So charming
Fuck that shit, Be Best.
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What could be classier than that.
Hopefully, most historians will judge Obama based upon their expectations and the cultural norms of the early 21st century. Perhaps we will progress to a more enlightened age in the next century or two, and then we can judge his presidency without having to compare it to the presidencies immediately before and after. This is certainly possible. Today, for example, liberal historians correctly judge the legacies of Andrew Jackson and James Polk far more harshly than they did only 30 years ago.
However, that may take a very long time. For now, the historical rankings seem to judge Obama pretty well: Historical rankings of presidents of the United States - Wikipedia
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Paywalled, but also Greenwald, so at this point highly suspect given his behaviour the past few years.
Can you provide some actual information that might support whatever point you are trying to make?
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Say that to all the individuals Obama radicalized through relentless robot carpet bombing.
I’m going by who wrote the Constitution, warts and all.
Soon, as the U.S. trudges towards a better union, we both will be considered equally imperfect by future generations of Americans, and that list will also include neoliberal charlatans like former President Obama.
edited for clarification
Guessing they’d likely be more weirded out by Obama being a free black president than anything else. So they’d gloss over the entire slavery thing that was going on under their watch, the Indian wars, continuous murder, destruction of their culture and the theft of all their land, our role in the Opium war, the Civil War, fought over the right to keep slaves, the Philipino-American war atrocities, Trench warfare in WWI, the development and use of the nuclear bomb over Japan, Dresden firebombing, Vietnam’s series of atrocities, Bush’s 200k-1 million dead in a war based on faulty intelligence that gulled him into attacking the wrong country, as well as beginning the Afghanistan war, but would stay up nights worrying about Obama continuing wars he didn’t start. Since there’s a simple answer to the Taliban/ Afghanistan/Central Asia/Middle East conflicts that you’re not sharing, you should run for president on that platform. Show in your answer proof that US non-involvement would result in less suffering, autocracy, and death than US involvement.
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Revived DOJ Civil Rights Division.
Signed Dodd-Frank Act which created Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Won record settlements against Wells Fargo and Countrywide for their anti-Black/Latino discriminatory housing and mortgage practices.
DACA.
Signed the Hate Crimes Prevention Act which expanded hate crime types to include gender; race; disability; etc.
Nominated Sotomayor and Kagen.
Directed Fed to deny protection for Defense of Marriage Act.
Supported Fed recognition of Same-Sex Marriages.
Repealed militaries Don’t ask; Don’t tell policy.
Diversified the Fed by appointing POC and women.
Signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act which removed then existing statute of limitations for suing companies that practiced pay discrimination against women.
Signed EO to protect LGBTQ discrimination by Fed contractors and subs.
Signed an executive order in 2014 prohibiting federal contractors and subcontractors from discriminating against their workers on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.
And there’s more. Not a liberal?
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Yes, my issue is with the country that elected the president. 0/10 would not recommend. Fascism? Since 1948. Presidents? All bad. Wars? More killed than all the leaders of the USSR combined.
Honestly, this is a really unsophisticated way of understanding the Cold War (or the 20th century). The millions of lives destroyed by American policy are are no more or less wrong than those caused by Stalin. The actual question we should care about is not which side was worse, as they both committed crimes in the name of their ideology, but what was the impact on actual human beings and did the actions of more powerful nations change the world, for good and ill. The blame game doesn’t help deployed like a 2nd grader on the playground doesn’t get us to understanding how power worked and was deployed during the Cold War (or the larger 20th century at all). It just gives us a means of feeling smug that the other guy is wrong.
As to the question of whether American president ordered crimes against humanity? Yes. They did. Only people who are deeply partisan are denying that fact. Anyone with a decent knowledge of the world knows that fact, same as with the soviet union (and China, etc). The projection of power is violent thing, and ignoring one for the other doesn’t not help us to understand WHY it happens and HOW we can prevent such mass slaughter in the future. 
Because that’s what I’m interested in. Not tryign to figure out who was “worse” in the Cold War and since the end of it… I’m interested in HOW WE STOP ALL NATIONS from carrying out their agendas in a violent way. As an American, I can start here, but speaking out about violence and oppression in other place shouldn’t be off the table. Obvious as an american I do bear responsibility for what my government has done (though it should be noted, that our government has often done things in the shadows via the CIA, etc).
The question of how much responsibility do the American people bear is an entirely valid one. Not everyone here supports our foreign policy, just like not all Soviets supported Stalinist purges or the invasion of afghanistan (though some most certainly did).
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You can try to harness and hijack my point all you want—even with much of what you’ve said as ALSO BEING TRUE.
It won’t change the reality of the cause and effect of President Obama’s working around Congress with relentless drone massacres that have made us all less safe—and it won’t change my educated opinion that history will look upon Obama more unfavorably than people who currently need to exalt him with absolutist reasoning.
I’m sure that someone so broad minded such as to be able to exalt the founders while considering their slavery and genocide should be quite capable of glossing over a few drone strikes.
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At the risk of trafficking in whataboutism (and fully acknowledging that I am not a presidential historian):
Can someone name the last president who didn’t commit crimes against humanity? Is transacting atrocities part of the job? How do Barack Obama’s war crimes compare to George W. Bush’s, or Reagan’s, or Truman’s?
Anyway, I think that we can hold Obama’s presidency to account for its wrongdoing while still admiring him as a civilian leader. Like @cannibalpeas points out, it’s not a simple binary. I think every president is likely guilty of “ends justify the means” moral compromises – and the evidence is clear that these compromises frequently result in horrors perpetrated against innocents – but it’s clear that the difference between Obama and Trump is that the ends Obama was pursuing were at least what he felt was in the nation’s interest.
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We have Pete Souza’s “SHADE: A Tale of Two Presidents”. Pages on Trump are counterpointed with pages on Obama. Except for a couple of Obama pages showing text only, all show photographs. Except for a couple of Trump pages showing photographs, all show text only.
Page 27 shows Barack and Michelle hugging on Valentine’s Day. Page 26 was left totally blank. Think about it.
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Obama had more transparency than his predecessors or his successor. So, while we know the numbers a bit better, is that better or worse than others? Again, do you know what the consequences of not intervening would have been? How do you know this? A quarter million died in the Syrian War. What if we had gone in, killed 50,000, but prevented the deaths of the other 200,000? What if Roosevelt or Churchill could have gone in sooner to stop Hitler? Please confer again with our late Founding Fathers, remember to chastise them over their monstrousness over slavery and Indian massacres, but get their read on it.
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