WTF does his VP have to do with the fact that there was a 100% Republican block against his policies

Obama had a bigger advantage in 2009 than Trump has today.

Joe Biden being a creepy racist crook with deep ties to the insurance industry is why health reform failed.

🌎 👨‍🚀 🔫 👩‍🚀

indefinitely preempt

So he’s on paid vacation. Getting an eight figure salary to do nothing ain’t so bad for a guy who got into comedy selling “Women jumping on trampolines” as his main gimmick.

Excited to see what kind of mindless AI slop they get replaced with.

Any time some group or party does something heinous in this country they are given a pass to “maintain unity”

I don’t believe Fred Hampton and the Black Panthers or David Koresh and the Branch Davidians were “given a pass”, particularly after national news declared them public enemies.

Quite a few organizations and organizers get squashed hard. It’s within the state’s capacity. Trump seems to be demonstrating the degree to which these norms can be violated.

However, at the barest minimum those who were part of the Confederacy should have been barred from holding public office of any kind or participating in anything that would influence public policy beyond maybe their right to vote

Well, they’re long dead. I’m more despondent at Biden giving the J6 instigators a free pass.

he had to fight tooth and nail for everything he managed

That’s the line his voters are fed.

But when you’ve got a VP owned and operated by the insurance industry and Larry Summers authoring your Treasury policy, I’m more concerned with who he was fighting for.

Obama lead us out the Great Recession

He presided as we left the Great Recession, under a policy of Keynesianism both he and Bush Jr had embraced.

He didn’t lead shit. He did what his handlers told him to do and looked pretty on TV.

The real economic vision of the Obama administration was not meaningfully distinct from Bush in '01 or Trump in '20. Bail out the plutocrats. Let debt collectors feast on everyone else.

Trump who spent four years trashing everything

We dipped back into recession in '14 and flirted with recession in '16. Trump took a bad situation and made it worse. But Obama never actually fixed anything.

Italian Unification but it’s everything from Hadrian’s Wall to Istanbul.

The fundamental problem with Obama was that he took office in a transformative moment for the country, with an enormous public mandate to rewrite how our economy and our legal system functioned. The US Treasury owned 1/3rd of the private banking system outright.

There was an enormous demand for sweeping reforms in the health care, real estate, and education sectors. Union momentum was building for the first time in decades. DC Statehood was on the table. The SCOTUS was in play. A new era of civil rights legislation was possible. We had trillions going to a couple of stupid, pointless wars that we could claw back. The tech sector was ripe for economic growth in a period of surging unemployment in a way that would guarantee everyone more money for fewer working hours. Sky high gas prices made a Green New Deal a real possibility.

He fucking pooched it. Practically all of it. We got a few tepid financial regulations, a marginal expansion of Medicaid, billions in loan forgiveness on trillions in debt, and a pat on the head.

Now that window has fully slammed shut. A new window is open, but it’s open to a future of fascist police violence, decimation of the administrative state, a permanent indentured servant class, apartheid, genocide, and a third world war. Trump isn’t flinching. He’s going for all of it and his party is throwing their full weight behind him.

Now that its the reactionary turn of the wheel and all the worst people are getting to make decisions, do I wish a non-fascist was in charge of the country? Yeah, okay, sure. But I also envy my conservative neighbors in that they appear to have a party that’s putting all the shit they wrote down on paper into action. Project 2025 isn’t just smoke blown up the assholes of the rub base. The modern GOP is here to deliver.

Maybe if Obama’d been less of a Truman and more of an FDR we wouldn’t fucking be in this mess to begin with.

Real Presidents would have called in the shooter to have a beer with them, amirite?

Back then there were the mighty Soviet Union on one side and the massive war industry of the US on the other. Together, with other allied forces, they were able to fight back the nazis.

That’s a highly abbreviated view of history.

Germany wasn’t just magically fascist one day during the 1930s. The country was heavily split between Soviet aligned KDR and Western aligned Conservatives, with Nazis playing both sides against the middle.

Americans like Ford and Prescott-Bush were very friendly with the German and Italian fascists before the war. Hoover was friendly with the Nazis straight into the first full FDR term. The Winter War heralded as a victory for capitalism in many corners of the Western world.

It wasn’t until Germany invaded Poland that mainstream public sentiment turned. Even then, you needed Pearl Harbor to galvanize the US to enter a conflict the Soviets had been fighting for half a year.

Right now, the fascists have the mightiest army.

They always did. US/UK have been fascist at least since McKinley. We were the bad guys during the Cold War. And while we won most of our battles, we ultimately suffered the same fate as our Soviet adversaries - corruption, insurrection, and capture by foreign intelligence services.

Who’s going to stop them?

The worst enemy of the Nazi state was it’s own leadership. They’d destroyed themselves from within before the first boots left German soil.

The country just took a decade to fall apart and killed 80M people as it came crashing down.

Sartre was no fool.

An end to the war appears no closer, despite months of U.S.-led peace efforts.

Is that what was going on?

They’re some of the world’s biggest landlords. This is just aristocrats rubbing elbows.

Made up ceremony

Wait till the Brits find out its all made up and the nobility doesn’t matter.

There isn’t anything to discuss, really.

What if we talked about only doing the fascism in the red and purple states? Maybe create some kind of Vichy Republic for the liberals, off to the side aways, once the reactionaries have come through and purged them of anyone too threatening.

Surely you can just let Barack Obama continue his #blessed influencer lifestyle out in Martha’s Vineyard, at least? He’s a mega-millionaire! He’s in the club now, you guys! They can look the other way while you do your pogroms. You can look the other way while they do their Netflix autobiographies and Burning Man festivals. Comme ci, comme ça.

There is nothing to discuss with a fascist.

There’s always room for discussion. We just need a strategically managed surrender. Let the poors go into the meat grinder while the elites can install the AI chips that do all the prole work for us. Then we just segregate ourselves into partisan enclaves and rule as miniature local despots together.

Just so long as the fascists don’t become greedy and try to take further ground, things should be fine. And if we’re rhetorically clever enough and sensible enough and rational enough, they won’t do that.

It’s not like countries aren’t doing anything. Israel might not be admitted to the next season of So You Think You Can Dance.

Or just do nothing. Huff through it like we’ve been doing for the last 250 years.

That’s far more likely than any radical geopolitical reorganization. Nobody in the US government with enough authority to affect a real secessionist movement actually wants a secessionist movement to exist. They all think they’ve got the next bite at the White House apple.

Hell, even in the OG Civil War, the first thing the Confederates did was march on Washington. The CSA never intended to be permanently divided. They were going to conquer and subjugate the north just as they’d subjugated Florida and Cuba and Texas and California in decades prior. The momentum among nations has always been consolidation. We only see break ups - like in the Balkins - when the central leadership of the domestic government is decapitated and a foreign country needs to divide in order to conquer.

nuclear war with China

Everyone wants to wave their fists at China. Nobody actually wants to stand up in that fight.

Douglas MacArthur learned that lesson far too well for any modern military leadership to seriously want to repeat it.

Are you not trusting the police in Mississippi to be honest about when a black man seeking education found hanging from a tree is suicide?

Apparently, Emmett Till “commuted suicide” just thirty miles away

Would Epstein have been considered Lynched?

It really irks me when people use “mainstream media” as a pejorative like there’s some kind of conspiracy

A small number of private companies with national syndication are owned by a cartel of billionaires. These billionaires regularly meet to discuss and align themselves on policies that benefit their group at the expense of everyone else. The policies they agree to are reflected in the media coverage.

This is a textbook conspiracy. Just not an “Alex Jones” style conspiracy, where a Murdoch and an Ellison and a Gates have to be lizard people to spice up the relatively banal affair of promoting tax cuts, deregulation, and white supremacy.