The Four Color Media Monitor

A very short list of Obama failures, when you compare it with the disasters of the past four years or so - corona virus, economic depression, the disaster of Puerto Rican disaster relief, the increasing legitimacy and violence of racism and pseudo-white nationalism, the decline and fall of American international leadership and prestige. But of course none of this can be blamed on the president; there is a long list of other people who he blames things on. He is good at blaming people for things.

And if you want to weigh disturbing personal conduct of politicians...!

Blah, blah, all you're saying is "Orange Man Bad."

Obama was, and still is an anti-white racist who stirred division in the country. Thanks to him, race relations have taken a nose dive. He stirred up racial divisions by personally involving himself in every police shooting, starting with Trayvon Martin. Oh, and he droned thousands of brown people into paste during his presidency. Even more than Bush.

Oh, and have you ever heard of Fast and Furious, Anonymous idiot? Solyandra? The IRS targeting conservatives? All the reporters whom the Obama administration spied on? And then he, and his idiot supporters like you, had the audacity to call it all "phoney scandals" I'm sure you're have, but because you're a liberal, you'll defend Obama to the death.

I know I'm wasting my time replying to you, and I know I've said this before, but I'm gonna say it again: get lost and go to a liberal blog.

The narcissistic pasty guy with the fake tan is real awful; bad is an understatement.

Obama was raised by a white mother in a white family; he is not exactly a racist. He is no saint, but saying he is as bad as Trump is ridiculous. Trump has his share of financial self-dealing and scandal, far more serious than any you attribute to Obama; but on top of those scandals, he has abdicated leadership in the face of national disasters and is devastating the country. It is like comparing grapes and cantaloupes. There is a reason why he has consistently been the most unpopular president in the history of polling, beginning on the date of his inauguration; his approval rating has never been over 50% when you average out the different polling companies.

From Dreams from My Father: 'I ceased to advertise my mother's race at the age of 12 or 13, when I began to suspect that by doing so I was ingratiating myself to whites.'
From Dreams from My Father : 'I found a solace in nursing a pervasive sense of grievance and animosity
against my mother's race.'
From Dreams from My Father: 'There was something about him that made me wary, a little too sure of himself, maybe. And white.'
From Dreams from My Father: 'It remained necessary to prove which side you were on, to show your loyalty to the black masses, to strike out and name names.'
From Dreams from My Father: 'I never emulate white men and brown men whose fates didn't
speak to my own. It was into my father's image, the black man, son of Africa, that I'd packed all the attribute I sought in myself , the attributes of Martin and Malcolm, DuBois and Mandela.'

To simply point to Obama’s white mother, or to his African father, or even to his rearing in Hawaii, is to miss the point. For most African Americans, white people exist either as a direct or an indirect force for bad in their lives. Biraciality is no shield against this; often it just intensifies the problem. What proved key for Barack Obama was not that he was born to a black man and a white woman, but that his white family approved of the union, and approved of the child who came from it. They did this in 1961—a time when sex between black men and white women, in large swaths of the country, was not just illegal but fraught with mortal danger. But that danger is not part of Obama’s story. The first white people he ever knew, the ones who raised him, were decent in a way that very few black people of that era experienced.

Obama’s early positive interactions with his white family members gave him a fundamentally different outlook toward the wider world than most blacks of the 1960s had. Obama told me he rarely had “the working assumption of discrimination, the working assumption that white people would not treat me right or give me an opportunity or judge me [other than] on the basis of merit.” He continued, “The kind of working assumption” that white people would discriminate against him or treat him poorly “is less embedded in my psyche than it is, say, with Michelle.”

That lens, born of literally relating to whites, allowed Obama to imagine that he could be the country’s first black president. “If I walked into a room and it’s a bunch of white farmers, trade unionists, middle age—I’m not walking in thinking, Man, I’ve got to show them that I’m normal,” Obama explained. “I walk in there, I think, with a set of assumptions: like, these people look just like my grandparents. And I see the same Jell‑O mold that my grandmother served, and they’ve got the same, you know, little stuff on their mantelpieces. And so I am maybe disarming them by just assuming that we’re okay.”

What Obama was able to offer white America is something very few African Americans could—trust. The vast majority of us are, necessarily, too crippled by our defenses to ever consider such a proposition. But Obama, through a mixture of ancestral connections and distance from the poisons of Jim Crow, can credibly and sincerely trust the majority population of this country. That trust is reinforced, not contradicted, by his blackness.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, "My President Was Black, A history of the first African American White House—and of what came next", The Atlantic

Ta-Nehisi Coates is a racist hack. He's also a terrible human being who admitted to not feeling anything when the Twin Towers went down in 2001. Not sure why a racist columnist like him ever gained credibility. The guy thinks we need reparation for something that ended 150 years ago.

It would be tempting to respond to that last post by saying 'Blah, blah, all you're saying is "Black Man Bad." ' But although there is truth to that evaluation, it is beside the point. The real issue is that you are more concerned about picking a side and arguing for it rather than understanding the other guy, taking cheap shots by picking isolated lines out of context in order to present a caricature of Obama's or Coates' beliefs. Also, typecasting anyone who disagrees with your side as being a liberal.

Maybe if you wandered for a bit, got lost, and wound up on a liberal blog, it might help to balance your perspective a bit, and stop just tromping out the politically correct party line. Not to become a liberal (tfoo! Tfoo!) but to get a more complete view of the facts.

Don't lecture me, douchebag. I'm comfortable with my beliefs and I don't need people like you making me feel bad for having them. And I don't go to liberal blogs because I have better things to do.

I used exact quotes from Obama's memoir. And Coates' lack of empathy for 9/11 is well-known. He's said it many times. i took nothing out of context.

And how original, using my statements to you against me. Unlike you, I've been commenting on this blog off and on for nearly a decade, and I'm not going anywhere.

As always, you come off as a condescending, know-it-all douchebag. You try to frame your comments by acting like you're the better person, but in reality, you're just another slimy, anonymous troll who never adds a thing to the conversation.

You're both condescending idiots with no real grasp on reality.

"You're both condescending idiots with no real grasp on reality."

Projection on your part, dolt. The only idiot I see is you.