Barack Hussein Obama

Barack Hussein Obama
44th President of the United States; From: January 20, 2009 – January 20, 2017
Vice President	Joe Biden
Predecessor	George W. Bush
Successor	Donald Trump
U.S. Senator from Illinois; From: January 3, 2005 – November 16, 2008
Predecessor	Peter Fitzgerald
Successor	Roland Burris
Information;
Party	Democratic Party;
Spouse(s)	Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama; may have had a prior marriage.;
Religion	Islamic heritage, said to have converted to Protestantism (the liberal United Church of Christ)

--AvenVorak (talk) 21:43, 1 November 2017 (EDT)

Barack ☭HUSSEIN☭ Muhammad Soetoro[note 1] "You didn't build that"[1] Obama II Jr. (born in Nairobi, Kenya Honolulu, Hawaii, August 4, 1961) was the Anti-Reagan 44th President of the United States. He was the first self-identified homosexual[2] atheist[3] British[4] Kenyan[5] Egyptian[6] Commie-Nazi[7][8] Martian[9] Reptilian[10] multiracial person to be elected to the presidency, as well as a radical black[11][12] Christian, Jew[13] Hindu,[14] Muslim,[15] witch doctor,[16] Satanist[17] and Antichrist.[18]

America elected a law professor with a J.D. from Harvard to office. While things generally went okay for the period, it did not return the U.S. to what many consider the Pax Americana. Coupled with an aging voting population for whom social issues of the day were difficult to relate to (and in turn, the intellectuals who championed these ideas), the population was primed for anti-intellectualism. Add in eight years of Obama's dithering in the White House, and you end up with rather fertile ground for "strong man" politicians who promise to get things done. You can see the emergence of an opportunistic alt-right media as a successful dissemination of this idea.

Fortunately, the Emperor[19] President announced he has "no more campaign to run" in his 2015 State of the Union Address. [20] He likely would have won a third term if he weren't prohibited by the Constitution.[21]==Biography==

Birth

Main article : Early life and career of Barack Hussein Obama

Barack Obama was ("allegedly") born in Hawaii, where he spent his childhood. His mother married Lolo Soetoro, so he also spent some time in Indonesia from 1967 to mid-1971. He later studied political science at Columbia University in New York City and law at Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He also got a huge boost from the fact that white people like to make the President black in science fiction as an indication of how far-flung it is (as a sign of uninterrupted Whig lineage). Lots of Americans were looking for a change in 2008 after losing all the gains of the 90's, so they voted for the President of the Future.

Prior to his election as President in 2008, Obama had previously served as a community organizer, Senator for Illinois, and a member of the Illinois State Senate. Obama was introduced to the world during the 2004 Democratic National Convention, when he gave a keynote speech which aspired to bi-partisan solutions, oh the irony.[22] In October of 2009, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his stunning success in not being George W. Bush.[23] He disliked the title very early on.[24]

President Obama's wife, Michelle, is a graduate of Princeton and Harvard Law. She formerly worked in hospital administration, and has promoted the "Let's Move!" campaign to fight childhood obesity.[25] The couple have two daughters, Sasha and Malia.

Bill Clinton tried to assemble a dream team, without much regard to loyalty. The result was a really leaky ship; everyone tried to influence policy by using the media to float trial balloons, embarrass rivals, and so on. This had the added effect of magnifying every scandal he was involved in. W. by contrast prized loyalty over all else. The result was scandals that never touched him directly, but lots of wrong-footed policy attempts as well. Trump actively and personally fomented competition, leading to rivalries, serious bad blood, and factional infighting within his White House. Obama, instead, seemed to have found the right mix of loyalty and competence.[27] There are very few leaks, the federal bureaucracy is actually doing its job, (legitimate) scandals are close to nonexistent, and he has gotten an awful lot done in the face of an obstructionist Congress, often via Executive Order.[28][29] His more notable achievements include overturning enhanced interrogation,[30] creating the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau,[31] brokering a thaw with Cuba, passing a nuclear deal with Iran, blocking states from de-funding Planned Parenthood for political reasons,[32] instituting overtime pay for federal workers,[33] outlining the Clean Power Plan to cut greenhouse gases,[34] killing Osama bin Laden, increasing the minimum wage from $7.25 to $10.10 for federal contract workers,[35], upholding net neutrality,[36] and spearheading the Paris Agreement over climate change.[note 2]

Barack Obama's presidency began with a deep recession that left unemployment above 9% for more than a year, a political environment of steadily-increasing vitriol and obstructionism, and a general continuance of Bush-era policies in national security, Wall Street regulation (i.e. none), and free trade. The largest shifts in actual policies that have occurred have been with foreign policy; while the U.S. did engage in military intervention in Libya, for instance, it was a markedly different style of attack when compared to the full commitment of Iraq and Afghanistan.[37] This was of a piece with the inclusive rhetoric espoused by President Obama, as well as with his generally centrist (centre-right by European standards) approach — despite having a very liberal voting record as a Senator, the dreaded socializmz never materialized.[38][39]

Obama has been criticized for getting the federal budget deficit to unprecedented levels, forgetting that the budget for 2009 was actually a series of continuing resolutions that kept spending at roughly the same as Bush's era.[40] Keeping in mind the fact that Bush did not include war spending as part of his budgets,[41] and the fact that the majority of debt is due to the recession, Obama has managed to decrease the overall rate of deficit spending, though obviously it's still present.[42]

Fulfillment of campaign promises[edit] Democrats viewed Obama's presidency as an improvement from the previous Bush-era domestic and foreign policies. However, while promising hope and change, a large number of his campaign pledges remained stalled or completely broken. PolitiFact, which tracked how many promises Obama kept, has found that by January 20th 2017, out of 533 promises, the President had kept or compromised on 404 promises, while he had outright broken 129.[43] Some examples:

Early in his campaign, Obama promised to abide by the voluntary spending limits required for public financing, but then went "never mind" when he saw the shitload of money he was raking in.[44] Obama said that he would not go after medical marijuana dispensaries, but has done so plenty, a sign that the War on Drugs won't die anytime soon.[45] On January 22, 2009, President Obama signed an executive order to close Guantanamo Bay within a year and for those incarcerated within to be dealt with as quickly as possible.[46] No change has occurred and Guantanamo continues with little reduction in inmates (and it's not helping with a large amount of red states disapproving).[47] Some abortive attempts at moving them to other states or countries have met with very limited success — essentially, no one wants them. Called for a more transparent government and promised that his administration would be the most transparent. Except the Obama administration has targeted more journalists for surveillance and more whistleblowers for prosecution than any other in US history, singling out those who have played major roles in exposing the crimes of the US government, like Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, or Edward Snowden. Despite opposing police brutality vocally, the Obama administration has set records in its efforts to militarize law enforcement agencies through conduits such as the Department of Defense’s 1033 program, which in just four years handed out record amounts of military equipment to local police forces. His Justice Department under Eric Holder has supported police officers every time an excessive-force case has made its way to arguments. Despite promising to soften immigration policies, he's given one billion dollars to private prisons who detain asylum seekers. [48] He also deported more immigrants than any other President in history, with over 2 million deportations under his watch, often through conducting raids on families of women and children, who are often seeking refuge from violence.[49] [50] On the other hand, Obama fulfilled many of his promises on other issues, mainly foreign policy and gay rights:

On February 27, 2009, Obama set the date of the Iraq War's end to be August 31, 2010.[51] As of December 2011, virtually all troops have left and the war is "officially" over. (Keep watching this.) The number of troops in Afghanistan sharply spiked in his first term nonetheless, as Obama pushed military spending to all-time highs, though after the death of Osama Bin Laden troops are expected to withdraw soon.[52] On December 28, 2014, the Afghanistan War was officially and formally declared over by President Obama... while keeping over 20,000 defense contractors, some 25 bases around the country, and looking to expand the total number of US troops by another 5,000.[53] On January 30, 2009, the abortion funding "gag rule" (preventing any clinic anywhere in the world that receives US funding from mentioning the evil abortion word) was rescinded, along with other Bush-era executive orders.[54] This actions was shortly followed on February 9, 2009 by the lifting of restrictions on stem-cell research.[55] With regards to health care, President Obama extended the S-CHIP program, and enacted the Affordable Care Act (or "Obamacare") on March 23, 2010, with the aid of united Congressional Democrats. The Act, a fairly conservative implementation of universal health care, has been widely criticized on the left for perceived failings (such as the lack of a public option, which Obama did not as enthusiastically support as he did in his campaign) while attacked hysterically from the right. The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform bill signed on July 21, 2010, "comprehensively" regulated banks and insurance companies, ending the Bush-era financial bailouts and stopping "too big to fail" banks. This remains one of Obama's most popular legislation, with over 60% of Americans approving.[56] Nevertheless, even if it's popular, it doesn't mean it's a good thing, as Dodd-Frank only slightly regulates the banks. Many critics have said that Obama could've done much more and that the only people who have really benefitted are the trial lawyers (to whom the Democrats just happen to be beholden), because it's taken all kinds of legal action to figure out what in God's name many of its provisions even mean. His support of the passage of the 2014 Omnibus bill (nicknamed Cromnibus), which has a clause that removes Dodd-Frank, is also rather questionable.[57] He has told his Attorney General, Eric Holder, to cease defending DOMA,[58] even though the then Republican-led Congress said they would fund the defense of DOMA themselves. In 2013 the Supreme Court finally struck down the law's most contentious clause, sparking a gay rights revolution in the United States.[59] In 2011, the restrictions in the DADT policy were eliminated, and gay and lesbian soldiers are allowed to serve openly.[60] The military was even ordered to allow gay marriages in public buildings if straight marriages are allowed there.[61] In 2012, Obama was able to raise taxes on the extremely wealthy back to Clinton-era rates, though he failed to get rid of the Bush-era tax cuts for people who earn between $250,000 and $400,000. Somehow we made it through 8 years of Obamunism (in which tax rates were the lowest they've been since the Truman admin)[62] but Hillary was going to bring on the econogeddon. Human rights and civil liberties record[edit]

"No Such Agency" no more. “”No, no. I have been practicing… I bowled a 129. It’s like — it was like Special Olympics, or something. —President Obama on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno, 2009 Obama has mainly been criticized for disappointing actions concerning human rights in the War on Terror. For example, on January 23, 2009, a mere 72 hours after taking office, Obama authorized an armed strike against a village in the Tribal Areas of Pakistan — an ally of the United States (although the area being bombed, the "tribal belt," is not under control of Pakistan's government),[63] — because the Pakistan Taliban Movement in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) had launched a campaign to discover local informants for the Central Intelligence Agency and had killed 40 of them. He has consistently continued this approach to dealing with foreign terrorists, arguing that drones are safer for Americans.[64] Drones have also proven dangerous for Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan, both of whom were American citizens living in Yemen who were killed by a drone strike on September 30th, 2011. Though both had been deemed terrorists, this action has been criticized for possibly violating the Fifth Amendment.[65] Under Obama, drone warfare has become a central element of American military policy, a practice which critics have called into question.[note 3]

In other questionable actions, on May 26, 2011, Obama signed an extension of the PATRIOT Act, which has been criticized by the left and civil libertarians as allowing violations of the Fourth Amendment.[66] In 2013, news agencies confirmed that he has continued the levels of mass surveillance that was encouraged by his predecessor, as enabled by the Act.[67][68] Similarly, on December 31, 2011, Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012, which codifies the President's authority to indefinitely detain terrorism suspects without trial (there is currently a dispute over whether it changes existing law or not, due to apparently contradictory passages in the bill on the matter).[69]

Trade policy[edit] “”My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks. You guys have an acute public relations problem that’s turning into a political problem. And I want to help…I’m not here to go after you. I’m protecting you…. I’m going to shield you from congressional and public anger. —President Obama to Wall Street. The Trans-Pacific Partnership is a global trade deal that the White House is attempting to pass at the end of 2013 well, eventually. It would establish a free trade zone from Vietnam to Chile, encompassing 800 million people and nearly 40% of the global economy. While the push against protectionism is admirable, the text of the treaty has been negotiated behind closed doors and kept secret from most of Congress, and more than 600 corporate advisers have access to the measure. WikiLeaks has revealed one reason why: SOPA-esque copyright legislation.[70] He is fast-tracking the trade deal, meaning he is forcing it through Congress without debate or amendment - just up or down votes. He takes "personal offense" whenever someone criticizes him for withholding information about the deal to the public, and he forces Congressmen not to share the details they know from the deal to anyone else, including staffers.

So why the secrecy? From what WikiLeaks revealed, under the TPP, corporations would sue governments for "encroaching on expected future profits." The TPP sets up ISDS tribunals, staffed by corporate lawyers wholly unaccountable to any electorate or system of legal precedent. These tribunal corporate lawyers will rotate between advocating for those same corporations and as judges determining rulings, with no requirements for the lawyer-judges to be impartial, reveal conflicts of interest, or recuse themselves in instances of direct conflict. There is no internal or external mechanism to appeal the tribunal members’ decisions on the merits, and claims of procedural errors would be decided by another tribunal of corporate lawyers.

The tribunals have discretion to determine the amount of compensation governments must pay investors and the allocation of costs, such as the tribunal members’ fees. A proposal that appeared in the 2012 leak of the text to standardize hourly fees for tribunal members at the lower end of the range of fees currently paid (about $375 per hour, compared to the $700 per hour that some tribunal members receive) has been eliminated.[71] This can mean literally every single accomplishment Obama would have up to this point will be overturned by an unaccountable corporate-aligned group of lawyers and judges who will gut any and all regulations protecting labor rights, worker rights, union rights, environmental rights, even basic human rights, for the sake of making an extra dime.

Several Democratic Senators have said Obama has spent more time and effort lobbying for this monstrosity than for any other policy, including the Affordable Care Act, or Dodd-Frank, or the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or net neutrality, or ending the Iraq War.

Economic policy[edit] Where FDR once said "I welcome their hatred," Obama asked "How can I help?"

The fact that Wisconsin elected Trump (of all people) would seem to be proof that many traditional Democrats felt Obama let them down. One might hypothesize that that's because his focus was always more international than domestic but, for whatever reason, there was a sense that Obama never truly felt the country's pain or took steps to alleviate it. A couple of examples of his seeming obliviousness are: individuals making the minimum wage in 2009 lost 11.2% in buying power as a result of inflation over the course of his administration, and (2) the generally recognized failure of the HAMP program to prevent foreclosures during the period of high unemployment from 2009-10. The enrollment program failed largely because it was left to the discretion of mortgage servicers, a group who had already been discredited and who represented the biggest obstacle to stopping the wave of foreclosures, namely because they profit from kicking people out of their homes.[72]

The recession Obama inherited began more than a year prior to his entering office. (This hasn't stopped mainstream conservative figures, like Rush Limbaugh, from attempting to convince as many people as possible that Obama caused the recession.) That said, Obama has been criticized by the reality-based community for not doing enough to combat the recession. For example, the stimulus bill he proposed to Congress, which Congress enacted, was probably half as large as it should have been. Part of the reason it was so small may have been because of Obama's decision to put Larry Summers, who probably is partly responsible for the recession, in charge of finding the right figure. Another reason why the stimulus was so small was because Congress didn’t want a bill bigger than $800 billion. The three moderate Republicans in the Senate and several centrist Democrats all said that they wouldn’t vote for a stimulus bill larger than $800 billion. This means Obama couldn't have gotten a larger stimulus bill passed even if he wanted it.[73] Furthermore, as the first Congressional term of Obama's presidency continued, Obama failed to use the bully pulpit to induce the Senate Republicans to stop filibustering counter-cyclical policy. On the other hand, his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel did shove his naked self in the face of House blue-dog Democrat Eric Massa, which isn't nothing.

Various smear attempts[edit] “”[It needs] to be reminded, after these numbing years, of just how berserk our era has been. There was a time when calling the president un-American was a beyond-the-pale transgression; now it’s not even news when a news anchor or an elected official does it. Birchian conspiracies once left to fester at the lunatic fringe of our politics have encroached onto center stage. It sends a shiver to recall that this president once had to stand in front of cameras in the White House briefing room and insist that, yes, he was born in America. —Elbert Ventura (Makes the 90s' look tame, eh?)[74] Islam[edit] Many people have tried to claim Obama is a Muslim (which, as Colin Powell rightly pointed out, shouldn't be a smear, but, alas, it is in practice), since his father (who was Kenyan) was one before he became an agnostic, or even an atheist.[75] However, Obama is a staunch Christian and often injects Jesus and God into his speeches. The myth of Obama's connections with Islam originated during his original campaign for the United States Senate. Ironically, there was a Muslim member of Congress elected only two years later: Congressman Keith Ellison. The Religious Right happened to target the wrong man.

Even if he was a seekrit Muslim, his lifestyle as POTUS would suggest that he'd be quite a poor one.[76]

Birthers[edit] See the main article on this topic: Obama citizenship denial A lot of Americans wary of Obama as they do not believe — and may never believe — he is actually an American. Republicans attempted to discredit the Obama campaign by insinuating that he was not born in the U.S., a requirement for any U.S. president.[77] Given that there is no evidence for him being a Martian, Muslim, gay or Communist, this has been the last refuge of those who, frankly, just can't stand that a black man with a foreign name won an election.[78] However, the requirement for a U.S. birth doesn't seem to be an impediment for Republicans, such as Ted Cruz.

He is teh gay![edit] Some homophobic conspiracy theorists are obsessed with their belief that Barack Obama is sexually attracted to men, perhaps to the point that he only has ever had sex with men. Mary Lou Bruner, a candidate for the Texas School Board, made waves in 2016 arguing that the progress made on LGBT civil rights during the Obama administration was a direct result of "the years he spent as a male prostitute in his twenties."[79] The homophobes' psychological hangup seems related to an obsessive belief that his presidency lacks the muscular masculinity that these troglodytes require. Of course, the plain fact of the existence of Obama's heteronormative nuclear family makes these claims a bit harder to believe, and so elaborate conspiracies have been concocted, the most amusing of which has to be that Michelle Obama is actually a man.[80] What this means in terms of their children is left largely unexplored.

Marxism[edit] See the main article on this topic: Cultural Marxism “”Either we throw Barack Hussein Obama and his corrupt, Godless Marxist/Socialist anti-American cohorts out of office or we face the real probability that our Constitutional Republic will cease to exist. That means the end of our Bill of Rights, including no more Second Amendment, no more Free Speech, no more Right to Assembly, no more Liberty. —Some idiot[81] Some of Obama's more paranoid opponents attempt to make the supporter of capitalism look like a Marxist by quote mining him, completely ignoring such glaring counter-evidence as the fact that he advocated for bailing out certain large corporations instead of nationalizing them. This is the same stuff that FDR had to go through.

In his first run for the State Senate, he received the endorsement of the "New Party," a highly obscure Marxist outfit that was aiming to reintroduce electoral fusionWikipedia's W.svg on a national level.[82] Of course, no one outside the moonbat community actually noticed this until the wingnut community, scraping the dregs for any excuse to use "Obama" and "communist" in the same sentence, happened upon it. Therefore, the New Party is most known today for the right-wing fit this nomination provoked. The nomination is so obscure that, by Wikipedia rules, it cannot be mentioned in the article on Obama. Oh, wait, does that mean there's unrelenting liberal bias in Wikipedia?

Lack of phony patriotism[edit]

Obama was criticized by right-wing "patriots" for not putting his hand on his heart while singing the National Anthem. Unlike many in the political arena, Obama does not routinely wear a flag pin in his lapel,[83] possibly because he can remember which country he's President of without having to look at it every few minutes. However, he did wear one given to him by a veteran at a 2008 campaign speech[84] and continued to wear one sporadically throughout the rest of his campaign, notably at major political events.

In yet another horrific public display, Obama was observed not putting his hand on his heart while the National Anthem was being sung (gasp!).[note 4]

Obligatory religious nuttery[edit] In his 2006 "Call for Renewal" speech, Obama, responding to secularists critical of the Pledge of Allegiance who had filed suit to have the practice discontinued, declared that "It is doubtful that children reciting the Pledge of Allegiance feel oppressed or brainwashed as a consequence of muttering the phrase 'under God.'"[85]

Vacations[edit] Among a certain section of the country, it is widely believed that Obama spent too much time on vacation, playing golf. It is an article of faith for some conservatives that this is yet another way in which he had been a demonstrably poor President. Unfortunately, nearing the end of his first term, Obama's vacation days were half of Reagan's and a third of the time George W. Bush spent at that point in their presidencies.[86] This trend remained unchanged during his second term.[87] If you want to be even more pedantic, the "golfer-in-chief" was either Woodrow Wilson or Dwight D. Eisenhower, who both somehow managed to play 1,000 holes in eight years (in contrast to Obama's 200+).[88][89] Dumb urban legends die hard, but there may indeed be something to the Ike comparisons.[note 5]

Also, bear in mind that George W. Bush, supposedly acknowledging that many Americans had to make sacrifices during the completely needless Iraq War he started, said that one of the war-time sacrifices he had made was that he no longer plays golf because he thought it would be unfair for the mothers of active-duty soldiers to have to see the president playing golf. Don't get us fucking started!

Abundance of melanin[edit] His other major issues with winning over people include:

His name terrifies illiterate rednecks: Barack (rhymes with "Iraq," also means "blessed" in Swahili — derived from the same Semitic language root as Baruch in Hebrew) Hussein ('nuff said) Obama (one letter off from "Osama")[note 6] His skin color terrifies racist morons His alleged use of mind control terrifies quacks[note 7] His refusal to foam at the mouth or to cater to people's worst hatreds and fears has failed to motivate the extreme left; he continues to blindly stick with this strategy even though his opponents successfully use such methods to motivate their base. Several conservative blogs and commentators, suffering from a huge case of sour grapes over the election, have stated that Barack Obama is a President of affirmative action.[90] This quite idiotic and clearly bitter accusation is completely at odds with observed polling behavior related to race, known as the Bradley effect, where people of ethnic minorities get fewer votes in reality compared to polls.

Post-Presidency[edit] Absolving Manning was a small way for him to cash in on his "fair treatment of whistleblowers" promise from the '08 campaign. Right now, the Democratic party is in something of a civil war. The progressive wing is furious with Obama for the centrist turn he took in office. Obama is open in the fact that he wants to assume a leadership role within the party after his term is up: he wants to fix the party and build up a platform for 2020. In order to do that, he needs to mend some fences.[91] By commuting Manning's sentence, Obama made it harder to brand him an uncaring centrist.

In addition, it puts the incoming Trump administration in an awkward position. Trump has a strained relationship with WikiLeaks and whistleblowers: on the one hand, he lauds them for getting him elected, but on the other, his base is very skeptical towards them. Obama is simply looking for a way to to drive a wedge between Trump and Congress. Since the Democrats hold basically no power whatsoever, this is the most effective tactic available to him.[92]