A post from a friend, John Watters:
Imagine this scenario:
Hillary Clinton is president. It’s learned that she has deep ties to Putin and the Russian spy agency. She puts unqualified billionaires in cabinet posts. She pursues public policies that benefit her and her billionaire friends. She puts her daughter Chelsea in a position of influence in the West Wing, gives her her own office and allows her to use that position to forward her own business interests. And Chelsea’s husband is her chief advisor. The private business trips taken by Chelsea and her husband are paid for by the taxpayers.
She refuses to release any tax returns, she blocks access to the visitor logs in the White House and Bill refuses to live in the White House so our tax dollars are spent keeping him safe in Chappaqua. Hillary spends almost every weekend lounging in her own, privately-held resort. Her private resort gets reimbursed for any and all “official” government functions (including security) because she chooses to conduct all her “business” and personal functions there. She and her family live in three White Houses at the same time.
In an interview, she names the wrong country she bombed while bragging about the chocolate cake she was eating while she ordered said bombing. I could go on and on. The point is that the outrage, the outcries, the screaming by Republicans would be heard around the world and impeachment proceedings would already be underway.
By the way, this is not about political party affiliation. Let’s face it, if Hillary – or any woman or minority candidate – had five children from three partners s/he would never have survived the primary.
And I [MM] would add: this is not just about party affiliation, which it certainly is. This description is the embodiment of white male privilege.
That's brilliant.
It's also true.
Geez, and it's only the tip of the iceberg.
I can't stop thinking about the the kinds of people who become very involved in aliens, bigfoot, ghosts, etc. For the most part they are otherwise perfectly sane, rational and capable of holding down jobs, marriages, etc. Yet nothing – certainly not the glaringly obvious, overwhelming facts before them – will persuade them from their bizarre beliefs.
For that very reason, it's inconceivable that President Hillary Clinton would even behave in this way.
Maybe we need to demand female or minority Presidents from now on simply because anyone who's gotten past these double standards has to be twice as good. (Though stereotype threat, the need to avoid being the angry black man, did probably inhibit Barack Obama from doing some things he desperately wanted and even needed to do.)
I assume that the things that you think that Obama desperately wanted were good things. Why can't you and so many others face the reality that Obama was not the liberal that he ran as in 2008? It makes more sense to assume that he wanted to unconstitutionally have drones drop bombs on people in numerous foreign countries in the hope of killing a few people whom he had determined without due process were terrorists. It makes sense to assume that he wanted to keep people unconstitutionally imprisoned at Guantanamo, because he could have released them without Congress's approval if he'd wanted to. It makes sense to assume that he wanted to prosecute whistleblowers at an unprecedented rate (for espionage, yet!) and that he wanted Edward Snowden to go to prison for interfering with his surveillance state. It makes sense to assume that he wanted to deport non-citizens in record numbers. The fact that Trump is far, far worse than Obama does not mitigate Obama's actions.
You could be right. But I can think of at least three cases that challenge your narrative:
(1) we know BHO smoked weed as a kid; we can (I think) presume that he's got some smidgen of moral consistency in his beliefs. Can we really conclude that b/c he didn't do -everything- he could to legalize weed, that he's -for- continued prohibition?
(2) we know (from his public statements) that he went against bombing Assad (over chemical weapons) specifically b/c he was pushing back on his generals.
(3) when he finally had no political price to pay, he commuted Chelsea Manning's sentence.
Heck, look at Jimmy Carter, who's lived this short of "expiatory" life since his Presidency. I'm going to bet we can dig into his term and find a ton of evil stuff the US was doing, that he could have prevented, but to do so, required upending the system in which the President is embedded. The very same "system" that is hobbling Lord Smallgloves, preventing him from doing a ton of really evil stuff (restricting him to only somewhat evil stuff) also hobbled PBHO. I mean, the man wanted to get re-elected. And until after the 2014 midterm, he wanted to get his fellow partisans elected. And until after Nov 2016, he wanted to get his successor (and fellow partisans) elected. Is it really unimaginable that he felt constrained in terms of what he could do, without calling down upon himself and his party the wrath of the "owners of the USA"?
(1) The problem was not that Obama didn't do everything he could to legalize weed. It was that, after promising not to prosecute crimes involving marijuana grown for medical use in states that had legalized it, he did so. So, no, he did not have a smidgen of moral consistency about that, but then neither do most politicians who voted to outlaw marijuana or do not vote to legalize it, as most of them probably "experimented" with it when they were young.
(3) Commuting Chelsea Manning's insane 35-year sentence does not mitigate not pardoning Snowden. Also, Obama might have felt shame over the abuse he allowed of Bradley Manning before he was convicted. You'll recall that he ended that abuse only after his former law professor Laurence Tribe and more than 250 other law professors published an open letter stating that the abuse of Manning was "a violation of the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment and the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee against punishment without trial. If continued, it may well amount to a violation of the criminal statute against torture. …" http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2011/04/28/privat…
I can see how one could interpret Obama's actions as evidence of malign (or, at least, not-with-the-right-people) intent. But in both the cases you mention, and also in the case of LGBT rights, ISTM that one can equally well make the case that he was of good intent, but had to allow the machinery to do what it would, for two reasons: (a) his and his party's political future, and (b) his own inherent bias as an institutionalist. As I noted above, a president is embedded in a system full of actors with their own opinions and motives. Sure, he can upend it. But that comes at a price, and I can understand why BHO didn't want to pay that price too often.
Look: I think we all owe a debt to Snowden also. But *lots* of liberals at at least one other blog I read, are pretty vituperative in their hatred for him. And other than that issue, I agree with them 100%. 100%. So I can't write them off as being nutjobs. This is a subject on which well-meaning people -will- differ.
I really do think it's a matter of interpretation, and to some extent, of one's priors regarding BHO's own motivations and prejudices. I could rework both points you chose to respond to, in that manner, but honestly, it'd just be my *own* opinion, and it isn't clear that that would further the discourse.