I appreciate the thoughtful response. Thank you. Above all else, congrats on outlasting your competition. I can imagine how that feels. So the real question is whether you feel like making some nice pastries on site? That said: - Barack Obama Your complaints basically boil down to "Obama didn't stem the tide" or "Trump is going to destroy everything he did. In some cases you're complaining that he didn't do enough and he did too much at the same time. Line by line: - Troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Bush II overthrew the secular power center of the Middle East and Reagan created the Taliban. You're mad that Obama didn't solve a problem 30 years in the making? And then you're upset that we didn't get any regime change out of the Arab Spring. The last time the US got involved in something like that we ended up with Mossadeq under house arrest and a talentless despot on a puppet throne. Israel? Israel is being run by the guy who incited a crazy man to shoot Rabin. You're putting that on Obama? - Health care costs. Aren't going down. But find the inflection point: The fact that 20 million people have health insurance that didn't should count for something. Yeah - the Republicans are likely to tear it apart but I mean, Reagan stopped stem cell research for 8 years. Bush II piled millions into the Office of Faith-based Initiatives. Nixon created HMOs which got us here in the first place. Infamy? - "Saved" the economy. "Most presidents would have done the same thing." - "Bush got things started but the Obama administration really ran with it." In this case, "really ran with it" means "didn't immediately reverse the September 11 police state." You're griping about Stingrays which are state-level, not federal level. You're griping about the border patrol and lemme tell ya - both the north and south borders are hella chiller under Obama than they were under Bush. You've got a lot of nebulous examples of things that are bad - and they're bad. Don't get me wrong. But the "oh shit you're idiots" moment for the Obama administration was Holder's Fast & Furious in which 1300 street-legal guns disappeared into the cartels. Let's get real: - Bush: $12bln in unmarked cash pallets vanishing into Iraq. Which only happened because, well, we invaded Iraq. Which only happened because, well, September 11. - Clinton: 76 dead cult members in Waco. Plus Ruby Ridge. Plus Oklahoma City Bombing. Plus the first WTO bomb. - Bush I: Desert Shield. Desert Storm. Somalia. Panama. - Reagan: El Salvador. Lebanon bombings. Grenada. Iran Contra. - Carter: Iran Hostage Crisis. - Ford: Pardoning Nixon. - Nixon: Doing shit he needed pardoning for. - LBJ: Winding up the Vietnam War. - Kennedy: Getting us into the Vietnam War. Bay of Pigs. Cuban Missile Crisis. I mean... Obama doesn't so much as have an Elian Gonzalez to explain. ________________________________________________________ I get it. He's no knight in shining armor. I get it. People far less cynical than myself expected unicorns and rainbows out of this administration. I get it. Fuckin' Guantanamo Bay is still open. But we're talking about a Kenyan-born secret muslim that half the country loses their shit over because he's black and a Republican congress that decided "fuck you, you've got slightly less than a year left in office, we're not going to vote on a single Supreme Court nominee." Even FDR wasn't cool with that shit. There's a whole lot I would have liked to have been different about 2008-2016. But holy fuck, dude, compared to where we've been? ..."one of the worst presidents of modern times" is a titch hyperbolic, no?...the federal government is an aircraft carrier, it’s not a speedboat. And, if you need any evidence of that, think about how hard we worked over the last eight years with a very clear progressive agenda, with a majority in the House and in the Senate, and we accomplished as much domestically as any President since Lyndon Johnson in those first two years. But it was really hard.”
