what are barack obama's flaws?

so TRUMP is his fault now too

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/opinion/sunday/from-obama-to-trump.html?ref=todayspaper&_r=0

in a way though this idiot is right. if O hadn't burned captain combover so mercilessly at the white house correspondents' dinner all those years ago, maybe captain combover wouldn't have been as motivated to enter the ring?

that's a feature, not a bug

keep in mind he gets to do exactly the same thing, over and over again, a few months from now, when he endorses his successor and gets into the campaign

I agree that the next one will be worse.

http://theweek.com/articles/621947/why-ill-miss-obama

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/obama-waives-ban-on-aiding-regimes-that-use-child-soldiers/article/2536609

I would guess they have already been breaking that for a while given the involvement in Yemen.

really, giving a medal to Kissinger is admirably consistent

imho restricting the ability of the President to conduct foreign policy by legislating static lists of named countries is a stupid way of doing business and will produce exactly these results every time

It's so thoroughly bizarre to denounce Obama for his foreign policy when that's one of the incredible progressive highlights of his time in office. Do people not remember what our global reputation was when he took office?

I think he's been way worse on education policy and cybersecurity but there the bar for modern Presidenting is low to nonexistent

Libya and our involvement in the Arab Spring scream "progressive foreign policy" but I couldn't call it a success.

Obama has the best foreign policy of any American president in a loooong time, but that is a low bar. Also, he inherited a world in financial breakdown, which has made for a lot of upheaval these 8 years. He hasn't always handled that upheaval very well, and the drone program is a big blemish, but. Could have been a lot worse. Will be a lot worse, with either Clintons hawkishness or Trump/Sanders complete cluelessness at the helm.

unceasing drone war also progressive, tho in a different sense

http://i0.wp.com/www.ghostcultmag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/artificialbrain-800x800-400x400.jpg

http://i0.wp.com/www.ghostcultmag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/artificialbrain-800x800-400x400.jpg

I'm not the foaming Iraq-totally-has-WMDs-you-guys tool of the MIC that I was in 2003 but I don't believe the demands of statecraft in the foreseeable future are ever going to allow for a truly "progressive" foreign policy wherein everybody gets along except the bad guys and nobody ever has to be blown up

It's also important to recognize that intervention and adventuring are never going to have better than a coin flip chance of being even relatively successful at not making stuff worse; Obama did recognize this and by most accounts has done an excellent job keeping the US out of "stupid shit" where others have all been pressing for boots on the ground etc

we flipped the coin in libya, ukraine and syria

'It's also important to recognize that intervention and adventuring are never going to have better than a coin flip chance of being even relatively successful at not making stuff worse;'

This is obviously untrue.

relative to what is probably a question that needs answering there.

sub "proceeding idiotically from lies, hubris and bad intelligence" for "intervention and adventuring", and coin-flip odds look good

I don't believe the demands of statecraft in the foreseeable future are ever going to allow for a truly "progressive" foreign policy wherein everybody gets along except the bad guys and nobody ever has to be blown up

― bothan zulu (El Tomboto), Wednesday, May 11, 2016 6:13 AM (58 minutes ago)

don't think this is what we typically mean by "progressive foreign policy"

think he means "progressively worse"

pimps for mega-trade deals in commencement speeches

back in Deporter of Women and Children mode

http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-immigration-raids-20160512-snap-story.html

wtf is going on here

I think he's been a good president overall, would take a third term. Still something rubs me the wrong way about his hemmy-hawy answers to questions, like when he's trying to sound folksy and intellectual at the same time and his voice gets all caught up in his nose and jaw. I think he has a touch of the same "insincere" quality that Hillary has worse, and this may contribute to the right's dislike of him, though there are more obvious reasons why the right dislikes him. The only thing GWB was really any good at was seeming like himself.

late examples may also just be a sign of the fatigue of the presidency, perhaps a touch of mild depression or a feeling of having to go through the motions.

yes he seems increasingly more weary and beaten down with every shooting. which is kind of what I would want in a President. I do think he's been a great president. I am frustrated by the lack of progress in some respects but I think he's done what he could given how much internal opposition he faces on basically everything he tries to do, I've never seen anything like it.

i'm confused and upset by his immigration enforcement actions and the fucking drone strikes, i don't get how it squares with what he says he wants to achieve in the world

I think he sees himself as a logical centrist, and therefore drone strikes to him are a middle ground between sending troops in which could result in more deaths to both civilians and US troops; and doing nothing which, while keeping the US from being involved with directly killing civilians, will allow extremists to terrorize and kill civilians and others around the world

I don't think drone strikes and immigration enforcement are things he has to square!

But I think he would make an argument for it squaring with what he wants to achieve in the world, if he had too

yeah, the video that prompted my post was also very much in that "logical, reasonable middle ground" style, where he first bent every which way to assure the audience no one wanted to take their guns, then brought in an appeal to facts and data and science and an analogy about cars and various car-related policies (drivers' licenses, airbags, etc.), and finally expressed that a sensible regime could be created of letting all the hunters and sportsmen and self-defenders keep the guns they like while getting them out of the wrong hands. Hard to argue with, but a little bit lacking in feeling.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8TwRmX6zs4

If nothing else Obama is definitely the funniest president we've had in my lifetime

that event is the ur-moment of trump's candidacy; you can see him seething with resentment (he even starts rocking back and forth) as obama mocks him

I'd point it to the moment where Obama says, "all kidding aside, obviously we all know about your credentials and breadth of experience..." and the audience cracks up, clearly he's thinking "I'll show them all"

it gives a new literalness to he phrase 'politics of resentment'

sure he has flaws, but i still think he's probably the most 'normal' and certainly the most decent president we've had in a long time.

maybe this is an indictment of american democracy or just of the limits of my imagination, but i just can't see this country at its present state electing anyone better at the job than him.

oops, i had meant to share that with this article/link

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/03/us/politics/obama-after-dark-the-precious-hours-alone.html

yeah i liked that article a lot

oddly related to this line about the night: "it's smaller. it lets you think."

can you imagine 7 years with a maximum 5 hours of sleep a night? jesus.

is he the first president in decades who cares so much about the prose of speeches and actually writes many of those speeches himself?

probably -- i don't know much about carter, but i can't imagine him being quite so detail oriented.

obama's obviously brilliant, and a better writer than i am obviously, but he's not a great speechwriter IMO. when giving proper speeches, he seldom has the quality of pith, and i can't think of many phrases in his speeches that are particularly memorable. the phrase "the soft bigotry of low expectations" that some hack put in GWB's mouth is more memorable than anything BHO has said... it's got assonance, a nice rhythm, parallelism....

I forgot that in the first few years Reagan wrote many of the big speeches.

The clarity of the Jeremiah Wright kiss-off was a tonic.

horrifying revive

'decent' my ass

Morbius who are your top ten presidents

Dylan
Dylan
Dylan...

I want to be open to the idea that the approach taken with Al Qaeda and ISIS has been a calculation relative to the amount of death of suffering that's been possible. Maybe I should be, but I'm still not entirely convinced that the offensive approach taken ultimately results in more death and suffering than what is possible if they are left alone.

I guess that's true of the initial impulse to defend that city in Libya than initially got us into that conflict, regardless of what ended up happening.

I guess that's *also* true, I meant to say

horrifying revive

'decent' my ass

― helpless before THRILLARY (Dr Morbius), Sunday, July 3, 2016 10:36 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

jeez, what took you so long?