Submitted 1 week ago by some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org to showerthoughts@lemmy.world
Federal agents kept smashing up weed shops in California after we legalized it. He seems awesome by comparison, not because he was awesome. Same with Billy C. We haven’t had an awesome president in my lifetime.
A president doesn’t need to be awesome, he or she needs to be competent.
Yep, I just want to sleep without worrying about shit.
There is an amount of alcohol that will get you there.
He blew up innocent people with bombs and drones. He tortured people. I’d say he was indeed terrible.
Don’t get me wrong: he was one of the better presidents that we’ve had, but that bar is embarrasingly low.
He extrajudicially killed a US citizen with a drone.
This is the scariest shit I can think of from any modern president. The precedent is terrifying.
I believe Obama didn’t have the confidence to disrupt the military industrial complex as it was operating post-GWB. I also think he feared the political repercussions of seeming “weak” on defense, which I think he misperceived. This was perhaps the most serious flaw in his presidency, which was otherwise great in regards to domestic policy
…leading some of the most disastrous dea and fbi raids in US history is good domestic policy?
He was a boring ‘good’, president if you were upper middle class or higher in a fairly conservative job and a white male. That’s about it. Those were the people that could tune out.
People want war criminals who talk good. That’s the bar for the average American.
Obama’s policies were mostly Heritage foundation fed too. The ACA was a Heritage Foundation plan. His bank bail out was a hand out to the rich without consequence. His foreign policy was bad towards the middle East and awful for human rights. He deported more people than any president before him. By all metrics, he was a Republican. He was historic, sure, but I don’t think he was any better than Biden in relation to policies that helped regular people or embrace of the anti-human rights policies. People’s memories tend to soften situations or maybe just politics was more muted at the time. Democrats have been right wing lite for my whole life.
Thank you.
I feel like a crazy person sometimes because I remember when the ACA was rolling along it was reported that it was just the Heritage Foundation, a notoriously right wing think tank, plan.
I looked into it because I thought “certainly this can’t be true, hope and change and all that” I went and looked up their plan. It was a market based approach that used tax incentives and penalties to increase the size of the insurance pool.
That’s the ACA.
And people act like it’s some litmus test of progressive policy success.
This is what I’ll never forgive Obama about. He captured an entire generation of voters energy stumping with progressive speeches about making real change. He had no real desire to do that, constantly governing from the center / center right.
So that whole generation learned a lesson, progressive policies don’t work. Which is amazing considering that we didn’t even try any. We somehow passed a bunch of corporate friendly policies and peoples lives didn’t get meaningfully better and they chalked it up to “progressives don’t have an answer either”
I think this is a contributing factor to the absolute shit show we find ourselves in today. America has deeply broken problems that are entrenched because them existing makes someone very rich. Not the same guy for every problem, but for every problem in America you can rest assured there’s a small group of assholes that need that problem to exist so they can buy a third yacht. People feel that pain and they went “well fuck, the lefts best orator, the guy with a vision and plan and skills couldn’t fix it” then along comes trump being a blowhard jackass saying “I can fix it” and people were like “sure, let’s try it”
Obama could have actually delivered on that change, it wouldn’t have been easy, he would have had to actually use that supermajority for the few weeks it existed to pass legislation. He would have had to bring blue dogs to heel or blow up the filibuster. But if he could have found the gumption to do it, and those policies meaningfully improved peoples lives, he would have cemented multiple decades of democratic dominance.
Instead he passed uninspiring half assed solutions that tinkered around the edges of our societies most difficult problems. Structured them so that all the pain would be felt up front and all the benefits would slowly phase in over time. Tried to find compromise so that the right wouldn’t attack him and even after giving everything away they screeched about death panels.
That’s it. Dems have moved to the right.
He was a war criminal, just saying
Care to elaborate? I didn’t notice a single article when we was a president.
Illegitimate wars fought for oil in Iraq and Afghanistan, with civilian casualties in the 100s of thousands. Let Russia take Crimea, arguably the initial precursor to today’s war in Ukraine, even though we promised them protection in exchange for giving up their nukes. Extra-judicial killing of American citizen via drone strike. He was peak lib and gave corpos everything they wanted and more, so of course the corpo media won’t point any of this out. Doesn’t change the fact that he committed grave crimes against humanity and our own citizens.
Would I rather have him back today instead of the orange dotard? Yeah. Doesn’t mean he was a good guy though, or good for Americans in general.
> The White House and Pentagon boast that the targeted killing program is precise and that civilian deaths are minimal. However, documents detailing a special operations campaign in northeastern Afghanistan, Operation Haymaker, show that between January 2012 and February 2013, U.S. special operations airstrikes killed more than 200 people. Of those, only 35 were the intended targets. During one five-month period of the operation, according to the documents, nearly 90 percent of the people killed in airstrikes were not the intended targets. In Yemen and Somalia, where the U.S. has far more limited intelligence capabilities to confirm the people killed are the intended targets, the equivalent ratios may well be much worse. > The documents show that the military designated people it killed in targeted strikes as EKIA — “enemy killed in action” — even if they were not the intended targets of the strike. Unless evidence posthumously emerged to prove the males killed were not terrorists or “unlawful enemy combatants,” EKIA remained their designation, according to the source. That process, he said, “is insane. But we’ve made ourselves comfortable with that. The intelligence community, JSOC, the CIA, and everybody that helps support and prop up these programs, they’re comfortable with that idea.” > The source described official U.S. government statements minimizing the number of civilian casualties inflicted by drone strikes as “exaggerating at best, if not outright lies.”
Well, for one thing, he was the president who OK’d drones.
first black president is a hero for many
full stop
This isn’t a shower thought, this is a political opinion.
No reason why it can’t be both
There were some things he did I disagreed with, and a lot he did I agreed with. I’d take another Obama presidency any day given where we currently find ourselves
Reading all the things he has done, I’ve come to my own conclusion of the man. When I was young and dumb, I didn’t like him. I was a 16 yr old conservative in the south. Then I got older and experienced more people and life. I ended up being a big fan of him.
But now that I’m 32 reaching 33 soon enough, I’ve found he is just man. Not bad or good. Just a man. I think he had the country’s best interest at heart. I imagine the crucible you’d have to deal with to be president and get things done is not easy. I imagine trying to do good requires you to close an eye to other things.
The difference between him and a Trump though? Trump does evil shit and let’s evil shit go and so he’s never stopped because the evil shits have control over most of the shit.
Is not really a showerthought and flagrantly breaks rule #6. Put this elsewhere.
It’s rule 3, but you are otherwise correct. I reported it and encourage others to do the same.
Biden was the best president since Jimmy Carter and Obama was a close second.
But they are all horrible people to be clear
Biden? Really? Dude helped trump get back into office with his late departure
We’re not going to play that game where you pretend like you think that’s a bad thing right?
Yeah, he wasn't the black jesus that everyone was trying to make him out to be. I didn't like him at the time, but he seems like a godsend compared to today's shit show.
He’s a great speaker. After the dumbass that preceded him, he seemed like a miracle. Oh well. “Fool me once you can’t get fooled again.”
He gave NASA to Musk
Would you say that about any president? Genuinely curious. I can think of ones that I like some of their policies and deeds, but the whole of their work? Lincoln maybe.
Lincoln presided over the largest mass execution in American history where 38 Dakota men were hanged. Further, he emancipated slaves not because he had moralistic ideals but because he thought he couldn’t preserve the Union without doing so.
Every US president is a war criminal
What about the Roosevelts and Johnson?
I don’t know if you can label someone just “not terrible” that’s directly responsible for 400 civilian deaths. I mean the next two presidents were worse for civilian deaths so idk. The US is a fat turd run by war criminals.
At this point I’m fine with someone who isn’t terrible.
Couldn’t agree more.
Hard to argue logic like that
Best president of my life (started with Carter). I’d give him a C- if not grading on a curve.
How old are you OP? Just curious to what your frame of reference is.
Did I click somewhere wrong and mistakenly enter the Boca Raton Chamber of Commerce?
OP: Tell me you are a suburban white male without telling me that you are a suburban white male.
I’m a suburban white male. What is your point>
My point is that your opinion is one predicated on extreme levels of misinformation and propaganda that only Americans could possibly be subject to. If you have any intellectual honesty whatever, you should seek out the answer to why your opinion on Obama is universally laughable across the global south.
Dis ain’t even a shower thought bro, icl I’d rather leave politics out of some communities, but 100% I agree.
I wonder what you guys expect out of your politicians. They’re not supposed to be heroes.
Also, the fact that these come up now and are bringing up how unimpressive the Dems are are strange to me when mango Mussolini are causing havoc.
Were people deifying Obama like Trump? It seemed like most people were upset with him most of the time.
Were people deifying Obama like Trump?
There was a reddit post of him talking about what’s happening now in front of an audience. Yes. He’s a deity.
I think that likeability and presidency are not really related or relevant. I think that’s more about getting elected.
I think that leadership is about building and shaping the world into a place where everyone can feel safe and loved.
It’s about security and stability, about having an idea of what you want it to look like, being able to articulate that and then make it happen.
That kind of leadership seems to be in short supply and getting rarer.
I’m not sure why.
bullshit. he’s absolutely a hero. everything he did was honorable when you consider he felt he felt his legacy was dependent on compromise and treating the opposition as an equal.
consider what Republicans have done before and after. Obama was a good man in a difficult place. he had to be something he isn’t so he could be successful
alas politics
A president is only going to be awesome when they nearly 100% align with your values, which means that for at lest 30% of the country, they’re a terrible president. So the question is: should a president at least try to represent as much of the country as possible?
Honestly, I think the US should do away with the executive branch. I’m not sure what should replace it; maybe make the House proportionally representative, separate the Senate out of Congress, give it some of the executive powers and remove some of the congressional powers, and get 3 branches that way. But the Presidency was a bad idea back in the founding days, and it’s proving to be one of the biggest mistakes the founders made.
Best one you guys had since… I dont know. Reagan?
Best since FDR. We’re fucked.
There is no way you think Reagan was good
Are there people besides brainwashed republicans who unironically think Reagan was a great president?
A lot of those people got really quiet when we started fellating putin. I had to hear for years about how rad he was, and now crickets.
foggy@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Least bad president in my lifetime.
Bailed out the banks, that sucked.
Itdidnttrickledown@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I guess the least bad president in my lifetime was jimmy carter. Guy sold his families peanut farm to prevent a conflict of interest. He gets a lot of bad press but he tried. After he left the office spent the rest of his life helping to build homes for the poor.
InverseParallax@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Jesus christ, you fell for the GOP talking points!
The bank bailout was by Paulson under Bush, it was literally just blank checks with 0 strings attached.
Obama altered the deal, he made it so onerous the banks begged to pay back the money early just to get him off their backs.