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You are here: Home / Archives for Politics / Politicans / Best President Ever

Best President Ever

Tuesday Morning Open Thread: #StupidSOBGate!

by Anne Laurie|  January 25, 20227:29 am| 196 Comments

This post is in: Best President Ever, Open Threads, Proud to Be A Democrat, Our Failed Media Experiment

Oh my heavens the President said a SWEAR!…

Biden calls Fox News reporter Peter Doocy a "stupid son of a b—-" https://t.co/N1t3oy4HSu (video via @quicktake) pic.twitter.com/BuRsKeJm9P

— Bloomberg (@business) January 24, 2022

Biden crossed a line when he called the otherwise unemployable son of the guy who hosts Fox & Friends a stupid son of a bitch. Hard to see how he comes back from this. Also the aforementioned host is one of those inflatable guys that flaps around outside of car dealerships.

— David Roth (@david_j_roth) January 24, 2022

Of course, President Biden chose to be the bigger person, because he was schooled by nuns & Jesuits…

Doocy tells Hannity that Biden "cleared the air” with him and that they had a nice call. Doocy says Biden told him "it's nothing personal pal" and that they talked about moving forward. Doocy says he appreciated Biden reaching out.

— Oliver Darcy (@oliverdarcy) January 25, 2022

Fun for all parties — us normies get to snicker about Doocy, and Young Peter’s colleagues and supporters get to clutch their pearls so hard they cut off their own airways.

show full post on front page

Not only is everybody perfectly well aware that Peter Doocy is a stupid son of a bitch, it's funny to go back to when the Fox party line was uncritical worship of George W. Bush https://t.co/976G9Jpwj5

— Scott Lemieux (@LemieuxLGM) January 25, 2022

imagine having a meltdown because the president called the failson nepotism fox news hire a stupid son of a bitch and pretending that doocy's question was a good one and that there was a good way to answer it in the moment

— GOLIKEHELLMACHINE (@golikehellmachi) January 24, 2022

Biden rarely drops curses, but when he does it's a Doocy.

— George Takei (@GeorgeTakei) January 25, 2022

I wouldn’t assume he does https://t.co/Oa49YydizA

— Dana Houle (@DanaHoule) January 25, 2022

This made me laugh. https://t.co/psCQHgHfyZ

— Patrick Chovanec (@prchovanec) January 25, 2022

What Biden said was profane, unnecessary and unpresidential.

He should’ve just called Fox a “shithole network” and told the Secret Service to “grab him by the Doocy”

— Michael Harriot (@michaelharriot) January 25, 2022

pic.twitter.com/BTPZDbfobB

— Bruce the Rock n Roll Hellcat (@HellcatBruce) January 25, 2022

also, imagine that you pretend to sincerely believe that biden giving a serious and detailed answer on inflation would actually have broken through the wall of noise that is our national political media class

— GOLIKEHELLMACHINE (@golikehellmachi) January 24, 2022

[trump says literally anything that comes into his head]media: he is plain spoken and, dare I say it, funny. Regular People appreciate this

[biden gets fed up with dumb questions]media: this coarse behavior will turn off a lo of voters. https://t.co/iqGaVaz1yC

— Gerry Doyle (@mgerrydoyle) January 25, 2022

Tuesday Morning Open Thread: <em>#StupidSOBGate!</em>Post + Comments (196)

Obama Respite Open Thread

by Cheryl Rofer|  April 6, 20196:29 pm| 78 Comments

This post is in: Best President Ever, Nature & Respite, Open Threads, Rofer on Nuclear Issues

 The man whom Chancellor Angela Merkel calls “dear Barack” was back in Berlin on Saturday, his lanky figure and easy smile a reminder for Germans of a different era that ended not so long ago.

But former President Barack Obama had not come to speak about the past. He came to speak to the future: some 300 young leaders from across Europe, who had gathered for a town hall-style meeting in the German capital.

It did not take long for Mr. Obama to touch on one of his main concerns — and the reason he had come to what he called “the heart of Europe.”

Europe, Mr. Obama suggested, is one of the main battlefields between liberal democracy and far-right populism.

“Nationalism, particularly on the far right, is re-emerging,” he told a packed auditorium. “We know where that leads. Europe knows better than anyone where that leads.”

“It leads to conflict, bloodshed and catastrophe,” he said.

This past week was the tenth anniversary of Obama’s speech in Prague on nuclear disarmament. Here’s the transcript and also a video.

Open thread.

Obama Respite Open ThreadPost + Comments (78)

President Obama at the University of Illinois

by Betty Cracker|  September 7, 201812:14 pm| 190 Comments

This post is in: Best President Ever, Open Threads, Politics

He just received something Trump never will: an ethics in government award.

Open thread!

President Obama at the University of IllinoisPost + Comments (190)

Obama Up Now At McCain Funeral

by Cheryl Rofer|  September 1, 201811:30 am| 181 Comments

This post is in: America, Best President Ever, Domestic Politics, Don't Mourn, Organize, Open Threads

What we’ve been waiting for.

 

 

Obama Up Now At McCain FuneralPost + Comments (181)

Ben Rhodes On Obama’s Decision To Disarm, Not Bomb, Syria

by Cheryl Rofer|  June 4, 201812:34 pm| 79 Comments

This post is in: Best President Ever, Foreign Affairs, Missing Obama Already

President Barack Obama’s statements and decisions around responses to Bashar al-Assad’s use of Sarin against Syrian opposition provide a test case for three issues: Intervening in conflicts that have only indirectly to do with US interests, assumptions about the use of force that have gendered aspects, and how a president communicates. If we are to end our forever wars and avoid stumbling into more, we need to understand these issues.

Some time ago, I wrote up an analysis focusing on the gendered assumptions about the use of force and struggled with an editor over it for several months, until Jeffrey Goldberg published his interview with President Obama in The Atlantic. I had predicted some of the new information in that interview in my analysis, but of course the interview precluded the use of that analysis. So I never published it. But the fact that the interview supported my analysis has kept me watching for more information about presidential decisions in August and September of 2013.

Ben Rhodes has provided more information in an Atlantic article taken from his forthcoming book. The Obama interview is a useful companion read. In this post, I’d like to work through my three issues in relation to Rhodes’s article.

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The biggest news in Rhodes’s article comes near the end.

On the flight home [probably September 6, 2013], Obama mentioned that he’d had a private conversation with Putin on the margins of the [G20] summit. For years, Obama had proposed that the United States and Russia work together to address the threat from Syria’s chemical weapons stockpile; for years, Russia had resisted. This time, Obama again suggested working together to remove and destroy Syria’s chemical weapons. Putin agreed and suggested that John Kerry follow up with his Russian counterpart.

That Monday, September 9, John Kerry mused before reporters’ cameras that Syria should give up its chemical weapons. Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, replied that Syria could do that. By September 12, Russia and the United States had an agreement on the subject.

That sequence seemed scripted to me at the time, and, if Rhodes’s account is accurate, we now know it was.

In the White House discussions, it appears that Rhodes played the part of what Obama called the foreign policy “blob” – the Washington conventional wisdom that military force is the first response to be considered to most foreign relations problems. Obama wanted to change that conventional wisdom. Read through that framework, Rhodes’s article is a suspenseful account of one battle in Obama’s struggle with the blob.

Even though I had misgivings about our Syria policy, I wanted to do something about the catastrophe in Syria, just as I had advocated intervention in Libya.

When bad things are happening, it’s natural to want to do something, and for people in power, that all too often translates to military force.

Yet I was also wrestling with my own creeping suspicion that Obama was right in his reluctance to intervene militarily in Syria. Maybe we couldn’t do much to direct events inside the Middle East; maybe U.S. military intervention in Syria would only make things worse.

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Martin Dempsey, said that something needed to be done even if they didn’t know what would happen after they took action. That’s not good military thinking. But blob thinking is pervasive.

All this was in April 2013, before the attack on Ghouta that caused more than a thousand deaths. Assad tested Obama’s earlier warning with small attacks. Rhodes does not say what the purpose of doing something would be, perhaps to send Assad a warning. But a warning of what? Would there be more American attacks if Assad ignored the warning? Troops on the ground? This is the problem with the blobby do something.

The intelligence people were not sure enough that Assad was behind the attacks to write a finding. They gave their information to Rhodes to write an equivalent document.

The United Nations inspection team had not completed its work. Germany’s Angela Merkel felt that support needed to be built in Europe. Congressional opposition to a strike was building. There was an element of hypocrisy in Republican opposition, but it was a real difficulty for going ahead with strikes. The administration’s lawyers had concerns. The British Parliament voted against joining American strikes.

With Rhodes’s assessment in hand, John Kerry said in a speech at the State Department, “My friends, it matters here if nothing is done. It matters if the world speaks out in condemnation and then nothing happens.” Which is why presidents have to be careful what they say. On the other hand, we are now seeing what happens when too many people do not call out wrongdoing.

Rhodes continues as the voice of the blob:

Kerry suggested that we wait another week to bring other countries into a coalition. I argued that we had to act as soon as possible—time was not our friend, and our military action was likely to change the public dynamic. Obama, who seemed increasingly focused on the factors aligning against us, pressed for the domestic and international legal basis that we could cite for taking action.

As Rhodes becomes convinced that cruise missiles would soon be hitting Syria, Obama decides to seek approval from Congress.

At some point, [Obama] said [to the National Security Council], a president alone couldn’t keep the United States on a perpetual war footing, moving from one Middle Eastern conflict to the next. In the decade since 9/11, we’d gone to war in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, and Libya. Now there was a demand that we go into Syria; next it would be Iran. “It is too easy for a president to go to war,” he said.

As Obama goes around the room to gauge opinion, Rhodes agrees with him.

“In this Syria debate,” I said, “we’ve seen a convergence of two dysfunctions in our foreign policy—Congress and the international community. They both press for action but want to avoid any share of the responsibility.” All week, I had been thinking the answer to that problem was to go ahead and do something; now I saw Obama’s reasoning for why that wouldn’t work. “At some point, we have to address that dysfunction head-on.”

Of course, we now have so many dysfunctions in government that this one has gone to the back burner.

Obama decided not to ask Congress to vote on an intervention in Syria. Then came the massive chemical attack on Ghouta and the agreement between the United States and Russia to remove Syria’s chemical weapons.

As decisions are made about interventions elsewhere, it’s essential to think about alternatives, as Obama did, and evaluate on more criteria than the need to do something.

 

Image: National Security Council meeting in 2014. Rhodes is at the end of the table on the right.

 

Cross-posted to Nuclear Diner.

 

Ben Rhodes On Obama’s Decision To Disarm, Not Bomb, SyriaPost + Comments (79)

Monday Afternoon Open Thread

by Betty Cracker|  February 12, 20183:41 pm| 144 Comments

This post is in: Best President Ever, Open Threads

Okay, the thread below got so damn ugly, I am deliberately squashing it! Here’s a controversial topic that hopefully won’t devolve into a Game of Thrones-style bloodbath — the Obamas’ official portraits for the National Portrait Gallery were unveiled today:

The official portraits. Barack Obama by Kehinde Wiley. Michelle Obama by Amy Sherald. pic.twitter.com/xZzBYTJhKn

— Dan Zak (@MrDanZak) February 12, 2018

My first reaction was, “What the hell?!?,” especially in response to Michelle Obama’s portrait. But the Obamas themselves seem happy with them, so who cares what I think?

Also, it’s possible the WaPo art critic was right when he said, “The Obamas’ portraits are not what you’d expect and that’s why they’re great.”

I’ll go along with that. What say you?

Open thread!

Monday Afternoon Open ThreadPost + Comments (144)

Must Have Been The Brown Acid…

by Tom Levenson|  May 12, 201710:00 am| 194 Comments

This post is in: Best President Ever, Getting The Band Back Together, All we want is life beyond the thunderdome, Get off my grass you damned kids, I Can't Believe We're Losing to These People, I wish a motherfucker would!

ETA: Given Betty’s post immediately below, this should settle any last doubts that this blog is not a member of any organized political party…(a gazillion quatloos to all those (many here) who nod to the illustrious forebear who put that opening to such good use).  I’ll leave this one up for the Rose-Mary Woods photo, which is worth the price of admission. But Betty got there first in all the relevant detail, so that’s where I’m heading for the fun of the discussion.)

———————————–

…the flashbacks seem so real.

At 8:32 this morning, the usurper occupying the Oval Office tweeted this:

I have several reactions.

First, this:

(For all you kids out there, that’s Nixon’s secretary, Rose Mary Woods, demonstrating how she managed to “accidentally” create an eighteen minute gap in the Oval Office tapes, perfectly placed to eliminate some very interesting discussion of Watergate matters.)*

Second: A question for the legal minds here:  Bob Bauer has an interesting piece over at the Lawfare Blog assessing where Trump has reached on the obstruction of justice spectrum, clearly written before the shitgibbon released the tweet at the top of this post.  He argues (as I, a non-lawyer, read him) that there is an emerging fact pattern consistent with obstruction, but further focused inquiry would be needed to generate an actual case.  So, does this new tweet, explicitly threatening a potential witness in such an obstruction, advance the argument that the president is engaged in an actual, legally-jeopardizing attempt at obstruction?

Third: “Subpoena” has such a lovely ring to it, doesn’t it.  I shouldn’t still be surprised, but I am: how dumb do you have to be to announce the possibility of evidence that one had no prior reason to suspect might exist?  This tweet from Garry Kasparov is so spot on:

And with that, it’s back to the 18th century for me! (Isaac Newton, musing on the virtues of government debt…)  Have at it, y’all.

*Ancient tech nerd that I am, I am totally grooving on the IBM Selectric there. What fabulous machines… ETA: So — you can retire my tech-nerd creds. That’s not a Selectric. Ahh well….

 

Must Have Been The Brown Acid…Post + Comments (194)

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