Obama Failure Thread Part VII (The Lame Duck Years)

OMG!!! They didn't use Celsius!!


That's what you wanted to point out to, right?

 

Spoiler alert: Not an Obama failure but not sure where else to put it.

I realize it's an official portrait and all, but this is ********ing great:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/16/arts/design/obamas-presidential-portraits.html

Been a huge fan of Wiley for some time now and was lucky enough to catch his retrospective at the VMFA last year.

Great choice by the Obama's.

 

I'll save him the trouble:



First time I noticed the flag in the fireplace. Genius!

 

Uh, okay.

 

When did Nancy McNally go rogue?

 

For myriad reasons, I felt like listening to this speech this morning.

 

There’s a new RWNJ book out, just in time for your racist Uncle’s Christmas list. One part of the book claims that the CIA complained about the Obama administration’s overemphasis on political correctness.

That’s because some dipshit didn’t know all of the scheduled PC meetings were meetings of a principals committee.

https://www.foxnews.com/media/book-cia-staff-obama-white-house

Some things you can’t save with an editor’s note.

 

I’m holding out for the book Donald Trump- the treason years.

 

Melanie will have to update her resume soon:

So thrilled to receive a #GRAMMYs nomination! This past year has been such a meaningful, exhilarating ride. I’ve loved hearing your stories and continuing down the road of becoming together. Thank you for every ounce of love and support you’ve shared so generously. #IAmBecoming pic.twitter.com/mvBb4W4od6

— Michelle Obama (@MichelleObama) November 20, 2019

 

https://newrepublic.com/article/156...al&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

I agree with most of this Obama critique. The critique is in part from the left. (In particular, it is very critical of the Afghanistan surge.). But mostly it’s a critique of Obama’s basic approach to governing, arguing that he was far too technocratic for his own good. He and his team ran the gvt in such a way as to guarantee they would only get credit for their accomplishments from the highest information voters.

 

I'm not sure how much of a problem that was, given that he won the only re-election campaign he was permitted to run. I guess one could argue that hurt Hillary, to the extent that she ran as a quasi-incumbent, but that would be a bit of a stretch.

 

I long for the return to technocratic governance. It beats the shit out of governance by tweet storm.

 

The conclusion is interesting, though it might be a result of 20/20 hindsight. But here is how Obama is "responsible" for Trump.

In October 2009, Michelle Goldberg invited New Republic readers to “meet the next Glenn Beck.” It was none other than Alex Jones, at the time best known (besides to Richard Linklater fans) as a prominent 9/11 “truther” representing the fringe of the fringe. “Until recently,” Goldberg wrote, “Jones’s search for mainstream allies has been less than fruitful.” Goldberg noted that even the conservative firebrand Michelle Malkin—an extreme figure, to be sure, but a thoroughly mainstream one at the time—had castigated then-Representative Ron Paul for appearing on Jones’s show and argued that doing so should disqualify a Republican from the primary debates. ​

But with Obama in office, things were already changing. Fox News’s “senior judicial analyst,” one Andrew Napolitano, had just done a joint broadcast with Jones, boosting his new anti-Obama documentary. Representative Louie Gohmert of Texas had just appeared on his show, as well.​

Naturally, given his belief that 9/11 was a government conspiracy, Jones had been anti-Bush while Bush was in power, making Jones and his audience useful only to legitimate outsiders like Paul. With Obama in the White House, though, he and the conspiracies he generated could help the conservative movement win back power, and so it was no longer considered beyond the pale to associate with him. As for Malkin, she was fired, in November of this year, by a conservative group for publicly supporting a Holocaust denier, and earlier this month she appeared on a white nationalist YouTube channel and applauded young “alt-right” activists.

The Democrats’ fecklessness, in other words, did not flourish in a partisan vacuum. It has been, at every juncture, inspired and influenced by the complete failure of the right to self-police. The American right, like the housing market and the banks and the hedge funds and the health insurers and providers, simply could not be induced to check its basest instincts in the face of an opponent that staked its entire political credibility on the promise that it could make Republicans fall in line with realigned incentives or One Weird Trick. If liberals want to get the next decade right, after the previous one in which we repeatedly failed to save the world while telling ourselves we were doing so, we will need to stop nudging and begin fighting.​

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This explains why I laughed at the early Never Trumpers who were shocked that he got the GOP nomination and then that he won. It's like those people never watched Fox News or listened to the radio.[/I]

 

"The complete failure of the right to self police" made me laugh. Not self policing might seem as a failure to the left, which has some belief in laws, being viewed kindly by history, and such. But "the failure to self police" has a been a glorious asset for the right, which seeks to win, full stop.