Wednesday, November 22, 2017

One of you all read this post in the last three hours. One of you four from the U.S., or you from China, you from Poland, or you from South Korea. So, I read it too. 

I got a pain in my heart reading the first bolded sentence, I really did. 

I would write the second bolded sentence again.

The third is absolutely true. I remember telling myself "You have to write this."

I do not remember writing #4 or thinking that. But I did. And, according to #4, I had thought and written that previous to September 28, 2015. No memory of that either. The rest of the paragraph #4 leads is absolutely the case and I do remember writing about that repeatedly.

I do remember writing #6 and concluding that after thinking about the issue of NATO ad taedium since the Russian invasion of Ukraine. 

#7. "TPP still to come," change to "TPP undone" by the first governor-general of the American Oblast.

I did not know on September 28, 2015 that Russia would rig the 2016 presidential election for Donald Trump. I don't think the Russians did. But a year after the post below American intel and President Obama knew. The intel services went public with it. Obama refused to give their consensus his imprimatur. He refused to do anything beyond telling Putin to "stop it." For fear of putting his hand on the election scales. When the Russo-Republican conspiracy began dripping into public consciousness in the late summer and fall of 2016, the alarm bells were ringing and I wrote that Obama should be doing more: post-pone the election was one of the things I remember writing. Federalize the states voting security. Put the Marshalls at voting precincts vulnerable to Trump Brownshirts intimidation So, the question in enumerated sentence #5, I did provide an answer to the question and as I recall more than one.

It makes me sick to write, but I have written it before (when it also made me sick), that Barack Obama's failure to secure the election from the Russo-Republican attack resulted in the overthrow of the Original America and the advent of Amerika 2.0. Obama knew: He gave that speech in North Carolina--What? a week before the election?-- saying, 

"The fate of the Republic rests on your shoulders. The fate of the world is teetering."

The president of the United States swears an oath that he, 

"...will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."

This was a new kind of attack, Obama was in his last months as president but he knew. And he failed to act to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution to the best of his Ability. The result was the loss of Original America, which I am repeating as an avoidance mechanism. Deep breath: I repeat the exquisitely painful judgment I rendered many months ago. Barack Obama was the last president of Original America, its loss was due to his dereliction, you cannot but be the worst president of the United States when your failure to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution results in the loss of country. The American Son, personally, I felt of him as one of my very best friends, lost the country. Oh, this is high tragedy. I miss Barack Obama so much it actually hurts. But I cannot escape the judgment and will not unsay what I wrote months ago, he was the worst president of the United States. 

And now, I will go have a cyanide cocktail if I can find the cyanide. Good night.

Monday, September 28, 2015

These Are The Good Old Days.

(1) Barack Obama is in the last year and change of his presidency and, I promise you, we are going to miss this president. We will look back at his accomplishments and the way he made his decisions and we will say, "He did a lot." He did a lot against bitter opposition, he was steady and rational, there was always a well-thought reason for his decisions, even those with which we disagree, as I do with JCPOA/UNSCR 2231. 
(2) There is a compelling case for, maybe not greatness, but "very goodness" for this presidency and I think very good will be the consensus among presidential historians once they have perspective that comes with time. I read that Obama currently is ranked 17th among all presidents in a composite of surveys. I think it likely that ranking will rise with time.

(3) I have wanted to write this for, oh, maybe six months or so. I write it tonight because readers of this site may be surprised and I wanted to be on record while the corpse was still warm and I could not be accused of being nostalgic. I have lambasted Obama when my nature was up and I unsay none of those criticisms now. I am looking at his body of work and I see near greatness in that body of work. I write tonight because, gritting his teeth, the president met with and gave competing speeches with and against Russian president Vladimir Putin at the United Nations over Syria and because the early instant analyses are that Putin made Obama his bitch at the UN, he won the battle of the dueling speeches.

(4) I unsay none of my suspicions, supported by incident after incident that Barack Obama does not "get" the non-Black world. He is abstracted away from Europe, considers it a jigsaw puzzle. His heart is in Africa and the Pacific. He has few friends internationally and cooperation is the exception. Non-black world leaders do not trust Obama, they do not like him, not Putin, not Xi, not Rousseff, not Merkel, not Netanyahu, not Harper, for godssake not Canada's Steven Harper, and Cameron is wary. All feel Obama is arrogant, condescending, and wrong. These are heads of state themselves, they have pride, they are strong personalities and the writ of the U.S. president's leadership does not run. This is the the glaring failure of the Obama presidency. A very good man and a very good U.S. president has less influence among major world leaders than recent presidents.

I have wondered in print several times about the specific dynamics behind this international dysfunction and I don't know what it is. I know there has been dysfunction. I have looked ever so briefly at the body language today between Putin and Obama, more so at the confrontational rhetoric, and it is as bad as it has ever been. Readers of Public Occurrences know that this is a recurring theme here. I know only that the odds are that when so many world leaders do not have a working relationship with the president of the United States that it is only common sense to conclude that they are in significant measure correct and that our president is not the only right one in the world.

(5) But you ask me a reasonable question if you ask, as I have asked myself, "What specifically would you have had the president do or not do that he did not do or did do that would have resulted in a more influential presidency abroad?", and I cannot answer that reasonable question. He has made rational decisions, he has given them forethought and still he is the one who other world leaders are wary of. Take Putin: No, in my opinion the U.S. should not have expanded NATO east and manifestly that has exacerbated Russia's paranoia. But Obama did not expand NATO east, he inherited it, he inherited it and didn't change it, as he inherited the panopticon state from Bush43 and has made some reforms but it is still a panopticon state. We should not have expanded NATO eastward and that fed into Russian paranoia but 
(6) paranoia is a mental disorder, the Russians have it, the U.S. does not (at least vis-vis Russia) and the inconvenient truth that paranoids do not see is that NATO is not a threat to Russia. That Russia does not see that is Russia behaving irrationally, it is not the U.S. producing what was not there.

Obama deftly got the U.S. and to that extent the world, out of the Great Recession. Affordable Care, the assassination of Osama bin Laden, the drone strikes on al Qaeda leaders (some 2,000), the Iran deal, 
(7) TPP (still to come), the opening to Cuba--these are remarkable doings.

I think presidential historians will see all this when they write their post-mortems on the Obama presidency and I think there is a plausible case for greatness in  that record. He should be in the top ten and may be rated higher than any president in my adult lifetime. Weasly words there, "may be," I will change those to Obama "will be" rated higher than any president since 1976.