Barack Obama Archives - Ramblin' with Roger

It’s a distraction?

MLK, Hillary, Barack HUSSEIN Obama

I’ve been musing over how much people rush to suggest that it’s a distraction when FOTUS does something in light of his current crisis regarding Jeffrey Epstein or his previous crises. A is a distraction for B, B is a distraction for C. Maybe some of it is distraction, but so much is also on brand.

ITEM: Over his family’s objections, the regime released records about the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The files had been sealed since 1977, when the FBI turned them over to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). They were scheduled to be released in 2027. But know that the records were specifically from COINTELPRO, the FBI program (1956-1971) designed “to discredit and neutralize organizations considered subversive to U.S. political stability. It was covert and often used extralegal means to criminalize various forms of political struggle.”

Distraction? Maybe. On brand: Absolutely; trying to tear down a black American icon because he is too DEI. Incidentally, on Juneteenth, he took the opportunity to say that America has “too many non-working holidays.”

ITEM: Attorney General Bondi announced that the DOJ has released additional documents from the FBI’s investigation into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s email server.

Distraction?: Almost certainly; isn’t that a rerun? On brand? Definitely! In 2016, then-Republican candidate insisted that her use of a private server had been criminal and made “Lock her up!” a chant at his rallies.

BHO

ITEM: FOTUS also attacked former president Barack Obama, claiming that he and Hillary “tried to rig the [2016] election, and they got caught. And there should be very severe consequences for that.” Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard is getting back on FOTUS’ good side, after her Iran intel ‘betrayal,’ by calling for their prosecution for participating in a ‘treasonous conspiracy’ against FOTUS for indicating that Russian operatives had worked on his behalf during the 2016 presidential election.

Distraction? Obama believes so, but I think not. FOTUS’s continued insistence that he ‘won’ the 2020 election and suggesting that they ‘rigged’ 2016 proves the ‘truth.’ This would ‘justify’ the Jan 6 insurrection as merely righting a wrong, and pardoning the insurrectionists as fair. On brand: From his 2011 ‘birther’ claims against Obama on, he’s obsessed with outdoing the black guy. He can count on his media sycophants to buy in. Red State: Tulsi Gabbard Posts Russiagate Evidence Obama Had Been Fearing. Gabbard to Newsmax: New Docs Will Refute Obama’s ‘Coup’ Denial. It’s all part of the retribution campaign, “this time with aides more inclined to carry out his wishes.” Not to mention an obsequious Congress.

Quid pro quo

ITEM: Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said that under AG Pam Bondi’s direction, he had talked to the lawyers for Ghislaine Maxwell, who was convicted of grooming victims for convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Blanche wrote that he anticipated meeting with Maxwell in the coming days.

Distraction? I don’t think so. There’s more than a slight chance that Maxwell will somehow immunize FOTUS in exchange for reducing her prison sentence or even a pardon, despite FOTUS’s obvious relationship with Epstein. On brand: 100%.This week, the White House account posted on X an image of FOTUS in front of American flags, eagles, and fireworks with the caption: “I was the hunted—NOW I’M THE HUNTER.”

Oh, you might want to read this background on the Epstein files: She Exposed Epstein and Shares MAGA’s Anger -the reporter (Julie K. Brown) who took down Jeffrey Epstein on what’s still hidden (NYT). Also, watch The Epstein File Fiasco (Legal Eagle).

ITEM: In railing against Joe Biden, FOTUS complains about 46’s competence. Yet 47 does his own word salads. For instance, recently speaking in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, FOTUS claimed that his late uncle John Trump taught Unabomber Ted Kaczynski at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He then claimed that he quizzed his uncle about his supposed student. This did not happen.

Distraction? I don’t know what to make of these ramblings – he does it a LOT – where he tells a demonstrably false story, with no obvious takeaway. And he was doing this in 2024, before the election Distraction? Maybe. Or dementia?

ARA: the Presidents

undeniable

Kelly, that guy from western New York, asked several questions, two about the Presidents.

One scenario I had in mind when Biden was elected was that he would serve two years–essentially steward the country through the worst of COVID and get the economic recovery going–and then step down, making Harris President. Should he have done so? Would Harris have done better as an incumbent?

One thing I know about Joe Biden is that he is a traditionalist regarding the presidency. Barring extraordinary circumstances, such as severe illness, he would never serve two years and then resign. Only one president in our history resigned from office: Richard Nixon in 1974, less than two years after Joe became the US senator from Delaware.

Moreover, if he had announced too early that he would quit after two, any chance of his agenda being acted upon would have been almost impossible to achieve. I suppose he could have done it secretly and then announced it after the midterms of 2022.

However, completing a president’s agenda in the best situations takes time. There are negotiations to be had, and much of what he achieved was in the latter half of his term. I noticed that FOTUS felt entitled to do everything on Day One, but he didn’t even have his cabinet in place on January 21st.

Secondly, I don’t think he would have ceded the presidency to Kamala Harris in 2022. Many people, including me, thought she was a terrible candidate when she ran for president in 2020. Heck, her campaign didn’t even make it to the election year; she started it in 2019 and ended it in 2019.

HHH redux

Moreover, in 2022, she would have been burdened by immigration and inflation worse than in 2024. Conversely, the Biden support for Israel in the Gaza war harmed her greatly. It would have been like Hubert Humphrey running against LBJ’s Vietnam War in 1968; it would have been even more difficult for Kamala to separate herself from Joe.

She was a much better candidate than I anticipated when she ran in 2024. Still, many people hated the process of her becoming the Democratic nominee; even people I know IRL, who probably voted for her, were appalled by the manner in which she became the pick.

I have intimated before that it would have been a better choice for Joe to decide to be a one-term president much earlier. There have been willing, “successful” one-term presidents before. The most noteworthy in terms of his agenda was James Knox Polk (1845-1849), who managed to win the Mexican War and expand our manifest destiny. I’m not saying this is good, merely that he was triumphant at it.

His inner circle ultimately served him poorly by trying to manage his physical decline. As Dean Phillips suggested, Biden should have stepped down around July 2023. Then, there would have been a primary process that most Democrats would have embraced.

(BTW, my candidate would have probably been Pete Buttigieg because he spoke so well to the rightwing news crowd, going on their shows regularly; he was like the “FOX whisperer.”)

All that said, I’m not sure that ANYONE could have beaten FOTUS unless the man were indicted shortly after January 2021. Jack Smith’s much-too-late report proves clearly that he was the felon we all knew he was. “But for [his] election and imminent return to the presidency, the office assessed that the admissible evidence was sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction at trial,” the report states.

AotD

On November 22, 2024, Senator John Fetterman told ABC This Week’s Jon Karl: “You have a singular political talent [in FOTUS]. It’s undeniable. …if you’re not afraid to say all of those things, or, and after you survived an assassination, you literally were shot in your head and had the presence of mind to respond, ‘fight, fight, fight.’

“I was driving home from Indiana County (PA) at nine o’clock, and there was a Trump superstore on the side of a road, nine o’clock on Friday night, and people are buying swag. And that really crystallized in, at the assassination [attempt]… the day or two later, you start seeing people wearing shirts with that iconic picture. And, you know, the energy and the anger and, it’s like, wow, I really thought — in fact, I thought that might be ball game.'”

So, FOTUS has mastered the Art of the Deal, in which January 6, 2021, was a stroll through the Capitol. His pardon of the J6 insurrectionists was the final nail in the gaslighting coffin.

“They’re eating their cats” is merely Orange hyperbole. Yet I read how he picks out the lies and errors of others. Joe LIED about not pardoning Hunter. He was wrong about the fact that the Afghan Taliban wouldn’t take over Afghanistan that quickly.

Part of the reason is that many Americans, especially men, preferred Ben Shapiro, “Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson, YouTube, and X over the mainstream media,” where Biden and Harris largely operated.

Perhaps it’s a function of what author Jianwei Xun, in his book about FOTUS and Musk, calls Hypnocracy, a “new form of social control… that… induces a permanent functional trance through algorithmic modulation of collective consciousness… In the era of post-truth and artificial intelligence, power no longer operates through repression but through the manipulation of reality perception.”

When this question came in, my daughter and I watched the 2005 Charlie the Chocolate Factory movie with Johnny Depp. She suggested that the children that Willy Wonka selected were like FOTUS. Much of the American public was like the indulgent parents who capitulated to their noisy brats.

BHO

What WERE 45 and Obama saying to one another at President Carter’s funeral, anyway?!

“Donald, you know that I think you’re a dipwad. But you’re gonna be president again, much to my consternation. [FOTUS laughs]. So you’re in ‘the club.’ Let’s get together and have a rational conversation somewhere about why you shouldn’t undermine the Panama Canal treaty or blow up NATO by seizing Greenland and threatening Canada. Hey, if these actions don’t happen, people will think all of this is bluster and that you’ve ‘grown’ into the presidency. This could help your historical reputation!”

US “Bregret” already?

The Indivisible:

As early as late November, I was reading about some voters for the Republican candidate for President feeling regret about their vote. It’s similar to how many people in the United Kingdom felt after the Brexit vote in 2016; they had Bregret.

djt has promised huge tariffs on goods from China. Somehow, Americans didn’t understand that that would likely result in retaliatory tariffs on American goods. Now, he’s suggesting a tariff on goods from Canada and Mexico, our largest trading partners, even though we are in a USMCA (NAFTA successor) agreement that would preclude that from taking place until 2026.

This is presumably to”teach them a lesson” about US border security. The first rule of tariff wars is that no one wins a tariff war. If they respond in kind, which Mexico has already promised, this will increase the pain in Americans’ wallets.

Some contractors and farmers who supported him have talked about how they don’t know what they’re going to do if half of their workers are deported.

12 People Who Had Literally No Idea What Their Trump Vote Meant.

We don’t need no education

Hey, if the federal Department of Education is eliminated – a bill to do so has already been introduced – many of its services will also disappear. That’s the subtext of this link, which notes that Oklahoma has nevertheless found money to buy Bibles, optimally for every classroom.

Now, he says he can’t promise he’ll be able to lower grocery prices. An article in WaPo, behind a paywall, is titled, “After backing Trump, low-income voters hope he doesn’t slash their benefits.” It begins:

“NEW CASTLE, Pennsylvania — Lori Mosura goes to the grocery store on a bicycle because she can’t afford to fix her Ford F-150 truck.

“The single mother and her 17-year-old son live in an apartment that is so small she sleeps in the dining room. They receive $1,200 each month in food stamps and Social Security benefits but still come up short. Mosura said she often must decide whether to buy milk or toilet paper.”

Reaganomics redux

Here’s a fun fact from Heather Cox Richardson: “Laura Mannweiler of U.S. News and World Report estimated the worth of Trump’s current roster of appointees to be at least $344.4 billion, more than the gross domestic product of 169 countries. That number does not include Scott Bessent, whose net worth is hard to find. In comparison, Mannweiler notes, the total net worth of the officials in Biden’s Cabinet was about $118 million.

“The incoming administration will advance a different economic vision. Instead of trying to expand the economy through investment in infrastructure and manufacturing [as the Biden administration did], his team has emphasized cutting taxes for the wealthy and corporations and slashing regulations. The argument behind this approach to the economy is that concentrating wealth in the hands of investors will spur more investment while creating an environment that’s ‘friendly’ to business will create jobs.”It’s classic Reaganomics trickle-down, crony capitalism at its finest.

“Don’t test us.”

After Barack Obama was elected in 2008 and inaugurated in 2009, with solid majorities in the popular and Electoral College votes, Republicans served as the “loyal opposition.” This concept “indicates that the non-governing parties may oppose the actions of the sitting [government] while remaining loyal to the formal source(s) of the government’s power, such as the… constitution.”

I jest. The Tea Party movement simmered up in 2009, clearly a disloyal opposition designed to thwart his efforts at every turn. That he got anything done, especially after his first two years, was pretty miraculous.

Yet the message from this incoming administration and their allies is that the Democrats just should shut up, get out of the way, and let Orange be Orange. Senator Tom Cotton sent a letter to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin: “You issued a message to the department the day after the election commenting that the military will follow ‘lawful orders’ from the new president—a thinly veiled and baseless insinuation that [djt] will issue unlawful orders.” Baseless? Eh. Yet, Pete Hegseth, the choice to head Defense, is a train wreck.

Tom Homan, the incoming border czar, “plans to bring harsh consequences to any sanctuary city leader who threatens to hinder efforts by immigration authorities from mass-deporting illegal aliens.”

djt’s sometimes wacky Cabinet nominees shouldn’t need to be confirmed by the Senate! His words should be sufficient for the process. His media censorship arsenal is growing.

Resistance

So what is the response? The Union of Concerned Scientists notes: “We—and our supporters across the country—have a vital role to play in defending the progress we’ve made at the federal level, advancing our goals at the state level, and exposing and pushing back against the abuses that are likely to come. We’re clear about the threats we face, but we must move forward with hope and determination.” A key tenet is “Protecting democracy, state-by-state.” California is on board.

The Indivisible Guide: A Practical Guide to Democracy on the Brink is encouraging. It acknowledges the need to grieve for a while. I can’t live in despair for the next two or four years, and trust me, it would be very easy for me to do so. I’m holding onto the frankly uncomfortable thought that there will be a backlash to higher prices and other bad outcomes.

I know that some people are not there yet. Heck. I may not be there myself, but I pride myself on hoping I’ll get there eventually because the alternative is too dismal. There needs to be a response to what Cornel West called “American gangsterism crystallized, honest about itself, unashamed and bold.”

How djt Inverted the Violent History of Jan. 6

‘A Day of Love’: The president-elect and his allies have spent four years reinventing the Capitol attack — spreading conspiracy theories and weaving a tale of martyrdom for their ultimate political gain.

Review: Across the Spider-Verse

Miles Morales

There have been recent Marvel movies that I’ve thought about viewing (Guardians 3, e.g.) and I still may. When Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse came out, though, I HAD to see it. The fact that that Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, a pretty good gauge of popular culture on his Substack, loved it only added to my anticipation.

Spider-Man is my favorite character in the Marvel universe. During COVID, I saw all of the iterations of all of the Spidey films I had missed, which made No Way Home so delicious.

Still, my favorite webslinger film was the animated Into the Spider-Verse featuring Miles Morales. Across is a follow-up to that.

Isn’t it? The lengthy beginning of the film, before the credits, made me wonder for a time. Oh, yeah, there’s our young hero saving his neighborhood and frustrating his parents with… whatever secret he’s obviously keeping.

Gwen Stacy, a Spidey from a different sphere, shows up. This eventually prompts the Brooklyn-based teen to cross the Multiverse to join forces with other Spider-People to take on a calamitous villain Miles thinks he may be responsible for.

Without giving anything away, the film leans into the overarching mythos of the webslingers.

Obamaesque?

I was fascinated by the New Yorker article The Post-Racial Vision of “Across the Spider-Verse.” The subhead: “The movie treats its fantastical multiethnic team of superheroes and their forays into cultural determinism with Obama-like breeziness and tact.”

The key paragraph: “The appeal [of Miles’ character] is so universal—or, some might say, neutral—that even right-wing pundits who have dedicated the past few years to getting mad at every superhero or children’s film with a minority lead seem to have mostly given Miles Morales a pass. In what must have come as a surprise to its readers, ‘Worth It or Woke?,’ a Web site that disapprovingly assesses the wokeness of Hollywood releases, recently gave ‘Across the Spider-Verse’ a positive eighty-one-per-cent rating.

“Though it determined that the film took a ‘beloved character’ and ‘race-swapped in the name of Leftist virtue signaling,’ it briefly included the movie in its list of films that were ‘worth it.’ (The recommendation was ultimately pulled when the author of the review noticed that one of the characters had a ‘Protect Trans Kids’ sign in her bedroom.)” [Of COURSE it was.]

So Across the Spider-Verse has managed to walk the fine line of creating “representation” without ticking off the people who find the concept an anathema. Having Spideys from India and Japan, it appears, is OK by almost everyone.

The one structural difficulty is the same issue as Avengers: Infinity War; Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1; and virtually every movie’s second act. I want to see the next film NOW.

Venue

I saw the film at the Regal Theatre at Colonie Center near Albany. It’s not my favorite venue, but, at the time, the Spectrum was closed on Wednesdays, fortunately no longer the case.

So many ads and infotainment! The noon movie started at 12:25.

Ron DeSantis is a snowflake

Dreams from Our Founding Fathers:

Having spent too much time thinking about the Republican governor of Florida over his book bans and other nonsense, I had privately concluded that Ron DeSantis is a snowflake. As I looked up the term’s meaning, you might think, “Well, maybe.”

Wikipedia defines it as “a derogatory slang term for a person, implying that they have an inflated sense of uniqueness, an unwarranted sense of entitlement, or are overly-emotional, easily offended, and unable to deal with opposing opinions.”

On Last Week Tonight this month, John Oliver pointed to “a recent advertisement created by DeSantis and his team based on ‘Top Gun,’ which DeSantis’ camp called ‘Top Gov.’ In it, DeSantis is shown teaching new ‘recruits’ how to deal with the media, showing clips of how DeSantis himself has ‘never ever [backed] down from a fight.’

“In one clip, DeSantis seemingly stops a reporter from giving a ‘speech’ during a press conference. DeSantis is constantly complaining about the media taking him out of context. But in that particular clip, ‘he’s removing some pretty important context from the media,'” not letting her do her job.

Oliver notes, “He doesn’t hate all media – ‘even by Republican standards, the mutual affection between him and Fox is pretty extreme.’ During one four-month stretch, the network asked him to appear on air 113 times, nearly once a day, which is ‘just pathetic.'” Even a softball interview he did was pretty weird.

Entitled, easily offended, and unable to deal with opposing views? Check.

Diminishing freedom

DeSantis, and the Florida legislature, are leading forces in what Weekly Sift rightly describes as Imaginary problems, real laws, real victims. The Stop WOKE Act and the Parental Rights in Education Act (a.k.a. Don’t Say Gay) have led to a functional book ban that DeSantis denied; he lies. He has taken over the trustee board of the New College of Florida. (Hampshire College in Amherst, MA, is offering admission to all NCF students to match their current cost of tuition. )

Not that Desantis is alone in his overreach. “To my knowledge, there has been no drag-queen crime wave. So why do legislators in 15 states find it necessary to pass anti-drag laws their states never needed before? The answer has more to do with changes in Republican politics than changes in American society.” Mark Evanier noted that “the current move to restrict drag shows and people dressed unlike the norm for their gender — whatever that is these days — is ridiculous.”

The author

From Business Insider: DeSantis’ first book was his 2011 tome, Dreams from Our Founding Fathers: First Principles in the Age of Obama. The book’s title aimed to criticize Obama by playing with the name of the president’s first memoir, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance. “DeSantis even used a similar cover to the one Obama had…

“DeSantis was also critical of Obama personally, calling him ‘first in his own mind’ and saying, ‘he actually believed that he was a historically special figure.’ In one section of the book, DeSantis wrote that Obama lacked the humility of George Washington, the first US president.

“He wrote that Obama had a ‘palpable cockiness’ and ‘made outlandish claims about his own significance as an individual.’ “He accused the Obama campaign of having a ‘messianic posture.'” All of that is his right, even as he seemed as obsessed with BHO as DJT was/is.

“Eleven years later, the DeSantis campaign ran an ad during his 2022 gubernatorial reelection campaign that intimated DeSantis was uniquely chosen by God as a ‘fighter.'” DeSantis seems to despise Obama and yet emulates the traits he said he hated in the 44th President.

White House

I don’t know whether he’s actually running for President, let alone how he’ll do. Interestingly, some Republican members of Congress dissed him over calling the Ukraine war a “territorial dispute.” They must assume he is seeking higher office.