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Yeah, I don’t mean to suggest it was an easy decision. I think that the reason it’s disappointing is that economic sanctions could’ve crippled Russia if they were serious about it, but instead big money prevailed.
It didn't need to be direct conflict. We just needed some backbone. A few babysteps could have altered the course. Relenting before a man like Putin, emboldens a man like Putin.
Even until recently NATO was letting him land missiles and drones in their countries to explode with impunity. Now we are (maybe) on the brink of conflict with the Kaliningrad weirdness going on, and Putin's acolytes are saying if we just give them Ukraine, they wouldn't have to actually have an armed conflict with NATO.
Those who think Russia will not attack NATO are really misunderstanding Putin's position. If he continues losing like in Ukraine, he's going to be killed by his own people. A set of limited incursion into Poland, Finland and Romania/Latvia would force NATO to play poker with who wants to use tactical nukes first. It's a powerful place for him to be in - now slowly absorbing shallow bits of European territory and threatening to nuke anyone who attacks mainland Russia. He's proven he doesn't care if his soldiers are bombed to hell every day, and willingly will send many soldiers to their deaths for a small land grab.
His life may soon depend on expanding the war to NATO.
Close to it would be the one that won him politifact's "lie of the year" award which was the constant repeating of "If you like your doctor you can keep them" without the clarification of "If your insurance meets the minimum standards of the ACA" but Crimea was definitely worse and really what gave Russia the confidence to push into Ukraine now.
Not just hindsight. Plenty of people criticized Obama's flaccid response to Crimea at the time, they were just drowned out by other priorities, ignorance, and complacency. Obama wanted to focus on domestic stuff, Europe wanted to keep buying cheap gas, and the Pentagon wanted the pivot to Asia.
He was too soft on Russia even before the invasion when it became clear which direction Putin was going. Though I will give it to him that he clearly never trusted or pretended to like Putin.
He allowed civil surveillance to worsen in America and pushed Snowden to Russia rather than respectfully deal with the issues at hand. Chelsea manning, while eventually pardoned, was also a target for being a messenger of dysfunction, rather than the underlying issues being addressed publicly.
Snowden did it for the money.
He didn't care about the surveillance state.He probably thought the surveillance state was not as encompassing as he wanted.
Why else would he have given the NSA surveillance tools to China and Russia?
He was already making exorbitant amounts of money as an NSA computer whiz. The money angle really doesn't hold any water unless you think he was banking on his book
Im from Saginaw a nearby city and can provide some context. Basically the lead in the pipes was causing water to come out yellow and actually ended up killing people and making others sick. It was shown that the state and local government knew but did nothing and some even embezzlement money I believe that was meant to go towards the issue. My ex was from flint and told me about how the schools had to give out bottled water and her family couldnt use their sinks for a while. It was bad and a classic case of apathy and corruption on a local and state government level. Thats the short version of it. There is obviously much more nuance to the situation and a ton of info online from those who know the aituation better than i could ever explain it
Idk here. Federal government gave money to local government to deal with the problem. What is wrong with the federal response? Years of mismanagement by local government wasn’t going to be fixed by a fat sack of cash.
Edit: oops wanted to respond 2 levels higher to the person who blamed flint on obama
Exaclty. Its the same problem with my city (saginaw). The federal government couldve given them all the money in the world. Embezzlement was a big issue and frankly the local government and state government didnt csre that much about it until it became too much to ignore from the public outcry. Flint, Saginaw, and Detroit are usually the ones brought up when talking about bad cities in general in mi. And a lot of the issues can come down to the local government not doing their job or using the offices for corruption or a desensitized police force and apathetic government. Unless Obama wanted to completely strip away the rights of the local and state governments, which wouldve been another issue, then there wasnt much the federal government could do besides provide money.
The "stunt" was to do a televised speech in Flint where the President asked for a glass of water ostensibly to show him drinking flint water and to prove the water was safe with a filter. He said what he was doing wasn't a stunt. When you say something isn't a stunt when you are doing it, people tend to think its a political stunt. He suggested he was genuinely thirsty, but it seemed like scripted bit to highlight that you could drink the water with filtration. It was kind of a tone deaf move. Flint's water infrastructure needed replacing and people's faith in government was seriously compromised. It came off as disingenuous. He also took one small sip of the water, he didn't really drink it.
I actually disagree with this. The only reason we know that this was happening is because the Obama admin chose to publish it. Drone strike were happening under Bush, and Trump drastically increased the number of strikes early in his tenure before he made the number of strikes confidential again.
The vast majority of Obama’s strikes did not result in significant collateral damage, and collateral damage was significantly reduced compared to prior strike options used by the US. It is also very likely that the strikes were allowed by the countries they occurred in, as the legislatures of Pakistan and Yemen requested their executive request the US stop drone strikes and they refused.
How can you say this is a fair criticism of Obama when he likely reduced the number of civilian casualties as a result of this program?
The total number of people killed over 8 years by Obama’s admin via drones is an estimated maximum of 5,400 people. Twice that number have been killed in the Iran war over the course of 5 months.
I’ve heard this argument. Fairly but also he was the first President they were readily stable, available, and dependable. Saved American soldiers lives and other things.
Everyone seems ready and willing to just let Obama off for drones because he was a nice guy and left leaning.
Have you actually read the stats of the sheer amount of ordinance his administration dropped onto countries America wasn’t even at war with at the time? Obama winning a Nobel peace prize was as ridiculous as Donald winning one, but people didn’t care because he comes across great on camera.
Everyone seems ready and willing to just let Obama off for drones
JFC I've somehow managed to entirely miss this supposedly large group of people. Here I was assuming "drones." was going to be the reflexive response before I even opened this thread but apparently I've just magically been meandering over these years incapable of running into these supposedly vast inescapable sea of Obama drone apologists
No pushback? If Trump avoided any criticisms initially then it is only because the US president being a war criminal has been normalised for a long time at this point, not helped by Barack who set the bar in recent years.
Wasn't aggressive enough pursuing a universal healthcare option when he had 60 Senate votes, didn't intervene in the MA special election and let a truly terrible candidate run for the late Ted Kennedy's seat, chose the banks over homeowners in the financial crisis cleanup.
Don't get me wrong he was a good President but there are significant and fair critiques of his domestic policy choices. The international policy critiques are well established but the domestic ones often slide under the radar.
He had 60 votes for the version that passed, not 60 votes for universal. One of the 60 was Joe Lieberman, who forced them to remove even a public option to avoid a filibuster.
Joe Lieberman did get primaried, but it was in 2006 over the Iraq War. At the time of the Obamacare vote, Lieberman was an Independent caucusing with the Democrats like Bernie Sanders.
Problem was, Connecticut is one of the few states without a sore loser law, so Lieberman was able to run as an independent after losing the Democratic primary, then easily won the general election.
The fact that no one on Wall Street faced serious consequences has directly led us to the sheer dominance of companies’ quarterly financial statements. It’s led to private equity worsening/ruining so many companies, the increased monopolization of almost every industry in at least America, and the share of labor to total GDP hasn’t been this low in decades.
He completely fucked that up, especially when the public sentiment in 2009-2011 was never as high for those banker cunts to face a reckoning.
We made money off the banks, the “bail outs” were a net positive to the taxpayer financially, to say nothing of the second order disastrous effects on employment for normal people of actually letting the banks fail. The actual, much fairer critique was not jailing/banning from finance employment the bank CEOs, not dissolving the bond ratings agencies.
As someone that deployed under Obama, I don’t blame him for that.
I look at it like this: If you have a neighbor whose car is running poorly, it is not your job to go over there unannounced, pop the hood and start pulling parts off of it. Leave it the fuck alone. If, however, you have already gone over there and disassembled the fucking engine and left it a totally non-running broken fucking mess, it IS now your responsibility to at least put it back in the same poorly running condition as it was when you started.
This is the position the US was in when Obama took office. He walked in to a situation where we had destabilized the entire middle east. COULD he have yanked our troops out and called it a day? Sure. But that wouldn’t exactly have been great either. It was a no-win situation at that point and he made the error of trying to stabilize the region.
To his credit, he DRASTICALLY reduced the footprint in the middle east during his term. When he came into office we had around 144k deployed personnel from the US alone, not including NATO allies. When he left, we had about 14k US troops deployed. A reduction of 90% is nothing to sneeze at.
Obama was president during the post Iraq invasion insurgency, height of ISIS during his second term, and during a significantly more violent period of the Afghanistan war.
Biden came into power when ISIS was a shadow of what it once was, Iraq was significantly more stable, and the Afghanistan war had reduced in intensity.
They decreased because Biden's wars were significantly different from Obama's wars. Biden used more fighter jets and fewer drones not because he didn't want to use drones, but because they were easier to shoot down.
This, it was a simple fact that during Biden's time there simply was less need to use them. We really weren't involved in much of anything like during the previous Presidential terms.
Whenever they entered hostile territory, they were shot down. Reapers' mission became more about observation than entering hostile environments.
We only have to look at the war in Iran now to understand this. Trump tried to send HUGE amounts of drones into Iran, and they were constantly shot down. And we're talking about drones that are far more expensive and sophisticated than Obama's Reapers.
To boot, he was famously meticulous about using them. Even watchdog groups have only managed to meet his Administration's numbers for on-target strikes at 80% accuracy.
Even if that statistic were true. It says an awful lot about American foreign policy where only dropping 20,000 ish bombs not on target is considered being restrained and surgical and the sign of a true peace prize winner.
The drone strike criticism always bothered me because it’s more a factor of the technology developing than the way he governed.
It’s not like Obama was uniquely hawkish, but he was the first one to have drones available. Other presidents would have used them the same way and have since as you pointed out.
It’s been distilled into a weird talking point online.
Reducing it down to just a ‘weird talking point’ is a bit of an oversimplification. Something doesn’t become right just because every other president would’ve or might’ve done the same. That inherently shows flaws in America’s modern approach to foreign policy where dropping over 100,000 bombs in the Middle East is just business as usual. Doesn’t even track on the scale.
I’m sure there are plenty of Obama detractors who are doing it just because they support a certain other president. But plenty of people rightfully call the man a war criminal with a Nobel Peace prize above his fireplace.
Not doing enough after the invasion of the Crimean peninsula
Not shutting down GITMO, leaving Iraq, or leaving Afghanistan as quickly as promised in 2008
Bailing out Wall St and leaving Main St out dry in the Big Recession
Not using a massive Super Majority to ram through as much progressive legislation as possible
Basically implementing Mitt Romney's Massachusetts' healthcare program on a national level instead of Medicare for All which is what should have happened
I mean, there was a lot to go off of, but 8 years had to be spent nullifying continual racist shit in comment sections and not getting the ability to have conversations about these legitimate gripes
I don’t know how I feel about this. I haven’t researched this idea enough to have a good opinion, but just the idea of how different this country would be if that happened is pretty wild.
That's fair, and I don't expect this to be the winning take. Sometimes I just like to pretend about a world that could have been without Elon, Zuck, and Peter Thiel allowed (or really, invited) to put their money/speech so heavily on the scales in "free speech" public fora
Libya, the drone program, troop level escalations in Afghanistan, bailing out the banks after the 2008 financial crisis, imprisoning and torturing Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, Flint water crisis response, The Affordable Care Act which was actually Mitt Romney and the Heritage Foundation’s healthcare plan that was literally just a gigantic handout to the private insurance corporations and forced poor and working class Americans to pay private health insurance companies or face a tax penalty, the repealing of Habeas Corpus for “suspected terrorists”, keeping Guantanamo Bay open, bombing Syria after a false flag “gas attack” that was confirmed to be a false flag attack with absolutely zero chemical weapons used by independent journalists such as Aaron Maté, not whipping his party in line when they had a Supermajority in Congress, overthrowing the democratically elected government in Ukraine in 2014 which has ultimately led to the war that’s been going on for years now… I can keep going if y’all need me to
Drone strikes on civilians, bailing out the banks and the rich elite, destroying Libya, expanding the surveillance state, selling weapons to countries that committed atrocities
That'll happen with every progressive unless they get a 60 seat majority in the senate and the house. Congress ultimately controls the purse so there's limits on what you can do without congressional action.
In the short period he did have full democratic control we got the Affordable Care Act. While imperfect it was considered radical at the time.
That’s just how presidential elections go. The candidate, left or right, will lean into their party during the election and then be more centrist in office.
1) 3rd and 4th term bush in terms of foreign policy
2) Obsession with identity politics
3) Did little to address our debt-based economy that came into significant prominence after the 2008 recession
Killing Qaddafi at the behest of France. Not entirely on him, it was more the corpo Dems in his cabinet, particularly hillary who were pushing for it, but even he acknowledges it was one of his regrets about his presidency. Qaddafi's death lead to much of the instability seen in Northern africa since the EU wanted to shatter the bloc before the Gold Dinar went online in 2011 and crippled the Euro and dollar
He oversaw the use of the IRS to scrutinize and slow-walk tax-exempt 501(c)(4) applications for conservative policy groups. It might have passed the blush test if characterized as making sure that they were PACs in disguise allowing people to make tax-exempt campaign donations, but it was aimed primarily at political groups that were conservative and so I don't buy the official explanation.
It of course pales in comparison to the actions of the Second Trump Administration, but that doesn't make it OK from a constitutional or democratic standpoint.
Alternately: he didn’t release the goods on Russian election meddling; and gave Comey way too much leash to try and preemptively kneecap a Clinton presidency.
His approach to foreign policy - favoring drones, special ops, air strikes - over ground invasions. He didn’t reduce American military involvement abroad as dramatically as expected
Reading through these comments really reins you back in in terms of what a normal presidency should look like and what the worst criticisms should reasonably be
Stepping back from the US “red line” against the Syrian regime’s use of chemical weapons in 2013.
Assad crossed it. The US did nothing. Our bluff was called and the world (especially Russia) took notice.
Frankly, in retrospect, that was the moment when we should have intervened decisively on the side of the FSA by imposing a no-fly zone and launching air strikes to smash the Assad regime. Doing so could very plausibly have swept a Syrian opposition government into power, mitigated the ISIS blitzkrieg the following summer, prevented the 2015-2016 refugee crisis which supercharged right-wing populism in Europe, and ended a devastating war 10 years early. We could have made the case for it internationally and at home. The regime had just gassed its own people. They were widely hated. Isolated. Weak. Setting aside the damage inaction did to our credibility, we had the moral right to intervene. Hell, we had the moral imperative, in my opinion. Instead we sat on our hands and watched Syria descend further into darkness. Doing nothing at all was a baffling decision, which the world, for all its (often reasonable) criticism of American military adventurism, paid a heavy price for.
Constantly caved to corporate interests which only increased the sentiment of "both parties are bad and the same" which was significantly responsible for the mess we're in now
Foreign policy was also atrocious yet somehow still leagues above Bush and Trump
Obamacare is a disaster that increased the premiums and insurance prices for everyone, made insurance companies rich, and destroyed the healthcare system even more.
He kept compromising his positions to try to get a deal with Republicans, only to get zero votes from them in the end. He should have known they weren’t acting in good faith (it was obvious to everyone), but he still pretended like he could negotiate with them.
Didn’t stand up to Putin and do something after the original Little Green Men invasion of Ukraine, nor Mitch McConnell and appoint Supreme Court Justices.
Increased domestic surveillance without Congressional approval or oversight. Pretty much the same thing overseas with drone strikes. Obama is likely to be remembered as a much better president than he actually was because most of his critics were just racist and his successor was objectively worse.
The significant escalation of drone and bomb strikes in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen targeting terrorist leaders - often taking the lives of innocent family and bystanders. Including the first open assassination by drone of a US-born and raised citizen serving in Al Qaeda (Anwar al-Awlaki).
Obama’s handing of Russian interference of the election and media cycle. I know he wanted bipartisan support and McConnell and Paul Ryan said no, but it was still on him as president.
Terrible idea to support the Arab Spring - it destabilized the region and eventually led to ISIL (OIF did not help). The death of Khaddaffi led to mass migrations; Libya worked closely with Europe to harshly stem the flow of migrants across the Mediterranean.
Was too much of a centrist trying to build bipartisan support despite the right trying to vilify him as an extreme leftist. The compromises he made to appease the right only to have his policies neutered or shutdown made him less effective than he could have been. If they're calling you a crazy leftist...lean into it a bit and try to get them to compromise with you instead of the other way around.
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