Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/08/19/barack-obamas-summer-reading.html
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Remember when we had a POTUS that could read, and speak in complete sentences?
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… and while making complete sense?
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I’d be a bit more nostalgic if he’d actually done anything. I mean anything except bailing out banks and implementing Heritage Foundation plans.
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Class act. This is what our country should aspire to be. Reading articles about him and his family sometimes makes me mad because I see how steep the precipice is that we fell off of.
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You mean given an intransigent, obstructionist, majority-GOP Congress?
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How about saving the economy (which is why it is where it is today), not having any lewd sexual/financial/international scandals, not starting any wars (trade or otherwise), pushing our country to rely more on renewable energy, increasing funding for education, and demonstrating to the world that we’re not all idiots like his predecessor?
All with %0 help from one of the branches of government thanks to a jack-hole from KY.
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Just another bit of evidence of what a liberal elite Obama was, what with his ability to read books. And whole paragraphs. And sentences.
I actually saw someone arguing that Trump was more articulate than Obama, because Obama, when he spoke extemporaneously, had pauses and “ahs” in his speech. (Because he was actually thinking about what he was saying, rather than spouting stream-of-unconsciousness gibberish.) My mind boggles.
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Did his last name start with a “T” and rhymed with “rump”?
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He only “saved” the economy for stockholders. Everyone else got foreclosed, and that’s a large part of the reason Hillary lost.
He did nothing about deeply disfunctional and broken governmental agencies that have been a rolling scandal since they were gutted and staffed with grifters by Bush.
We were in two wars the entire 8 years of his presidency, which had he won on the promise to end.
And a leader of the Democratic party who ran the party completely into the ground over the course of 8 years.
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Well, one thing he could have done as President and leader of the Democratic party was, you know, try to fix that.
You mean… like, back off on universal healthcare?
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I’m not a stockholder, but I’m pleased with the current job market compared to where it was when Barak took office. I agree that the banks should have taken more of a shave, but INAE(conomist). And anyone who thinks the current growth rate is sustainable is a fool.
How could he? He tried, but needed congressional approval for most of his policies.
I believe this is somewhat disingenuous. He tried hard to end those conflicts and was stop by congress at every attempt. At least he listened to his defense department and took their advice on the proper timeline to disengage. Just look at what happened when he tried to pull out of Gitmo.
Eh? The Democratic party was perfectly capable of running itself into the ground independently. I still think highly of Obama and poorly of the Clintons, but I still voted Hillary to avoid the Trumpster fire we’re in today. And it will be a looooong time before I do anything but vote down-ticket D because this BS has to stop (I even thought Romney would have been okay but now…nope).
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I’m pretty jaded, but the unbelievable amount of racism required to positively compare Trump to Obama just boggles my mind ever time I see it.
Well, that was certainly the plan with Obamacare, and then the plan for 2010 and 2014 was to back off on Obamacare, and then the plan for 2016 was just to back off the Democratic party completely, but that last one I have to admit was not his fault.
Funny GWB had no such problems.
He prided himself in that a bit too much, and seemed to be incapable of ever considering that someone might not be arguing from an honest position. Even I could see that disengagement from Iraq would create a immediate wave of instability as the potemkin government we’d installed was suddenly expected to function, and that ever general and bureaucrat involved would want to kick the can down the road as far as possible so that their careers wouldn’t take the hit.
Obama inherited an growing and improving Democratic party from Howard Dean (remember, Dean’s 50 state strategy had already netted them Congress in 2006). Even more frustratingly, Obama himself had built an amazing movement to support his candidacy. But everyone I’ve read who was close to either felt that Obama couldn’t be bothered to keep working on them once he was in office, and they were either abandoned or turned over to the usual pool of grifters and incompetents (because he listened to the “right” people) as soon as he took office.
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I thought that this post was about books and reading lists.
I’m in the middle of Sarah Ruden’s translation of Confessions, and I’m fixing to start Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet by Katie Hafner.
Ol’ Augustine actually has a pretty funny sense of humor up in there.
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… thus proving that a Dem-majority House and a split Senate had fewer “working issues” with GWB than a GOP-majority Congress with Obama.
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Obama inherited a country headed for financial ruin and was able to turn it around. That wasn’t about increasing economic velocity via Fed rate cutting, it was about increasing acceleration which I can’t even imagine trying to explain to 45.
45 doesn’t listen to any advisors except sycophants, and even then he fires them when he gets bored.
That’s because he had a country to run. Which he did quite well IMHO. But then again, I voted for Nader so I’m partially responsible for Bush (although I’m not in a swing state) which is why we’re in this mess we’re in today.
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Ted Chiang’s Story of your Life and Others is one of my favorite short story collections. I can’t wait to read Exhalations.
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It’s like the people who talked about how Trump going into the White House meant it was now going to have someone “classy” in it. Trump. Classy. They couldn’t possibly have said anything that would have been more overtly racist, and there’s no better evidence of racism warping one’s perception of reality.
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