Will Obama go down as a massive disappointment?

Current Affairs
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[quote=“Rocko, post: 894649, member: 1”]Yeah I’m with the consensus so far on this one.

Plenty of promise in that election campaign but has delivered next to nothing in terms of meaningful change. The opposition haven’t helped (though in some respects it should have been an advantage to have extremist and splintered opposition) but his second term in particular has been a huge disappointment. His speech last week (or the week before) about the “reforms” of the NSA was indicative of just how little he wants to change anything. In his first term it seemed to be all about protecting his chances for a second term. In his second term it seems to be all about protecting his legacy as an after-dinner speaker. He seems utterly afraid of delivering on any of his change agenda.[/quote]

For fuxake, go buy a fucking clue.
The Affordable Care Act is, and will go down in history as, one of the most monumental pieces of legislation in US history. It will be right up there with Civil Rights Act, the New Deal etc.
Do you realise that amount of people in the US that have/had no health insurance? That the number 1 cause of bankruptcy and personal financial disaster in the US is medical bills? That people die, for the simple reason that they can’t afford to go to the doctor and let things fester till it’s to late?
If Obama does fuckall else, he can at least fall back on the ACA.

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[quote=“His Holiness Da Dalai Lama, post: 894754, member: 1503”]For fuxake, go buy a fucking clue.
The Affordable Care Act is, and will go down in history as, one of the most monumental pieces of legislation in US history. It will be right up there with Civil Rights Act, the New Deal etc.
Do you realise that amount of people in the US that have/had no health insurance? That the number 1 cause of bankruptcy and personal financial disaster in the US is medical bills? That people die, for the simple reason that they can’t afford to go to the doctor and let things fester till it’s to late?
If Obama does fuckall else, he can at least fall back on the ACA.[/quote]

& the drones mate,dont forget the drones

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Lovely, if his Holiness the Dali Lama is a stubborn as Rocko when it cones to an argument we could be on for a right borefest here

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[quote=“The Wild Colonial Bhoy, post: 894666, member: 80”]it could only be disappointing if it wasnt so predictable and right from day 1 him towing the line was as predictable as night following day

the fact that you dont mention the drone strikes sums you up as the vile racist cunt we all thought you were[/quote]

Are you calling him an uncle Tom?

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Just heard some excerpts from his speech. Talking about how upward mobility has stalled and people on lower wages have lost income, he wants to address that and create more ladders to the middle class. That’s pretty radical stuff in the USA. If goes some way to addressing this as he says it will be huge. He’s sorted out health insurance which is groundbreaking. He inherited a basket of shit and has to deal with some absolute nutjobs that would rather bankrupt the state than work with him. He’s done alright. How Syria goes in the next year or two and whether he can get the Israeli cunts to negotiate in any meaningful way will determine his foreign policy legacy.

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[quote=“His Holiness Da Dalai Lama, post: 894613, member: 1503”]Kennedy did fuckall.
LBJ did 10 times more for the Kennedy legacy… now there was a real fucking politician. The Democrats did control both the House and Senate for 8 years of Kennedy/LBJ, but you have to keep in mind the Southern Democrats back then were more conservative (and racist ) than the Republicans are now.

Clinton got shit done, and did so with both houses against him. One of the finest politicians the US has ever known.

While you can make the argument that Obama is longer on style than substance, in fairness to him he has been shackled by the most vitriolic opposition ever seen in American politics. The Tea party cunts will not compromise on anything. They are intent on trying to take him down, even at the expense of the country as a whole. A bigger shower of cunts you will never meet.[/quote]

Martin O’Neill has been closely aligned with the Tea party agenda for many years and walked out on villa because randy Lerner voted for Obama. Fact

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[quote=“His Holiness Da Dalai Lama, post: 894754, member: 1503”]For fuxake, go buy a fucking clue.
The Affordable Care Act is, and will go down in history as, one of the most monumental pieces of legislation in US history. It will be right up there with Civil Rights Act, the New Deal etc.
Do you realise that amount of people in the US that have/had no health insurance? That the number 1 cause of bankruptcy and personal financial disaster in the US is medical bills? That people die, for the simple reason that they can’t afford to go to the doctor and let things fester till it’s to late?
If Obama does fuckall else, he can at least fall back on the ACA.[/quote]
Do you think there’s any chance at all you might just be underestimating the importance of Civil Rights?

Obamacare is a much watered down version of his election promises. He was all too happy to do a deal with the pharmaceutical companies and the insurance companies, meaning he reformed elements of the health insurance system but did nothing to address the root causes of unaffordability. Don’t confuse bankruptcy with poverty. Reforming insurance policies was an absolute necessity but poverty levels in the US are a disgrace and the longer Obama has stayed in the job the less reformist he has been.

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Don’t be so naive tinnion, FFS.

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At this stage of his Presidency Clinton was an even worse lame duck than Obama and was caught up in the Lewinski affair. Three years later he had the highest end of office ratings of any American president. And still Gore the effective incumbent lost out to Dubya. Anyway the point is it is way too early to judge Obamas Presidency.

30

Very good article from the excellent Gary Younge in the Guardian today on Obama’s presidency and its achievements.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/feb/23/what-is-barack-obama-presidency-for

What the hell is Barack Obama’s presidency for?

A few days after John F Kennedy’s assassination, Lyndon Johnson sat in his kitchen with his key advisers working his first speech to Congress. It was the evening of Kennedy’s funeral – Johnson was now president. The nation was still in grief and Johnson, writes Robert Caro in The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Passage of Power, was not yet able to move into the White House because Kennedy’s effects were still there.
He had been a hapless vice-president; now he had to both personify and project the transition from bereavement to business as usual. In the midst of the cold war, with Vietnam brewing, the Kennedy administration had been trying to get civil rights legislation and tax cuts through Congress. There was plenty of business to attend to. Johnson’s advisers were keen that he introduced himself to the nation as a president who could get things done.

For that reason, writes Caro, they implored him not to push for civil rights in this first speech, since it had no chance of passing. “The presidency has only a certain amount of coinage to expend, and you oughtn’t to expend it on this,” said “one of the wise, practical people around the table”. Johnson, who sat in silence at the table as his aides debated, interjected: “Well, what the hell’s the presidency for.”
“First,” he told Congress a few days later, “no memorial oration or eulogy could more eloquently honour President Kennedy’s memory than the earliest possible passage of the civil rights bill for which he fought so long.” Over the next five years he would go on to sign the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, launch the war on poverty and introduce Medicaid (medical assistance for low-income families) and Medicare (for seniors). That’s what his presidency was for.

Barack Obama has now been in power for longer than Johnson was, and the question remains: “What the hell’s his presidency for?” His second term has been characterised by a profound sense of drift in principle and policy. While posing as the ally of the immigrant he is deporting people at a faster clip than any of his predecessors; while claiming to be a supporter of labour he’s championing trade deals that will undercut American jobs and wages. In December, even as he pursued one whistleblower, Edward Snowden and kept another, Chelsea Manning, incarcerated[/URL], he told the crowd at Nelson Mandela’s funeral: "[URL=‘http://www.cnn.com/2013/12/10/politics/mandela-obama-remarks/’]There are too many leaders who claim solidarity with Madiba’s struggle for freedom, but do not tolerate dissent from their own people."
If there was a plot, he’s lost it. If there was a point, few can remember it. If he had a big idea, he shrank it. If there’s a moral compass powerful enough to guide such contradictions to more consistent waters, it is in urgent need of being reset.
Given the barriers to democratic engagement and progressive change in America – gerrymandering, big money and Senate vetoes – we should always be wary of expecting too much from a system designed to deliver precious little to the poor[/URL]. We should also challenge [URL=‘http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/mar/03/barackobama.uselections2008’]the illusion that any individual can single-handedly produce progressive change in the absence of a mass movement that can both drive and sustain it.
Nonetheless, it was Obama who set himself the task of becoming a transformational political figure in the mould of Ronald Reagan or JFK. “I think we are in one of those fundamentally different times right now where people think that things, the way they are going, just aren’t working,” he said. It was he who donned the mantles of “hope” and “change”.
It was obvious what his election was for. First, preventing the alternative: presidential candidates in the grip of a deeply dysfunctional and reactionary party. His arrival marked a respite from eight years of international isolation, military excess and economic collapse. He stood against fear, exclusion and greed – and won. Second, it helped cohere and mobilise a new progressive coalition that is transforming the electoral landscape. Finally, it proved that despite the country’s recent history Americans could elect a black man to its highest office.

So his ascent to power had meaning. It’s his presence in power that lacks purpose. The gap between rich and poor[/URL] and [URL=‘http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/29/business/racial-wealth-gap-widened-during-recession.html?pagewanted=all’]black and white has grown while he’s been in the White House, the prospects for immigration reform remain remote, bankers made away with the loot, and Guantánamo’s still open. It’s true there’s a limit to what a president can do about much of this and that Republican intransigence has not helped. But that makes the original question more salient not less: if he can’t reunite a divided political culture, which was one of his key pledges, and his powers are that limited, then what is the point of his presidency?
This should not deny his achievements. He scaled down one major war, is winding down another, and helped save the US car industry. If he’s on the hook for growing inequality, then he can take credit for the deficit shrinking[/URL] and [URL=‘http://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/feb/07/us-economy-jobs-unemployment-rate’]unemployment falling. But together, this amounts to an extended period of triage before sending the patient back out into the world without any plan for long-term recovery. The underlying impulses, policies, priorities and structures that made the wars and economic collapse possible are still in place.

Finally, there’s healthcare reform. The brouhaha over its botched rollout will scarcely be remembered a few years hence. But with roughly 31 million people set to remain uninsured and little changing for many, its undeniable benefits are not likely to be remembered as transformational. All in all, there’s precious little that Obama has done that any of his primary opponents would not have done.
Occasionally, he either gives a lead – like after the shootings at Newtown when he advocated for gun control – or follows one, as in his support for gay marriage or preventing the deportation of young undocumented immigrants, which helps to set a tone or establish a moral marker. But these interventions are too rare, and their remedies too piecemeal, to constitute a narrative.
“If you’re going to be president, then I guess you obviously want to be in the history books,” said Susan Aylward, a frustrated Obama supporter in Akron, Ohio, shortly before the last election. “So what does he want to be in the history books for? I don’t quite know the answer to that yet.” Sadly, it seems, neither does he.

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The US is to restore diplomatic ties with Cuba.

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Victory for Fidel!

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Cuba taking the first tentative steps to FREEDOM. The ballsy guys are already in there buying property.

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I wonder what’s in it for the yanks?

Cuba seemed to do great without democracy

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[QUOTE=“caoimhaoin, post: 1059050, member: 273”]I wonder what’s in it for the yanks?

Cuba seemed to do great without democracy[/QUOTE]
Yeah, all those lads that paddled to the states in a fridge were doing so to spread the virtue of communism.

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Obama is now an inFidel.

The Republicans’ official campaign slogan for 2016 is “Death to the inFidels”.

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[QUOTE=“Sidney, post: 1059069, member: 183”]Obama is now an inFidel.

The Republicans’ official campaign slogan for 2016 is “Death to the inFidels”.[/QUOTE]
Thanks sid, I knew I could count on you.

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[QUOTE=“caoimhaoin, post: 1059050, member: 273”]I wonder what’s in it for the yanks?

Cuba seemed to do great without democracy[/QUOTE]
there must be something in it for them all right. nothing given without taking with them fckers.

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US Republican Party announces “Death to the inFidels” as official slogan for 2016 Presidential Campaign

Outraged US Republicans have announced a controversial new slogan for the 2016 Presidential Campaign, as President Barack Obama moves to reopen diplomatic relations with Cuba after a gap of almost 56 years.

Newly announced 2016 Presidential candidate Jeb Bush called Obama’ s move “a Castrophe”.

“B. Hussein Osama has allowed us to be shafted by the Cubans”, said Bush. “He is literally an inFidel”.

But when it was suggested to him that the word “inFidel” suggested that Obama is in fact the one doing the shafting, Bush responded: “It suggests that he’s a big, gay Muslim, commie freedom hater, which he is.”

When it was also put to Bush that there was an irony that the Republicans were using a phrase associated with radical Islamism to attack a President they have described as a radical Islamist, Bush said there was no contradiction.

“Obama is anti-freedom, and by allowing free travel and trade with Cuba, he is destroying our freedom.”

“We’re all about freedom - the freedom to stop people going to Cuba, the freedom to stop gays marrying, the freedom to stop black people voting, the freedom to force women give birth to dead children, the freedom to force dead women to give birth to children, the freedom of mentally ill racists to carry automatic machine guns, the freedom to deny essential medical care to dying people, the freedom to bomb Muslim children.”

But doesn’t Obama already bomb Muslim children?

“Well, yes he does, but he doesn’t shout “yeeehaaaw, USA, USA, USA” every time he does it, and that’s not good enough. It’s un-American.”

The “Death to the inFidels” slogan has been criticised by media experts as “a turn-off” and “unappealing to sane people”. It’s the second such controversy, after another prospective Republican candidate for 2016, Scott Walker, launched his campaign last week under the banner “The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore”.

In other news, the North Korean cyber-hacking scandal escalated last night after all major US TV news programmes were unexpectedly replaced with “The Joy of Cooking Dogs with Kim Jong Un”. The North Koreans have also hacked the CBS network’s website to change the listing of the planned Christmas Day showing of “Citizen Kane” to “Citizen Canine”.

Republicans have also flown into a rage after last night’s edition of “Hannity” on Fox News was sensationally cyber-hacked by Cuba. Pictures went out as normal, but Hannity’s voice was digitally altered so that he appeared to be repeatedly saying “I’m a big, gay North Korean Cuban commie freedom hater and I love to suck dogs off and kiss my own butt”

Hannity has denied that he is to wear a muzzle on tonight’s edition of the programme.

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[QUOTE=“caoimhaoin, post: 1059050, member: 273”]I wonder what’s in it for the yanks?
[/QUOTE]

[insert universal healthcare quip here]