke pot.” Libertarianism is a radical, principled, anti-political, anti-conservative ideology. While conservatism glorifies tradition, stagnation, and the past, libertarianism embraces dynamism, tolerance, an open culture, and innovation. Rightly understood, it belongs on the left, like its classically liberal forerunners.

Trying to claim Reagan as one of ours, or trying to moderate our radical-ness to appeal to the right leads to the disintegration of truly libertarian principles. We would not do well to remember Reagan’s speech. It’s imperative that we completely forget it, the entire Reagan presidency, and conservatism as a whole if we want a free future.

“Despite bitter opposition, despite having come close to self-inflicted disaster, Obama has emerged as one of the most consequential and, yes, successful presidents in American history,” Krugman writes. His evidence? Health reform doesn’t suck nearly as much as it might, economic reform didn’t cripple nearly as many big cities as predicted, and most bafflingly, the Obama administration’s environmental policy is, in Krugman’s opinion, doing just fine and dandy, thank you very much.

Never mind that Detroit lies in ruins; that healthcare reform provides a larger conduit for profits and unfair advantages for health insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies than at any point under the previous “free market” system; that one of Obama’s main environmental goals is construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, intentionally holding the ecosystem of the entire Midwestern United States hostage so that TransCanada can make money on the dirtiest form of fossil fuel known to humanity.

This is to say nothing of the Obama administration’s deleterious foreign policy; a domestic surveillance program that disregards every privacy law up to and including the constitutional ban on unwarranted search and seizure; a military-to-police equipment pipeline that gives local law enforcement the illusion of greater power and impunity to do worse and worse things to individuals.

Let’s not forget that it’s the Obama administration’s Justice Department that spied on the Associated Press. It’s the Obama administration that killed Anwar and Abdulrahman al-Awlaki with drones. Chelsea Manning languishes in prison for leaking information to Wikileaks under the Obama administration’s watch.

Krugman believes that the president has “[changed] the country for the better,” despite bitter opposition from the GOP in Congress and people from the left, right and center on the outside.

Krugman believes that the supposedly positive incremental changes the president has made are better than nothing. “No president gets to do everything his supporters expected him to,” he writes.

Reading Krugman’s assessment of the Obama presidency, one must assume that the president’s hands are tied on some issues, that he sometimes necessarily stands by, helpless to do anything while the machinery of the state churns onward, unrelenting. But the policies the Obama administration has carried out have not passed under his nose unnoticed. He is not ignorant of some of the most egregious civil liberties violations his government has perpetrated. It is true that the president is merely one man, but he is a man who stands atop a structure that relies on violence and pain to continue its existence, and he took the position knowing full well that that was the case.

The incremental, superficial change that Krugman lauds is just new window dressing on a house awaiting demolition. To be clear: There is nothing good about the Obama presidency; or any presidency, for that matter. It is the office itself that poisons what might have otherwise been decent people.