A Look Back at 2014

By Ron Hart, Op-Ed Contributor Tuesday, December 30, 2014

Ron Hart is a syndicated columnist and humorist.

Each year I get requests from readers on my year-in-review column. But I am going to do one anyway.

With another record-setting year, Peyton Manning has again proven himself the best quarterback of all time. He has endured, and is closing in on age 40 with no signs of slowing. He also has the distinction of being the only active player drafted for both the NFL and the Vietnam War.
The owner of the L.A. Clippers, Donald Sterling, was forced to sell his team because of illegally recorded and benign racial comments he made to his mistress in the sanctity of his and his wife's home. He was subjected to the harshest punishment administered by the NBA: being forced to take on a less hot mistress.
By ratcheting up the race baiting, Obama solidified his cred with blacks. Most never believed he was half white until they saw him drinking a Michelob Ultra.
President Obama also DJ-ed a dance party for his daughters in the White House. If he does that like he governs, he solicits requests, totally ignores them, and plays only what he likes.
Relations with Cuba took the first steps toward normalization this year. Cuba wants to start recruiting college graduates in engineering, business and medicine to come there. In more bad news for liberal arts majors, even a broken-down, socialist country can't bring itself to hire art history majors.
Vladimir Putin continued to defy Obama and run roughshod over the world. Obama did administer the toughest sanctions he can: a sternly worded letter with the veiled threat of perhaps disabling Putin's Tinder account.
The Russian Olympics were so important that we sent Joe Biden. He made an impassioned speech saying that Democrats will not rest until all biathletes can marry.
Joe Biden has said he will announce whether he will run for president in the spring or summer, whichever comes first. If he gets out of politics, he can always do TV spots for local car dealers.
Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton lead all polls to be our next president. It is so different from the 1990's, when North Korea was making veiled threats against America, we were fighting in Iraq, Russia was falling apart, and Bill Cosby was the most talked about comic.
It seems Obama will put his presidential library in Illinois, which is the perfect state for it. The current governor rides around in a car whose license plates could have been made by five previous governors. Illinois limits politicians to four terms: two in office and two in prison.
Chicago decided to name a new high school after President Obama. It will start out with great expectations and then exceed its budget. It will have an arrogant student government unable to govern. But on the bright side, the golf team will keep getting better.
Hillary Clinton had a disappointing book tour attempting the compulsory burnishing of her legacy as Secretary of State. In the book, she was supposed to outline her successes. You how we Americans like the suspense of a mystery revealed.
In its never-ending attempt to divide the country by race and gender, our government did a study in 2014 that concluded hurricanes named after women did more damage because people felt less threatened by a woman's name and don't take precautions. In reality, it's probably because female-named storms stay around longer because they want to cuddle. No consideration was given to the fact that female-named hurricanes at least clean up after themselves.
Even the doting press complained that the Obama administration is the least accessible and least transparent in history. It masterfully uses social media to manipulate the voters and press. It's the press' fault. When they asked, for six years, for IRS targeting emails, Benghazi cover-up documents or ObamaCare sign-up numbers, the administration sent them an adorable cat video.
Obama continued to "de-friend" Israel, seeming to blame our ally for more of the problems in the Middle East. But don't worry; the administration has a plan. If Israel is attacked, they plan to blame it on a Mel Gibson video.
ObamaCare continued to stumble, raising health care costs and creating chaos. Democrats were willing to take over 1/7th of our economy to provide maybe 2 million Americans (out of our 315 million-plus population) subsidized health care they probably could have gotten from Medicaid anyway. The number of people who actually signed up cannot be determined, since the data were kept on the ObamaCare website.