what are barack obama's flaws?

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

mass murderers tend to ruin the grading curve

morbs, ranking presidents relative to one another is, by definition an exercise in relativism. the job of president has such vast ramifications upon so many millions, for both good and ill, often due to the same decision, that moral purity is not an option. if you ever had the misfortune to find yourself doing the job, you'd not only be thoroughly miserable, but, unless you were paralyzed by moral indecision, you'd do some amount of irreparable harm each time you tried to do some indisputable good, and therefore become a pariah to yourself.

Sliding scale relativism, civilian drone deaths and "hilarious" comedy Caribbean accents aside, his current guise as benevolent billionaire with much hypocritical + platitudinous drivel + smugness to impart to us mere mortals - his global fan club of course, makes him an even worse example of a presumptuous + arrogant twat than Blair.

these people pursue the job relentlessly, Aimless, and hence are sociopaths by definition

Sociopaths get good things signed into law too. We know this.

"You're too hip baby, I can't carry you anymore"

don't ask me to love em

peace out

there are maybe three presidents better than obama and that's pushing it

No one here wants to grab a micro brew with Bam, for god's sake.

I'd totally grab a micro brew with him

i dunno he seems busy

i wouldn't wanna waste his time

Seems like a potentially awkward situation. "Sorry Barry, I have to turn down this highly imaginary invitation to grab some beers because I think you have more important things to do with your time." I think he'd be bummed.

never forget

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2009/07/30/us/31obama_600.jpg

that looks like a very un-fun and contrived liquid lunch, would definitely pass on an event like that.

plus the beer looks like shit beer

and Biden's drinking near beer!

I can take the shit beer all day long, just not the shit people!

good beer makes shit people more survivable

how many Mafia dons are better than Obama, J.D.?

Mafia dons don't get the poor subsidized health care or the Lily Ledbetter Act sighed. Man, you are so tedious about this -- it's like you can't imagine people can have complicated reactions to things other than Spielberg joints.

they do kill people they don't know, however

tho usually not children

I had a complicated reaction to at least one Spielberg joint.

It would get expensive to put a bullet in the head of every sick person in America, it's true

lol @ calzino piling on for no reason

I try to stay out of US politics, but he invaded my space on the radio the other morning. There are plenty of other reasons to pile on Obama, other than he seems a loathsome person tbf.

This a purpose built Obama's Faults thread as well.

idk, as faults go, "seeming loathsome to calzino" rates as pretty marginal.

well the accelerated use of drone strikes on civilians that he signed off on is pretty loathsome to anybody who isn't a brainwashed apologist.

for a start.

I think you might be confused about what the job is that he held for 8 years. But I’m not getting into this with you, my attitudes regarding the legitimacy of the state’s use of lethal violence and espionage are all over the place

Yeah, you'd think he'd at least ask them to change the name 'Drone Strikes on Civilians' to something a bit less conspicuous.

He personally changed the rules of engagement, which led to escalating civilian deaths during his presidency, there is no Bama-splaining or bullshit sophistry that gets him a free pass from that.

That's part of his legacy and he can wear to it to the fucking grave.

xps Are you saying that Obama signed off on drone strikes solely against civilians? As in, "Let's forget about killing soldiers or military leaders; let's just kill off some civilians as our military objective and see if that helps"? Or would you say the motive that lead to the action maybe a bit more complex than that?

This no doubt counts as apologetics in your view, but my point is not that killing civilians is trivial, but that your characterization of his action was not complete, and the omission was significant. It is easy, once you've arrived at a judgment, to distort facts to eliminate any which tend to run counter to your opinion. If you've ever been the target of such distortions of your actions or motives, you may perhaps recognize the unfairness of doing the same to others.

He personally changed the rules of engagement, which led to escalating civilian deaths during his presidency, there is no Bama-splaining or bullshit sophistry that gets him a free pass from that.

― calzino, 28. december 2017 22:33 (nine minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

That's part of his legacy and he can wear to it to the fucking grave.

― calzino, 28. december 2017 22:37 (five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Except it's not really true, though, is it?