Obama’s Just the Enemy and Always Was

“The Tories tripled the deficit”

This is completely inaccurate. I think fiscal austerity was moronic, but the deficit as a % of GDP (and, I think, in nominal terms) has declined since the Coalition took office in 2010, though Osborne repeatedly missed his targets.

One of the most amusing things about the 07/8 primary season was how often Obama praised Reagan and how few people took him seriously. Grrrr!!! I turn into a raging spitting maniac at the mention of Reagan, a truly evil man. I never understood why good people I know, generally well informed, politically active, willing to show up for demonstrations for the good causes, were excited over Obama. When I pointed out to them in my “you-idiot” tone (can’t help it, it’s Reagan) he likes Reagan! He wants to be like Reagan! they explained to me that he didn’t mean he liked what Reagan did; he liked Reagan changing the direction of the country, as he, Obama, would change the direction to what they wanted. The few that understood when I pointed out that Obama was in fact saying he liked Reagan shifted to “He has to say that to get elected.”

Yes, we have to elect good people. A big problem is that most people now feel that they’ve become expert political analysts. Yes, all politicians lie, but they can see what the politicians really mean. All it takes is a formula or two that echoes their beliefs and they’re certain that the politician agrees with them. Anything else she says is just campaigning. This of course will be confirmed by their group’s news sources.

So we need to get back to demanding acceptance of party platforms and punishing candidates for lying. Otherwise, we will continue to get betrayers.

Well and succinctly stated. Perhaps the biggest obstacle the left faces in trying to take power in America is Obama’s continued (and inexplicable) popularity and that he’ll use it to undermine real reform at every opportunity.

I think you point out how important leadership is. Not that I totally agree with the Great Man theory of history but I think you could make a strong argument that history would have been very different if say FDR never existed. Who knows what kind of government would have arisen during the Great Depression without him.

FDR had flaws and the New Deal wasn’t perfect but on balance FDR was a good man and the New Deal was a good thing. But if you browse Democratic websites you will see plenty of partisan Democrats talking about how the New Deal and New Deal-style policies are some form of racism and sexism to benefit white males only. But if you dare to criticize Obama you are a racist. No wonder the Democratic Party keeps losing.

As for Obama, he had the opportunity to possibly be another FDR. The Republican Party was in the gutter ruined by the disastrous George W. Bush. The economy was in the toilet and it looked like neoliberal capitalism was on its last legs. But instead of fighting for EFCA, a major public sector jobs program (not a stimulus bill filled with tax cuts) and at least a public option in health care we got rickety Obamacare and almost got the TPP. The last straw for me was when Obama betrayed the workers fighting Scott Walker in Wisconsin by never showing up to support them even though he promised to put on his comfy walking shoes and march with the workers.

Obama and so-called “liberals” like him are only interested in the top ten percent of the population. It is like Thomas Frank pointed out, if you are not part of the affluent professional class you are a scumbag and a loser to these people and deserve your fate. That is why Obama and others like him love Silicon Valley because they see SV magnates as meritocrats who are “disrupting” all of the lazy, stupid hillbillies in flyover country.

bowtie jack – thanks

I always wondered how his mom, a mere secretary, managed to be such a globe-trotter. None of the secretaries I ever knew had that kind of money and nobody became a secretary so they could travel.

FDR had flaws and the New Deal wasn’t perfect but on balance FDR was a good man and the New Deal was a good thing. But if you browse Democratic websites you will see plenty of partisan Democrats talking about how the New Deal and New Deal-style policies are some form of racism and sexism to benefit white males only. But if you dare to criticize Obama you are a racist. No wonder the Democratic Party keeps losing.

Herman, I agree 100% with the rest of your post, but disagree with this bit. I don’t know what goes down at democratic websites, but it’s pretty difficult to look at the large scale effects of the New Deal and not see very deliberate and insidious racist and sexist structural outcomes, the legacy of which we are still very much dealing with today. The New Deal normed the ‘male breadwinner’ model of work and family formation. Women actually had reduced opportunities in work as the New Deal kicked into gear, as the idea of full time, well-paid, unionized work as men’s work gained currency. And the agricultural and service occupations which were heavy employers of african americans were deliberately excluded from the major provisions of the New Deal.
I point this out not in order say Dems are racist. I point it out because I believe baby boomers are the way they are largely because they learned these lessons of institutionalized racism all through their formative years. When the attack on the racist and sexist elements of the New Deal began in earnest in the late 1960s, this proved intolerable to large numbers of the white middle and working classes, who had learned to see their institutional advantages as the natural results of their own effort and ‘hard work’.
It can still be true that the New Deal was largely a ‘good thing’. But it also exacerbated fault lines that are clearly being exploited endlessly today. In fact, Trump’s noises about a new trade and industrial policy, protection of social security, his coal industry fetish, etc., might well be said to comprise a ‘New Deal’ for whites. At least, the rhetoric points that way, even if in practice it’s actually the executive committee of the bourgeoisie running things.

Love you Ian Welsh! I am so glad you just came out and said it, “Obama is a bad man”. Wish I had listened to Adolf Reed. Wish I had listened to the warning signs when Obama was here with Sen Casey expounding the virtues of A. Hamilton.

Folks who understood early that it was about corporate oligarchy vs. regular folks, NOT Dems vs. Rethugs, knew exactly what Obama was going to be when he voted for telecom immunity.

We were called racists for noting that Obama was a corporatist.

I doubt that the lesson has been learned, even now. 🙁

“We were called racists for noting that Obama was a corporatist.”

Actually, you, realitychecker, get called a racist because you are a racist, as your comments here have repeatedly shown.

If you have donor money, yet votes are scarce where you need them, then what do you have? The time to write a pointless book.

Spot on; all of it.

I documented Obama\’s links to the CIA/USAID/NSA years ago and lost a score of readers who were aghast at the thought of this agent hidden in plain sight. I lost the contributors also who had kept me financially viable up until then, never to be heard from again.

Thanks for your courageous reporting, Ian. I find a home here.

” NR permalink
September 19, 2017

“We were called racists for noting that Obama was a corporatist.”

Actually, you, realitychecker, get called a racist because you are a racist, as your comments here have repeatedly shown.”

Another hopeless moron heard from.

Gotta be a racist to hate corrupt corporatists like Obama. Got it. You are a moronic Dem plantation dweller. Voted for Hillary. In mourning now. Suffer, bitch. I delight in your agony.

As a disabled person who owes what I have been able to achieve to the original, pre-neoliberal NHS, I echo all you say in this piece. Go see the movie ‘I, Daniel Blake’. One important caveat. Please do not use the word ‘cripple’. Not only is it the disabled world’s’ ‘N’ word, but to be crippled implies being helpless and useless and disabled people are anything but that.

Whose “enemy” is he and who are you trying to convince?

Obama is not in office. He wields no governmental power and little political power. He has a certain inspirational cachet that is not likely to be sullied by contrarians. He accomplished something that not that long ago was considered inconceivable. That will stand no matter how History regards his reign.

He ruled as a reincarnation of Hoover, not FDR — or Reagan for that matter. It was clear to many of us well before his election(s) that he was as much of a corporatist, imperialist warmonger as any Bush or Clinton, McCain or Reagan or Trump you could name. No matter what he said, it was clear how he would rule. And so he did.

He couldn’t have accomplished what he did or destroyed what he did — whatever you think of it — unless he fit the parameters of a warmongering, corporatist imperialist president. That’s how it works, even if your name is Trump.

Can I have more?

A fair number of ‘How and why empires decline’ writers speak of the common theme of an oligarchy gaining inordinate wealth and power with the citizenry (the ones that matter) losing their ability to care about their particular state. When integrity finally loses and sociopathy becomes the cultural value, the empire falls.

I’ve seen this happen when a small ma and pop company grows into a corporate multinational. “Who can do” becomes “who you know”, and the once good and decent company starts employing cheats and tricks like covert government connections and assistance, H-1Bs, and well-marketed crapweasel products… to stay profitable. True innovation declines. Empire or corporation, it’s probably all part of the same process.

Obama was just going with the flow.

Judas effing christ anyway. Reading these comments is hi-larious.

Pass the boubon and the popcorn!

As I said, your comments here speak for themselves, realitychecker. Like back in the Bannon post when you said that a journalist with a Hispanic last name was incapable of doing his job because of his race.

You can protest all you want, but your own words betray your racism.

@nihil obstet,

I also dissonantly cognified away the meaning of the Obama quotes in praise of Reagan. I did not know of the existence of Adolph Reed’s analysis of Obama at the time. I only heard about that years later. I did not know of Obama’s speech to Bob Rubin’s “Hamilton Project” group till years after the fact. Would that have affected my thinking if I had known about those latter two things at the time? I cannot say. It is unfair that I and millions of others were denied knowledge of these things at the time.

I do remember blogger Larry Johnson at his No Quarter blog pushing the Birtherism agenda very had and long at his website, along with his support for Clinton. I heard about Birtherism from Larry Johnson long before I ever heard about it from Donald Trump. I figured if this kind of nasty behavior was common among Clinton supporters, that was one more reason not to support Clinton.

Purist that I was, I voted for Kucinich in the Michigan primary of that Clinton v. Obama year.

I voted Obama in 2008 to spare myself 4 or 8 years of President McCain and then 8 more years of President Palin after that.

In 2012, I voted for Rocky Anderson, the “Other White Mormon”.

And yes. In hindsight, Obama was clearly James-Bond-Villain evil.

@realitychecker

“Um, I think you said that, asshole. I never said any such thing, ”

Yes, you did. You said that the journalist couldn’t be trusted to provide objective reporting about Trump because of his race. Since a journalist’s job is to provide objective reporting, you literally said that a non-white journalist was incapable of doing his job because of his race.

And here’s the quote, since you’re now trying to deny what you said.

https://www.ianwelsh.net/bannon-out/comment-page-1/#comments

“Christopher Suarez is such a nobody that wikipedia doesn’t even know him, but S-U-A-R-E-Z might give you a clue about his sentiments vis a vis Trump”

Your racist words speak for themselves.

I supported Obama for a few months in 2008 because I could not abide an arrogant, crooked, rotten creep like Hillary Clinton. But it was with increasing misgivings. I tried the rationalizing eleventy dimensional chess approach for a while, that he was only talking up bipartisanship and Reagan or throwing his minister under the bus for tactical campaign reasons. But there were more telling indicators like the complete absence of progressives in his campaign or outreach to them. And more than that an arrogant TINA attitude toward them. As with realitychecker, all this came to a head in July 2008 when Obama reneged on his pledge to fight the granting of retroactive immunity to the telecoms for their part in the illegal surveillance of Americans for years after the immediate emergency of 9/11 had passed. I broke with Obama, and I remember catching a lot of heat from other progressives. You know the type, we need to defeat McCain, don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good, you aren’t being realistic, etc. I remember having a conversation about this time with a neighbor, a liberal, and saying that people felt good about Obama but they weren’t really listening to what he was saying and didn’t understand how bad he was going to be for them. I never voted for the man. As I have said so many times since, no one owns your vote but you. If a candidate can’t give you substantial, affirmative reasons to vote for them, then they don’t want your vote. So don’t give it to them.

I wrote scandals lists for both the Bush and Obama Administrations. I eventually had to give up because the Obama scandals all flowed into each other and so it became very difficult to write about one without bringing in all the others. I would just add to Ian’s list Obama’s repeated attempts to gut Social Security and Medicare, the most famous of which was his Cat Food / Bowles-Simpson commission. It is illustrative. Obama sponsored a fiscal responsibility conference one month into his Administration. Initially, the billionaire, entitlement hating Pete Peterson was to be the keynote speaker. The blowback was so strong Obama substituted his OMB director Peter Orzag who called for reducing benefits. The Great Healthcare Debate delayed further action until January 2010 when Obama along with the whole of the Democratic Congressional leadership, including Nancy Pelosi, and the strong backing of VP Joe Biden signed off on a proposal to establish the Cat Food Commission. All recommendations of the commission were to go for a straight up or down vote without debate or hearings. A week later the Senate killed the deal in a rare bipartisan rejection. But much like Clinton, Obama never gave up on a really bad idea. So he established the Commission by executive order and named Bowles and Simpson to run it. Who were they?

Alan Simpson was a conservative former Senator from Wyoming and longtime critic of Social Security. Erskine Bowles was a pro-business Clinton conservative, who was involved as his Chief of Staff in crafting the 1997 Balanced Budget Act and was the then president of the state university system in North Carolina. He was also an investment banker and on the board of the investment bank Morgan Stanley. Even as rigged as the commission was, it could not agree upon any recommendations. So Bowles and Simpson decided to publish their own. All this went nowhere in part because 2010 was an election year and with the subsequent Democratic losses became moot. However, even to the end of his second term, Obama continued to express interest in gutting Social Security and Medicare.

I would also add that Obama continued Bush’s wars, never prosecuted anyone for the largest frauds in world history (resulting in the 2008 meltdown), and in fact bailed out/foamed the runway for the perpetrators of those frauds.

Two more: Obama having government agencies and departments run interference for BP following the Deepwater Horizon blowout in the Gulf.

And running, much like Trump, on renegotiating NAFTA even as one of his economics advisers Austan Goolsbee was telling the Canadians, not to worry, he didn’t mean it.

ProNewerDeal, I think each President since Bush, and maybe Clinton, has been the worst President until the next one comes along. And just for points of reference, both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were both to the right of Nixon and at least as far right as Reagan.

Statements that leave you breathless: “We tortured some folks,” while indicating that we’ll just forget all about it. What does folksiness mean to this man?

HAMP: what was the point of insuring that HAMP didn’t help anyone. I can accept as capitalist money-grubbing that you set up a program to “foam the runway” for the bankers who will take good care of you later, but the gratuitous cruelty of making sure that applicants for assistance were strung out in a financial death march is beyond my ability to comprehend.

“The New Deal normed the ‘male breadwinner’ model of work ”

What?

@ NR

All I meant by that quote was that possible bias is always a factor to be considered, that is the way grownups who deal with actual situations conduct their business. You offered that guy up as authority, and all I knew about him was his name. If you are denying that anti-Trump sentiment among Hispanics was not yuuuuge, than you have again shown how hopelessly out of touch you are. You probably don’t realize the degree of approval Obama got from blacks, either. Totally hopeless.

@realitychecker

“You offered that guy up as authority, and all I knew about him was his name.”

Yes, and simply based on the fact that he had a Hispanic-sounding name, you concluded that he could not be trusted to provide unbiased reporting; i.e., that he could not be trusted to do his job. That is racist sentiment, no matter how much you try to deflect and distract from that fact.

And you never answered my question: Can white journalists be trusted to provide unbiased reporting about racially controversial candidates and issues? Obama had net disapproval from white people for most of his presidency; are you contending that we shouldn’t have trusted anything that white journalists said about him because of that?

@ Ché Pasa: +1; thank you.

to whom it may concern: a lightbulb finally went on for me, and i emailed two former firedoglake denizens i believed might have been there ten years ago. yes, both were. i’d asked if they remembered reality checker wanting to talk about (plans, strategies?) for revolution. one said that yes, he’s asked, and that jane hamsher had said that ‘revolution is not an option, so No.’ he/she said he’d brought up again later, maybe twice, and offered that it was no wonder he’d been banned.

another said he didn’t really recall such, but at the time miz hamsher was just getting gigs on teevee, so small wonder she would object to such. now he’d told me that he’d been banned for racism; he appealed the decision, but miz hamsher wouldn’t provide any such evidence. at the time, i found it impossible to reconcile the charges with what i knew of him. now? derogatory racialist, at least.

realitychecker permalink , May 30, 2017

“My next needlepoint will be:

Just wait for the magic indigenous mudwomen of the world to sprinkle their magic pussy juice on the Earth, and that will make everything all better. The first thing to do is to get all the men out of power. Wendyworld is coming!”

@realitychecker

“Your problem is that you can only think in absolute binary fashion, and reality hardly ever, if ever, aligns with any binary absolutes.”

And yet, you are perfectly comfortable claiming that non-white journalists are incapable of doing their jobs simply because of their race.

Thinking doesn’t get much more binary than that. Or more racist.

Someone here who has claimed her own brain-damaged status thousands of times online should stop acting like she is a competent investigator already.

Just sayin’

So just whose enemy is Obama? To claim that he is “just the enemy” presumes a false universality. He’s everyone’s enemy? No. Not at all. Not even close.

Obama is not the enemy of most of the bankers and corporatists, most of the neo-imperialists and warmongers with whom he cheerfully hob-nobs to this day. He’s not the enemy of so many Americans who continue to hold him in the highest esteem regardless of his many flaws and regardess of who he hob-nobs with. He’s not the enemy of the hundreds of millions, perhaps billions, of people around the world who see him still as representing the greatest hopes of mankind.

There’s a reason why the Trump regime invokes him constantly — while trying to denigrate him. The regimes and their adherents are mirror images of one another. If Obama is the “enemy”, he’s the enemy in the mirror.

Obama’s actions in office tell us everything essential we need to know about him as a person. It would be helpful, however, to be able to look at some objective verifiable research about his background. Can anyone point to some helpful links (of the non-infowars/tinfoil hat variety)? What I’ve found online so far seems heavily tainted.

@RC

It appears you are getting the snowflake’s Trump flaming treatment depicting you as a regular Georgia Cracker. These self-righteous projections are all the snowflakes have to offer and most people seem to understand that they come from a very dark place .inhabited only by true believers.

@ cripes

Every time I go silent for awhile, trying to give you room to make a more meaningful contribution, you offer nothing.

You only seem to emerge from the ‘Tooobz to take a shot at me.

What’s up with that?

I come here for intellectual sharing and stimulation. All you name-callers and dogmatists are the ones stinking the place up.

But, I will say nothing for the rest of the day. Let’s see you fill the space with your wisdom.

Strange. I’d tell people of color that the Obamas were the best looking/acting family in the White House since the Kennedy’s, but they weren’t being nearly progressive enough to make any hopeful change difference. And none called me a racist.

i’m glad for you that the commentariat here knows the reason for your banning, then. but as far as your drama queen repetitions of “you are dead to me”: Oh, how i wish it were so. and yet you feel compelled over and over to come to my home website, quote things i’ve written, especially when i quote other sage people of color whose aspirations i love, then crow: “here’s the evidence of who wd really is!” please leave me and my diaries totally alone in the future.

yes, i love the notion that one day we won’t be divided by ‘race’, just class, and that the underclass will globally decide to make some massive changes in ‘democracy’.

I was simply expressing that what had worked for me, might work for others.

But apparently, in the world according to rc:

POC cannot be changed because they’re POC.