xkcd #2875: 2024

I didn't know it was a competition as to whose government shit the bed worse. I guess making it one has to do with the inferiority complex you get from knowing all your ancestors were criminals.

Wtf is an "Australia"?

No, tan suits and Dijon mustard are so much worse than either of those.

I think it was more like the guy before him drug us into multiple, decades long wars

We got into a shooting war in Syria under Obama. We overthrew the Libyan government with US-French joint airstrikes, too. We fostered relations with the fascist Modi regime in India and failed to secure any kind of lasting peace with Iran. We couldn't actually end the embargo of Cuba or even close down Gitmo. Instead we ended up ramping up police powers in the wake of the Baltimore and Ferguson riots.

Despite having a supermajority in the Senate, we never managed to get DC or Puerto Rico their statehoods... which is a shame because DC statehood alone could have kept Mitch McConnell out of the Senate majority position and flipped a host of federal judicial appointments including two in the SC. Extra important given that we lost the Voting Rights Act case under Obama's DOJ and a bunch of redistricting fights as well. That gave us a Republican House Majority despite those districts representing less than 45% of the total voting base.

Hell, one of the first things the Obama House, Senate, and Presidency did after a sweeping win in 2008 was.... to strip federal funds from ACORN!

Maybe some of those fuck-ups were what cost him the House, the Senate, the SCOTUS, and then the Presidency in the snowball of failure that lead up to 2016.

having an 8 year break of semi-normalcy was refreshing

Having an 8 year break of a smooth operator in office definitely blinded us to the decay of the republic that accelerated under his watch. But who did that ultimately benefit?

I guess it benefited our nation's budding crop of fascists.

Yeah he’s the best of the lot.

I mean, "best" by what standard? He's a continuation of the Reagan tradition.

I would prefer FDR in some kind of undead emperor setup but sadly that’s not available.

FDR got where he was thanks to a large popular movement that his administration ultimately undermined and dismantled. The guy that delivered Harry Truman, J. Edgar Hoover, and Allen Dulles onto the American system was a compromise at best.

Fixating on Presidents as modern day messiah figures has been uniformly bad for American politics and social progress. And its illustrated by this latent desire for a Lich-King President, a shambling corpse propped up by hagiography and revisionist history, who we're taught to venerate as the fountain of progress rather than merely the man at the helm during a hurricane who didn't sink the ship.

These guys aren't prime movers, they're consequences of much larger and more sweeping social movements. I would love to be in a country that elects a guy like FDR, but I do not believe that magically making FDR president again would result in anything remotely like the policies we got under his original administration.

Obama did do a great job

If he'd done a great job, the Dems would have maintained their majorities and Hillary would have won the Presidency.

He did a shit job. He sold out to the big banks. He failed to implement democractic reforms and protect civil rights. He undermined public education, health care, and social welfare. He continued to funnel hundred of billions of dollars to military contractors, heightened tensions in Europe and the Middle East, and ultimately gave us the socio-economic conditions that made Trump a viable candidate for the Presidency.

But he talked good. So, for some reason, we overlook all of that.

Your local medical system and its workers is the reason you're alive. You'd be just as alive under a Single Payer model or a fully public health care model. Its very possible you'd be alive without the ACA, just a lot broker.

The ACA is the only reason you pay thousands to insurance companies every year.