what are barack obama's flaws?

i don't think this is right, though. the problem was they expected clinton to win like everyone else. avoiding a stink from trump about the rigged election was prudent on that basis. if they had realistically expected trump to win, the calculus on giving him fodder would have been different.

In some ways it's comforting to know that everyone underestimated the collective stupidity of US voters, all the way to the top, and in other ways it's very frightening

oh no, barack obama failed to anticipate the nation electing a charlatan television reality show host

I still don't understand that thinking, but it doesn't matter -- too late.

especially as it's become more clear that clinton was behind many of the missteps

― k3vin k., 24. juni 2017 04:29 (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This is hardly true, and a fair bit of a cop out. The driving force behind Libya was France, for instance.

clinton was responsible for making foreign policy decisions for the u.s., not france

No, Obama was the commander in chief.

In some ways it's comforting to know that everyone underestimated the collective stupidity of US voters, all the way to the top, the electoral college, and in other ways it's very frightening

Also Fred B otm
And Alfred otm with the revive
Obama needed more deontology, slightly less utilitarianism

He was weak on foreign policy. Which really isn't the worst thing to be, in practice the alternative has been bluster and stupidity. But even if he led Hillary talk him into stupid decisions - which really wasn't what happened... - that's him being weak. He led France lead the US into Libya, with bad consequences, and he led Russia lead the US out of Syria, with pretty bad consequences as well. He was 'deliberative and careful', if you want to describe it in a positive way, but that led others to take the lead, and it's as bad an outcome as can be that Russia then decided to hack the US election, and he didn't know what to do...

But, I mean, he is the US president with the best foreign policy this millenium. By far... Foreign policy is complicated.

Obama's foreign policy was fine. Our presidents are elected by 200 million provincial townspeople who can't find where Fred B lives on a map so I'm very happy whenever we get one who doesn't start two wars he can't fucking finish.

xp FB otm

(Zing crashed as I posted that fwiw)

yeah he would probably have the shortest sentence in The Hague of recent presidents

maybe 30 years

I'm very happy whenever we get one who doesn't start two wars he can't fucking finish.

ah, FINISHING them is the key

not finishing the ones you inherited, less important

Fuck you, you predictable shit. You're from the "America shouldn't have any foreign policy" wing of the left, we all fucking know

ok oily but we arent going to look back in 10 years and be like this guy was actually only okay

j0rda not otm

Thanks, T. How does your ilk sleep? Humanity ends at the border, obviously.

remember, when the cogs like El T say "foreign policy," hear "global abbatoir"

at least they're not predictable, tho

Yeah, it's all about how you sleep, right? You'd be fine with every non-American dying horrifically, as long as you could wash your own hands of it.

go get under a drone, u babbler

Fuck you

tom relax jeez!

not sure what fred's HRC white knighting is all about, i didn't really dis her that hard or anything. there's tons of reporting out there that suggests she was one of the louder hawks in obama's ear during her time at state, and given that obama's decision-making style was nothing if not collaborative (a good thing!), it seems reasonable to point that out. though yes, ultimately the decision is his

Fuck off with that sexist 'white knight' bullshit, will you?

everybody so touchy this morning huh

From my perspective, Obama was collaborative with the people he invited to the room. He always invited someone who would disagree with him, and then try to accommodate them. Not convince them to come around to his position. That's probably his greatest flaw, as Alfred alluded to above

He deserves a lot of praise for Cuba and Iran, though, I forgot about that. I think my main problem with his foreign policy was mostly his slowness. He didn't have a guiding ideology, which is a fairly good thing. He wanted to be reactive and free and improvising, but he was just at times so slow that things spun out of control before he did anything. The part of that WaPo story of them trying to figure out a response to the Russians is a comedy of errors.

Obama's foreign policy was fine.

lol

American FP orthodoxy is poison and O did nothing to change that even if he didn't necessarily indulge in every possible worst impulse

Design the perfect US foreign policy! Wait no let me guess Bernie already did it

Bernie is awful on foreign policy and basically the entire left acknowledges this

I'd start with not giving the Saudis a bunch of money or drone bombing hospitals, how's that?

Wait no let me guess Bernie already did it

I'll join the "fuck you" party.

Disarmament Now

/ Wait no let me guess Bernie already did it/

I'll join the "fuck you" party.

You did that a while back, remember when we 51'd you? I really enjoyed being called a "cog" though.

Oh, and Fuck you.

I'd start with not giving the Saudis a bunch of money or drone bombing hospitals, how's that?

Okay if we want to do this for real, and since I'm usually the hippie in the room at my day job I'm certainly game, should we have a thread?

Bombing hospitals is insanely good.

definitely call it the American FP thread

for the love of god if you really must do that revive an existing thread, having a new dedicated trump thread is bad enough

oh good this should be edifying

j0rda not otm

― the Rain Man of nationalism. (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Saturday, June 24, 2017 2:13 PM (eight hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

you guys are missing the point

― J0rdan S., Wednesday, April 30, 2008 9:33 PM (nine years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

still tough to get over this but hey, nobody's perfect ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

In 2011, the former Republican chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Christopher "Kit" Bond, told me: "It's not the intelligence committee that fails to understand the problem. It's the Obama administration."

"The president seemed as angry at Mueller for wanting to arrest the illegals and at Panetta for wanting to exfiltrate the source from Moscow as he was at the Russians," Gates wrote. He quoted Obama as saying: "Just as we're getting on track with the Russians, this? This is a throwback to the Cold War. This is right out of John le Carré. We put START, Iran, the whole relationship with Russia at risk for this kind of thing?" Gates recounts that the vice president wanted to ignore the entire issue because it threatened to disrupt an upcoming visit from Russia's president at the time, Dmitry Medvedev.

Even after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the Obama policy toward Russian aggression was inconsistent. As Foreign Policy magazine reported in May, Obama's State Department slow-rolled a proposal from the U.S. Mission to the United Nations to lay out a set of options to punish Russia's client Syria for its use of chlorine bombs against its own citizens in 2014. Russia and the U.S. forged the agreement in 2013 to remove chemical weapons from the country. In 2015, the Obama administration did nothing to deter Russia from establishing air bases inside Syria...

All of this is the context of Putin's decision to boldly interfere in the 2016 U.S. elections. Perhaps Putin would have authorized the operation even if Obama had responded more robustly to Russia's earlier dirty tricks and foreign adventures. But it's easy to understand why Putin would believe he had a free shot. Russia probed American resolve for years. When Obama finally did respond, it was too late to save Ukraine and too late to protect our election.

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-06-27/obama-choked-on-russia-long-before-the-2016-election

ICYMI

"(This) paper finds that while President Obama had wide discretion and appropriated funds to relieve homeowners caught in the economic crisis, the policy design his administration chose for his housing program was a disaster. Instead of helping homeowners, at every turn the administration was obsessed with protecting the financial system — and so homeowners were left to drown.

"As a result, the percentage of black homeowners who were underwater on their mortgage exploded 20-fold from 2007 to 2013."

http://peoplespolicyproject.org/2017/12/07/destruction-of-black-wealth-during-the-obama-presidency/

obama fetishism is even more loathesome now than it was pre-trump

you're right, it's disgusting when we have such an excellent current president

Presidents need to be measured by the yardstick of all the other presidents who preceded or followed them. The job is unlike most any other job and places peculiar burdens and demands upon the people who seek and fill the office. You can't measure them accurately by comparing them to some unicorn that exists only in your imagination, which will never appear in real life, no matter how long you live. Within the framework of the U.S. presidency, Obama perhaps doesn't make the top five list, but he easily makes the top ten.

what kind of yardstick do you own?

(top twenty for sure)

i see your moral relativism and 'unicorn' bullshit, Aimless, and fuck it, along with Obama