In many respects, Barack Obama’s policies were not that different than Donald Trump’s. Yet Democrats continue to miss him as though he had been a shining example of perfect governance.
We Are All Supposed to Miss Obama
Ted Rall
Ted Rall is a syndicated political cartoonist for Andrews McMeel Syndication, WhoWhatWhy.org and Counterpoint. He is a frequent contributor to The Wall Street Journal, a graphic novelist and author of many books of art and prose, and an occasional war correspondent. He is, recently, the author of the graphic novel "The Stringer."
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But Mr Obama was so cooool ! Who cares about policies ?…
Henri
Missing Obama is like saying:
I miss when the Cancer didn’t show through my clothes.
Miss Obama? Hell, I already miss Bush…
Or, or that matter, Richard Milhous Nixon – whose campaign conspired with the South Vietnamese government back in 1968 to derail the Paris Peace Talks, but who remembers that now (not to speak of Ronald Wilson Reagan’s campaign and the Iranians) ?…
Henri
You got it, we’ve got a long history of Presidential wannabes conducting covert negotiations on behalf of the entire country they don’t lead.
At least Ollie North served some time – but we never did hear the whole story. Will Michael Flynn will fall on his sword for Hair Furor as well? Or will he name names?
Obama put sanctions on Russia based on zero information and the guy who made up Trump’s pee party dossier and put out the fake news about it still remains in hiding. And how many non-Democrats could have passed up making a joke about Hillary’s email account being secure because she hid her server in her closet?
Senator Schumer warned Trump about coming up against the intelligence agencies as blatantly as Trump’s “covert” invitation to Russia, before network cameras no less, to hack into the DNC.
Schumer must know something about the felonies committed in releasing these illegal intercepts about Flynn and should be investigated. Or, to be fair, Schumer should support a pardon for Snowden.
I don’t miss Obama. Americans aren’t great yet, but they’re working on it, and might make a big step in that direction if only they could recognize how little either party really cares about them.
George Washington was as bad as Trump.
Washington used federal troops to put down the Whiskey Rebellion and after using big government to knock out the competition, he became the biggest producer of whiskey in the U.S.A.
http://www.mountvernon.org/the-estate-gardens/distillery/
If you don’t care what your master is up to, you’ll be no smarter than a master would let his slave be, and maybe less so, because you’ll have no excuse for your ignorance.
I write this as an atheist to the conceptual object of political theology. The (mostly) guys in charge are not gods.
This cartoon could applied equally to Bush the lesser after Clinton whose Kosovo war was every bit as criminal as Iraq. Come to think of it, Clinton regularly dropped bombs on Iraq and strangled them through sanctions. Soft power – letting children starve by the hundreds of thousands – rather than hard power – splattering them all over the place.
As Henri mentioned, it also applies to Reagan following Jimmy Carter who literally ripped the freshly installed solar panels from the roof of the White House. Foreshadowing of Trump gutting the EPA (which was founded under… Nixon). As Henri also mentioned, Reagan brought us Iran-Contra, thus making Carter look rather sane in comparison. So it’s easy to forget that Carter, not Reagan, was the first neo-liberal president. Also the first evangelical.
Guess Trump is just a regular unhinged president. Sad.
«This cartoon could applied equally to Bush the lesser after Clinton whose Kosovo war was every bit as criminal as Iraq.» But Andreas, I thought it was those dastardly Russians who were the first to change the boundaries in Europe after 1990 ! Have they been leading me tenderly by th’ nose, as asses are ?…
Henri
Twice in the cartoon, I read “Miss Obama”! Is that a sublime suggestion that he was a pussy? Trump’s hand is at the ready to grab it!
😀
I thought of Miss Obama as being a beauty pageant like Miss America.
I remember the Miss Bush event where an Iraqi threw his shoe at George Bush, and Bush was able to duck down to avoid it.
The big miss of Obama was being paralyzed during his first two years in crisis, where he had enough popularity to do anything and controlled both houses of the Congress, and all he could think of was how to make his wealthy backers even more wealthy while screwing the rest of us
«The big miss of Obama was being paralyzed during his first two years in crisis, where he had enough popularity to do anything and controlled both houses of the Congress, and all he could think of was how to make his wealthy backers even more wealthy while screwing the rest of us» In which case, Glenn, I submit that Mr Obama’s inaction was hardly the result of «paraly[sis]»….
Henri
@Henri
Perhaps feigned paralysis is more appropriate.
A use of quotation marks (“paralyzed”) might work better.
The book by Walter Karp, “Indispensible Enemies, the politics of misrule in America”, provides an indispensible understanding of U.S. politics.
@glenn – while I haven’t read the book, enemies have always been indispensable. “Vote for me, because only I can protect you from _____”
a) commies
b) hippies
c) terrorists
d) Satan
e) gays
f) blacks
…
The stupidest thing I ever heard was, “Bush made me feel safe.” No he didn’t, he devoted massive effort you making you feel scared, just so that he could “save” you.
I suspect the technique was first perfected by shamans. “yeeeeeah, I’ll protect you from the volcano god. I’ll need a virgin, a couple bottles of wine, and did I mention that the volcano god really likes gold …?”
I was almost beginning to miss Mr Obama, but then I found out that the US is likely to continue the Obama/Clinton policy of continual provocation of, leading to war, on Russia, and my worries have evaporated like les neiges d’antan. If Ms Clinton couldn’t be Obama 2.0, perhaps Mr Trump/Pence can be ?…
Henri