Good points
Ah, another fan of selective propaganda.
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No matter who we get in office, they’ll never be able to please everyone, it’s just not possible.
Hell, Jesus himself could run, and somebody would still have some problem with him.
Obama wasn’t horrible, but neither was he ‘the best thing since sliced bread’; he was a politician, not a “magical Negro;” I had no expectation that he would actually be able to ‘change’ anything, just hopes that he wouldn’t make it so much worse.
Personally, I was relieved that he made it a full 8 years without being assassinated or having any embarrassing scandals - as a PoC that matters deeply, because we’re all judged by what one of us does, and if he had ‘fucked it up,’ there would have never been another POTUS of color.
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By no means was he perfect, nor magical.
But by the same token, he was not a murderer (any more so than any leader whose country uses weapons) or a destroyer of various rights, etc etc.
I’m in agreement with you, Melz, but I’m really not a fan of revisionist history that uses the Breitbart / Alex Jones party line.
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I hear ya.
Anyone who steps into the role of POTUS is automatically going to be complicit with the US’s crimes against the rest of the world (and they are many); unless they start actively trying to dismantle the entire system on day one, in which case, he or she would not remain POTUS for very long, methinks.
Exploitative fuckery is baked into the foundation of our society; a mere ‘changing of the guards’ every 4-8 years can’t and won’t change that.
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Oh God no. It’s bad enough people are half joking about a Dwayne Johnson POTUS. Just let’s stop with the celebrity Presidents. Trump and Reagan were enough. Can we get a boring engineer or teacher as a President next?
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Selective propaganda! Do you deny the charges sir?
I’m just not going to give Obama a big rainbow sticker for having a great propaganda department while being president.
He’s just another neoliberal that talked a good talk to get elected then did everything we hated bush for except start another Illegal war (although he did continue the ones he inherited)
Don’t forget he used the espionage act more than every other president combined
And Now he’s cashing in doing speeches to the bankers he bailed out … please stop me when I’ve told a lie…I’m waiting.
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In lieu of not being yet another participant in the perpetual ‘pissing contest’:
The entire system is broken, that much is evident; got any viable solutions?
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Point is if you cared more about the republic rather than your post presidency pay off then you would at least try to do those things
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“Point is,” how do we get such a virtuous and ethical being into office in the first place, in a system that is so horribly entrenched in scores upon scores of years worth of systemic corruption?
It’s easy to point out the symptoms; anyone can do it…
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One of my favorite games here at BB when I point out any positive thing about the other team (which by no means implies support) is getting called out as a traitor or an idiot for even mentioning it.
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Even here, tribalism and conformism are often problematic attributes.
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That is pretty common for people who have achieved that sort of success. They do tend to believe it is possible for others to do so as well.
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Of course it’s possible for others. However, that doesn’t tend to be quite the message.
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Keep waiting. I’m not getting into, as Melz puts it, a “perpetual pissing contest”, and I’m not interested in debating Obama’s merits.
The point is keeping a balanced look at the past. Every leader has their merits and their demerits. When looking at, say, Obama through an Alex Jones/Breitbart/Fox lens, of course all you’ll see is a horrible murderer who eats babies or something. (For those playing at home, I am not being facetious. The pizzagate crowd has elaborate theories about Obama and Hillary’s literal baby-eating and raping). It’s an unproductive, unhelpful line of thinking. Let it go.
Let’s focus on our next steps. How to fix the messed up situation things are in, how to stop the fractuous crap and try to progress things overall.
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At the very least because that’s not the fuckin’ topic at hand.
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The “adventure” thing was meant as snark, but I obviously didn’t make it clear enough! 
I wasn’t defending or trying to minimize Bush’s invasion of Iraq, which was not only illegal, but also horribly stupid and counterproductive, and was grotesquely mishandled from the very start.
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