FROM THE WORST PRESIDENT TO THE WORST EX-PRESIDENT

It must be a bummer to be smugly confident you are “on the right side of history,” only to have history dump you by the side of the road in the middle of nowhere and drive off with Donald Trump.

History is a record of things that happened, and how people responded to them. It’s important to study history, because if you don’t know where you’ve been, you don’t know where you are, or where you’re going.

Though history is about the past, careful students can find within it important lessons for the present and future. Human nature hasn’t changed much in roughly 10,000 years of recorded history.

People tend to make essentially the same mistakes, for pretty much the same reasons, with drearily similar results.

But the notion history is some kind of mystical force is Marxist claptrap.

“Progressives” obsess about making history, but put little effort into studying it. If they had, they’d realize there is precious little new ground to break. In fact, if “progressives” studied history, they wouldn’t be “progressives” at all.

“By reading (history), you learn through others’ experiences, generally a better way to do business, especially in our line of work where the consequences of incompetence are so final for young men,” Marine Gen. James Mattis wrote to a colleague in 2004.

“Thanks to my reading, I have never been caught flat-footed by any situation, never at a loss for how any problem has been addressed (successfully or unsuccessfully) before. “It doesn’t give me all the answers, but it lights what is often a dark path ahead.

“Ultimately, a real understanding of history means that we face NOTHING new under the sun,” Mattis concluded.

Soon to be former President Barack Obama is about to learn how ephemeral his “transformational” presidency has been. He will be remembered, but not nearly as fondly as he imagines, nor for as long as he expects.

Having surpassed Jimmy Carter as the worst president in American history, Mr. Obama evidently intends to eclipse him as the worst ex-president as well.

Mr. Obama has leased a $5.9 million mansion in the Kalorama section of Washington D.C. to live in after he leaves the White House.

This is in addition to an $8.7 million oceanfront estate in Hawaii, a multi-million dollar home in Rancho Mirage, California, and a $3 million home in the Hyde Park neighborhood in Chicago, where the Obamas lived before he became president.

Mr. Obama earned $200,000 a year for the last eight years, had free room and board, no commuting expenses.  He gets royalties from two ghost-written books, but they haven’t sold well for years. (One ranks 1,199 on Amazon. The other ranks 1,341.)

Do you think any “mainstream” journalist will wonder where he gets the money to buy and maintain all these mansions?

Nah.

His lease of the Kalorama mansion indicates he plans to hover over the Trump presidency like the ghost of Christmas Past, kibitzing The Donald’s every move.

This is bad form for an ex-president, but good news for the president-elect. Mr. Obama evidently doesn’t realize – or his ego won’t permit him to admit – that at noon on Jan. 20, his power to influence people will diminish sharply, but his ability to irritate them won’t decline much at all.

The longer Zero lingers as kibitzer-in-chief, the more difficult it will be for new leadership to emerge in the Democrat Party. Hillary Clinton too is likely to seek attention well after her expiration date (which was Nov. 8), which is also good news for Mr. Trump.  FYI, Mrs. Piaps was selected by leftie GQ Magazine as “One of America’s Least Influential People of 2016.”

The relationship between Zero and Hillary will be fascinating. They’ve never liked each other. Neither is willing to (or may be capable of) admitting a mistake. Everything that goes wrong has to be someone else’s fault. They’ve already started pointing fingers at each other.

Obama’s legacy will be ephemeral in large part because he was too lazy to try to get laws passed. He’ll discover that what can be “transformed” by executive order can be undone by executive order.

In November of 1960, Jack Kennedy was just barely elected president, probably wouldn’t have been were it not for massive vote fraud in Chicago and Texas. A little more than a year later, he was one of the most popular presidents ever.

Donald Trump has the opportunity to be as popular. He can kick start a moribund economy just by repealing Obama-era regulations that cripple it. And he is fortunate to be assuming office at the beginning of the fracking revolution, which has the potential of transforming our economy for good as much as did the discovery of oil at Spindletop, which jump started the conversion of our economy from coal to oil.

Trump is the greatest showman since P.T. Barnum. The presidency is a bully pulpit, Teddy Roosevelt said. Few know how to use that pulpit better than Trump. I suspect his first 100 days in office will be the most explosive since the term was coined to describe the start of the New Deal.

After that 100 days, fewer and fewer will care what Barack Obama thinks about anything.

Jack Kelly is a former Marine and Green Beret, and was the Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Air Force during the Reagan Administration.  He is the national security writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.