Obama's Bullshit, A Follow-Up

Or "Part 3" (with the late Bruce Dixon)

I have three follow-ups to my two-part series on the fascism-enabling presidency of the “vacuous to repressive neoliberal” and imperialist Barack Obama (see Part 1 here and Part 2 here).

+1. “Everybody is Sad When a Fascist Becomes President of the United States.”

One of the most irritating things I’ve experienced over the last seven years is getting  ignorant and stupid pushback from numerous liberals, progressives, and even many self-described leftists (including even Noam Chomsky for f*#k’s sake) for having the elementary historical, political, and ideological good judgment to properly identify, describe, analyze, and denounce Donald “Take Down the Metal Detectors” Trump and Trumpism as fascist.

Here’s something curious about that pushback from liberals, many of whom see the 44^th US president as a great hero: Obama himself described Trump as “a fascist” in a 2016 phone call with the Democratic Party’s vice-presidential candidate Tim Kaine, and this with the party’s presidential candidate standing nearby and concurring with the description. 

We know this from “Hillary,” an early 2020 Hulu documentary. The film shows Kaine talking to his running mate Hillary Clinton at an unspecified time during the 2016 campaign. “President Obama called me last night,” Kaine says, “and said: ‘Tim, remember, this is no time to be a purist. You’ve got to keep a fascist out of the White House.’”  Clinton says “I echo that sentiment” and adds: “But that’s really – the weight of our responsibility is so huge.”

So the liberal star Obama and Hillary were quite aware that Trump was “a fascist” before the orange maniac was first elected and more than four years before all serious debate about the matter should have ended with the tangerine-tinted Hitler fan’s January 6 putsch attempt.

This was something Obama could know and say only in private, never in public, then or since.

Obama did worse than just stay silent about what he knew to be true about Trump, however.

Listen to the idiotic and grotesque statement that Obama arrogantly delivered in the White House Rose Garden the day after Trump won in 2016:

“Now, everybody is sad when their side loses an election. But the day after, we have to remember that we’re actually all on one team. This is an intramural scrimmage. We’re not Democrats first. We're not Republicans first. We are Americans first. We’re patriots first. We all want what’s best for this country. That’s what I heard in Mr. Trump’s remarks last night. That's what I heard when I spoke to him directly. And I was heartened by that. That's what the country needs -- a sense of unity; a sense of inclusion; a respect for our institutions, our way of life, rule of law; and a respect for each other. I hope that he maintains that spirit throughout this transition, and I certainly hope that’s how his presidency has a chance to begin…A lot of our fellow Americans are exultant today. A lot of Americans are less so. But that's the nature of campaigns. That's the nature of democracy. It is hard, and sometimes contentious and noisy, and it's not always inspiring…Sometimes you lose an argument. Sometimes you lose an election. The path that this country has taken has never been a straight line. We zig and zag, and sometimes we move in ways that some people think is forward and others think is moving back. And that's okay. I’ve lost elections before…That’s the way politics works sometimes. We try really hard to persuade people that we’re right. And then people vote. And then if we lose, we learn from our mistakes, we do some reflection, we lick our wounds, we brush ourselves off, we get back in the arena. We go at it. We try even harder the next time….The point, though, is, is that we all go forward, with a presumption of good faith in our fellow citizens -- because that presumption of good faith is essential to a vibrant and functioning democracy. That's how this country has moved forward for 240 years. It’s how we’ve pushed boundaries and promoted freedom around the world. That's how we've expanded the rights of our founding to reach all of our citizens. It’s how we have come this far… And that's why I'm confident that this incredible journey that we're on as Americans will go on. And I am looking forward to doing everything that I can to make sure that the next President is successful in that. I have said before, I think of this job as being a relay runner -- you take the baton, you run your best race, and hopefully, by the time you hand it off you're a little further ahead, you've made a little progress. And I can say that we've done that, and I want to make sure that handoff is well-executed, because ultimately we're all on the same team.”  

What despicable horseshit. “Respect for the rule of law”!! Obama knew it was complete bullshit. He was lying through his teeth.  Just months before he had told Kaine “you’ve got to keep a fascist out of the White House.”

Privately, the Black Weimar president knew that the Trumpenstein, who he helped create, was “a fascist,” but publicly he vomited out a bunch of disingenuous and smarmy make nice American Exceptionalist crapola about how “we’re all on the same team” of “functioning democracy.” But of course.

As Obama delivered these insincere, populace-deceiving comments, another old white man he helped put on the center stage of history looked on with a big smile over his shoulder – the bumbling and spectacularly uncharismatic neoliberal Joe “Status Quo” Biden, whose tepid corporate nothingness, insipid centrism, and epically uninspiring persona have brought his 2023 public approval numbers (lower than Jimmy Carter’s in 1979) so far down that he could be defeated next fall by a subhuman beast potentially convicted of trying to overthrow US electoral “democracy” and rule of law, such as they are.

2.  Hey Obama, It is the Apocalypse Yet?

When The New Yorker’s anti-communist editor David Remnick asked Obama about the Trump election two days later, Obama said “I don’t believe in the apocalyptic – until the apocalypse comes.  I think nothing is the end of the world until the end of the world.” I wonder how Obama thinks about things now, with The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists having moved its “Doomsday Clock” closer to Midnight than it’s ever been, thanks in part to an inter-imperialist proxy war his man Biden has been waging in Ukraine. Also contributing to this unnerving clock change is the runaway capitalogenic climate catastrophe that the planet-cooking fracker Obama helped protect in Copenhagen (where he deep-sixed a binding international emission agreement) and that Biden is furthering by signing off on new drilling in the pristine Arctic among other eco-cidal measures.

3. The Flint Water Stunt

 I forgot to include in Part 2 (though it could also have gone in Part 1) an egregious episode illustrating the Dollar O’bomber’s white-pleasing neoliberalism: the nauseating moment when the lame duck drone warrior Obama pretended in May of 2016 to drink lead-filled tap-water that had been criminally poisoned by white capitalist city and state officials in the 57% Black city of Flint, Michigan. The late Bruce Dixon, an editor of Black Agenda Report (BAR), wrote a masterful and properly critical account of this sickening Obama event:

“President Obama's self-described ‘stunt,’ chugging a glass of Flint water, assuring residents of its safety, and claiming he might have ingested lead himself as a child were a deeply cynical deployment of his blackness to divert attention from federal responsibility for the mass poisonings and coverups…’When I was five, six, seven,’ the First Black President told an audience in Flint MI last week, ‘a lot of homes still had lead paint in them. I might have ingested some lead paint when I was two or three years old...’ President Obama spoke those words just after chugging a glass of filtered Flint water, and just before assuring residents that a little lead in their children's bodies was less of a life obstacle than some might think. Sure, get your kids tested. But if possible childhood lead poisoning didn't stop baby Barack, he seemed to tell his listeners, why should it stop your child, your family from success? The president admonished locals and others not to point fingers, specifically not at Michigan governor Rick Snyder, who the president said was working with the feds to remedy the situation….The president's act was tailor made for Flint, a black Michigan city only an hour north of Detroit, and aimed at African Americans around the country. It was quite a performance, reminiscent of his quip after the exoneration of the vigilante murderer of Trayvon Martin in Florida, when Obama observed that he ‘might have been’ Trayvon 35 years go…In both cases the president cynically leveraged his blackness to obscure the fact that he was refusing to go after the guilty parties, while proposing no measures to ensure it didn't happen again.”

“By the time President Obama dropped in on Flint, months after the deliberate poisoning of 100,000 people became national news, Democratic presidential candidates Clinton and Sanders had already come and gone. Congressional Democrats, led by members of the Congressional Black Caucus had staged their own denounce-a-Republican hearing in DC. For all of them, and for their allies in the corporate media, the mass poisonings were a unique case of evil Republicans whose ideology of privatization, small government and white supremacy empowered them to poison a mostly black city of 100,000. It's a simple and compelling story for this presidential campaign year, one that lets Democratic party activists keep the party's base voters aroused with demands to indict Governor Snyder and his minions.”

“That's their story. But it's not the real story. The federal Environmental Protection Agency, as Black Agenda Report's Dr. Marsha Coleman Abedayo, a former EPA official and whistleblower has repeatedly pointed out, has always possessed the legal power under the Nixon era Clean Water Act to seize the water systems of Flint and dozens of other cities around the country which are known to be poisoning local residents, arrest the parties responsible, and operate those systems itself. But although regional EPA officials were fully aware of the Flint situation months before it became public, they chose not to act. The EPA is part of the executive branch of government, under the president and charged with enforcing existing laws.”

“First, Obama's regional and national EPA officials didn't decline to protect Flint's citizens by seizing the water works because they feared Republican opposition. Congressional Republicans simply don't have the power to stop the executive branch from enforcing a law already on the books. Then the White House and top EPA officials chose not to punish the EPA officials whose failure to act prolonged the poisonings..Instead, the White House preferred to score cheap election year points against Republicans for the same privatizing acts that Democrats carry out all over the map. The Obama administration's Race To The Top program used billions of federal stimulus dollars to privatize thousands of public schools across the country. The Obama administration has likely privatized more public schools than any other president has ever built. The discredited notion of running schools and government agencies like businesses belongs to Democrats every bit as much as it does Republicans.”

“The last president named Clinton introduced what was called the ‘Reinventing Government’ initiative, compelling state and local governments to begin privatizing dozens of types of government services. The infrastructure projects of local governments everywhere in the US aren't funded by taxing the one percent, but instead by borrowing from the billionaires via bond issues that scoop up the taxes paid by poor people to repay bondholders at rates that street level loan sharks would envy. When the local tax revenues are insufficient to keep up the payments, local governments are turned into collection agencies, with emergency managers like those in Flint and Detroit appointed to cut services and pay the bondholders on time. In the more extreme cases, local governments are forced to sell off public land and other assets at pennies on the dollar to well-connected investors.”

“The root of the crisis in Flint isn't racist Republicans or devious Democrats. It's a property of present-day capitalism. The system does work, this is how it works, and both parties are committed to keeping it that way. This matrix of borrowing from the billionaires instead of taxing them, then turning local governments into collection agencies to repay the loans out of poor people's taxes is what brought us the mass poisonings in Flint. Democrats bear just as much responsibility for it as Republicans. But while the Democratic party's main funders are on Wall Street, its base voters are in places like Flint and Detroit.”

“So while Republicans can simply blame and scorn the citizens of Detroit and Flint, Democrats need a president who can skillfully deploy his black identity on demand to craft soothing, seemingly uplifting messages to the robbed and the poisoned. Democrats need to blame the Republicans, or nobody, and to keep the eyes and energies of capital's victims focused somewhere else.”

Street again: For what it’s worth, I really miss Bruce Dixon and Glen Ford, the late BAR editors who joined me in exposing and ridiculing the Obama phenomenon and presidency from a Marxist perspective from 2003 on.