@Bollox Ref

he smiles those big white teeth at us....while he stabs us in the back. 'us' meaning 'not the defense industry and wall street'.

mr wd reminded me that when the Occupy movement got too frisky, he'd [on typo edit]: shit shut it all down (fusion centers and all) before it could offer a serious challenge to The Power.

refresh my memory if you can: who did he name the most trasnsformative president ever, and his defenders had rushed to Spain Things. the rebecca solnit ilk. Reagan?

“… You mentioned earlier that I’m in some ways a never-Trump conservative. That’s not quite right, but what is true is that temperamentally I am sympathetic to a certain strain of conservatism....."

Don't we know it. And now we have Obiden to look forward to.

Obama is the ultimate, vapid poseur. Big words, a little history and... gravitas.

The next four years will be yummy.

(Edited)

@snoopydawg

i've only had time to read about half of Fikremariam's column, chores calling (thanks for introducing him, by the way), but it's well written, and yes:

Malcolm X noted the difference between the House Negro and the Field Negro, noting the House Negro prefers the royal We when speaking of the Master's bidness.

i loved that he noted who post-Haj Malcolm became, and noted (radicalized) MLK's fear that he'd brought negroes into a burning house. history records a meeting between the two and their handshake.

The way he speaks now is much different than how he did before he became that 'charming man with his beautiful family."

Which he did, if you heard him prior to 2000 and after, you would be shocked. His cadence, his inflection, all of it was to cater to Chicago's large African-American voting bloc. That's why I call him what he is bourgeois hustler. https://t.co/EUSvM7D53l

— Teodrose Fikremariam (@TeodroseFikre) November 21, 2020

From the article:

Now that I’ve shed my political blinders, I see how this game is played. I’ll be honest here and admit that Democrats irritate me more than Republicans for this one simple reason. I’ve come to expect Republicans to be malicious—there is honesty in their advertisement. However, it’s the Democrats who smile like foxes as they pretend to be our allies only to stab us in our backs the minute they get elected who gall me the most. They have maintained power for decades by successfully treading on the pains of marginalized groups as they concurrently enact legislation and regulations that inflame the very injustices they rail against.

Forget Plymouth Rock, the biggest hoodwink of them all that landed on us was a boulder named Barack. After losing a Congressional primary to Bobby Rush in 2000, Obama’s inner circle realized that he was not embraced by “African-Americans” in Chicago because many did not see him as one of them. He quickly adapted and learned the art of duplicity; Obama perfected the craft of talking eloquently about our issues and suffering as a means to an end. The end was his unabated ego. After he scaled the heights of politics, he ended up enacting policies that exacerbated the wealth gap. For his brazen act of betrayal, Obama was rewarded handsomely.

Barack Obama was not an outlier but the norm when it comes to the tokens who are paraded by Democrats to represent faux-progress and counterfeit diversity. Kamala Harris is the next black bourgeoisie in line who is hoping to use the plight of African-Americans and the tribulations of “black” folk to win the White House. After spending a career locking up brown and “black” folk with impunity and resurrecting the ugly legacy of penal slavery, she is now shamelessly pretending to be the next coming of Sojourner Truth—hers is the audacity of trope.

Listen to his speech patterns starting at 6:40. There is no shuck and awe from his speech.

[video:https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=oDSH4tO07ho]

From the excerpts I’ve read on his book the things that stand out for me is that he’s whining about how we abandoned him during the 2010 midterms and that we were mean to George Effing Bush on his way to Obama’s inauguration. He blames us for his losing the senate after his hideously flawed health care giveaway to insurance execs instead of looking into a f’cking mirror.

What really pisses me off is that he released his book in the middle of a raging epidemic and mass unemployment. This book got him $37.5 billion and he has so much to say that it’s coming in a 2 part book. Good lord the arrogance of him doing now. "Hey everybody look Obama dropped his book! The country has turned to shit, but read the book!

Gah! And gag me!

But hey here’s Kamala to fix our problem with racism because Obama being president for 8 years wasn’t enough for some here. Or something. Kamala didn’t even make it through the primary because Tulsi knocked her off her pedestal and told everyone how bad she was as AG. lol...thanks, Tulsi!

@Cassiodorus does the title say it all?

his defense of failing to create a public option (iirc): we had no majority in the senate! pfffft. he had his bully pulpit, which he never used save to fuck over the 95%, most especially big labor, which he'd used to convince them to buy into ObombaDontCare. and were they pissed that they'd been sold a bill of goods.. presidents and big egos: ha ha; yeppers.

(i'd covered the next afl-cio meeting virtually...) ; ) and trumpka is and was an oligarch in his own right. also prez of the international afl-cio. at least the longshoreman pulled out of the corrupt organization in the end.

(obama/trumka strike breakers blockading gmo grains at the port in W state, i've forgotten its name by now)

and as i understand it, obomba care was romney care disguised.

From what I gather of the reviews, Obama tries to portray himself as a Nice Liberal With a Big Ego, but, you know, sober and realistic and all that stuff. There was this New Republic review that was critical and stuff, but I couldn't tell from the book review if there was anything in the book on, say, Obama's crushing of Occupy, or picking his cabinet on the advice of a Citigroup exec, or Syria, Libya, Honduras, Haiti, or the Ukraine, or his party's record-breaking defeats when he was in office and his proxies were busy bankrupting the DNC, or his attempts to pass the Grand Bargain or the Trans-Pacific Partnership. You know, the acts of his that would really rip the cover off of all of this OH SO STRENUOUS LABOR through which Obama strives to avoid admitting what a wannabe Republican he was and is.

Oh and by the way. You can get the book in PDF format for free on Library Genesis.

@mimi

insight of an adult from a child's young life, but we all make choices along the way. and it's difficult to know how one's primary care-givers taught them, modeled for them, etc.

on edit: primary caregiver are one thing, but other figures in one's life can be large as well, as in: whose approval was oboma seeking in his rabid qust for power?

i'd linked to his books on amazon in the OP and the earliest they carry is: The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream Oct 17, 2006 by Barack Obama

he's clearly a high-functioning sociopath, as have been many presidents, and i had tried to specify that these hypocrisies were only related to his new gaggable book, and of course most people in power are hypocrites.

but what we need to know is what they do, have done, not what their stories were purported to be, imo, and certainly not what they virtue signal, esp. on twitter. the exceptions might be if one were malwired in the womb, or failed to bond with any care-giver, and suffered attachment disorder (essentially conscience-free). but that's a much larger subject.

childhood and who influenced him when he was a child. In general I believe it to be helpful to investigate a person|'s childhood. I admit I didn't read his books, just pieces and little bits of the first one. But I knew that he started to 'tell stories and produced narratives' very early, starting about his father he barely knew and imo did not or never understood (which was of course not his fault).

In my work as a low level video archivist I ran in a couple of short clips how classmates remembered him as a high school student. Nothing spectacular. The narratives he created in his books were not visible to his peers when he was younger.

He was influenced by his grandmother (and more or less raised) and it is worth to look at her 'ideology or world views'. Little is known about his grandfather. Strangely enough he didn't say much about him. Why? He was also a kid tossed back and forth between his mother, her second Indonesian husband (and with it living in Indonesia), his grandparents and completely tossed by his father into nothingness. That leaves a quite urgent need to make up stories (real or imagined) to fill that child confusing nothingness. I don't remember anymore when Obama started to write. Was it when he was in Occidental College or later?

(ADD. I looked it up, he wrote that book years later in 1995 when he already had organized Bill Clinton's campaign in 1992. And quite telling he made a children's version of his book as well... one can never start to manipulate one's readership early enough, right?)

Just saying. People are formed imo in their childhood years. Some make up stories about it for lack of what should have been a childhood within a functioning family. Being confronted with several cultures and way of thinking through his grandmother, mother, mothers second husband, absent father and a shadow grandfather not much was written about, isn't peanuts for any child. There is always a reason for why someone starts to write narratives and I think the child Obama had many needs and reasons to do just that.

This is not a defense of the adult Obama's political actions. I think if you wanted to you can write an essay of the double or triple hypocrisy of most politicians who made it up the ladder of power into the Presidency. And I think it is always helpful to look at any person's childhood experiences.

Just saying...no offense ... and no defense either.

PS I don't read Obama's books, as in general I don't like reading fiction.