Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/03/06/instrumentalism-sucks.html
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Just because Trump is… Trump, it does us no good at all to forget that Obama was a terrible president. He’s in a sandwich between two ultra-terrible presidents, true, but still terrible in his own right.
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Rather than preach to the choir about this stuff, what’s being done to inform the vast numbers of folks it’ll take to vote these poisonous fucks out?
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US drone strikes in the first seven months of Trump’s presidency apparently killed more civilians than in the whole of Obama’s:
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By what standard? I mean, I don’t love everything about Pope Francis, but by the standard of people who have a hope in hell of being pope, he’s about the best I could have hoped for. I kind of feel similarly about Obama
Are there past presidents, who you personally lived through, who you view more kindly in retrospect?
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Bill Clinton. Although he wasn’t given as bad of a shit sandwich as Obama.
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By the standard of “invented for himself and used the discretionary authority to kill anyone, anywhere, for secret reasons he felt beholden to explain to no-one in the public.” I feel that alone is enough to judge someone as ‘terrible.’ Is he exceptionally awful by the standards of American presidents… ehhh. Tough competition. No, but I’d contend that he was really successful at being awful in contrast to the way Trump is ridiculously bad at his particular evil schemes.
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Being responsible for a 9/11’s worth of dead civilians sounds plenty bad to me, though. You’ll find remarkably little pushback to the idea Trump’s very nearly the Devil here. That’s a given. But Obama isn’t nearly superior enough as compared to the Orange One to get any brownie points. Quite to the contrary.
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Oh, I’m in no way trying to give Obama a pass. He has serious blood on his hands.
I was more just shocked that (a) Trump had surpassed that carnage in just seven months and (b) I had to go looking for that stat to learn about it. It’s all tantrums and ludicrous statements and look at the orange freak and, yes, some very shitty things like his immigration policy and his lack of discernment w/r/t actual Nazis, but the murder of 2800+ civilians somehow just didn’t figure in any of the stuff I normally read, all of which (even the right-wing stuff) is solidly anti-Trump.
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“invented for himself and used the discretionary authority to kill anyone, anywhere, for secret reasons he felt beholden to explain to no-one in the public.”
I’d like to get a count of how many untimely deaths were postponed by the Affordable Care Act. I won’t argue that his ever increasing secrecy, lashing out at whistleblowers, and huge gifts to big business were damning. But he operated in years of post-911 terrorism hysteria, with scores of war hawks in the house and senate to placate. Technology just happened to reach the point of effortless drone killing in the administration before his.
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Which you can’t do until you sort out election financing.
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Perhaps this should be publicised more, so that Trump can be satisfied that he’s beaten Obama at something, and so will stop doing it.
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And Stalin, by some counts, saved a net 30 million lives by doubling Russian life expectancy. He was still a murderer.
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Mass incarceration, “superpredators”, welfare “reform”, created the conditions for the GFC.
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They’re brown foreigners. In the US press, those don’t count as people.
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That is amazing. I mean, I’ve heard him criticized for the food he eats, for the company he keeps, for the… pet? whatever the thing he keeps on his head is, for all manner of trivial nonsense, but not for being party to the death of thousands.
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You, I see, would most certainly not walk away from Omelas, eh?
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But we have to give Defense unlimited power! What if the Republicans called us bad names? Like every minute of the past 20 years? Surely, this time they will like us!
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if i look back at the presidents of my lifetime–kennedy to date–i have to say obama is by far the best president of my lifetime. possibly in the top 5 of all presidents the u.s. has had. your objection is noted but is almost irrelevant in the larger context.
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