{"id":6459,"date":"2016-05-05T13:01:02","date_gmt":"2016-05-05T13:01:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2016\/05\/05\/obama-as-precursor-of-trump\/"},"modified":"2016-05-05T13:01:02","modified_gmt":"2016-05-05T13:01:02","slug":"obama-as-precursor-of-trump","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2016\/05\/05\/obama-as-precursor-of-trump\/","title":{"rendered":"Obama as Precursor of Trump"},"content":{"rendered":"

Trump perpetuates the post-modern politics perfected by Obama and inaugurated by the first PoMo Prez, Bill Clinton, who was also the first black president.  You know you're in PoMo Land when a honkie<\/a> from Hope, Arkansas gets to be black.  <\/em>Well, why not? Race is just a social construct, isn't it?  And what can be constructed can be deconstructed.  <\/span><\/p>\n

Fred Siegel in Andrew Sullivan's Blind Spot<\/a>:<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

What  Sullivan misses is that Trump wasn\u2019t possible without Obama. You didn\u2019t have to be a white, male, working-class voter to be stunned by Obama\u2019s unprecedented assertion of executive power. Obama\u2019s argument time and again was that he had to bypass Congress because he was in a hurry. When he claimed that things needed to be done quickly, he promised to govern with his telephone and a pen. He not only refused to enforce America\u2019s border laws; he also claimed the right to legalize undocumented workers by executive action. He forged an international agreement with the Iranian mullahs by winning approval for the deal with the U.N.\u2014bypassing constitutionally required support from the Senate. Obama unilaterally revised Obamacare\u2019s rules without any pretense of seeking legislative approval.<\/span><\/p>\n

It was Obama who showed that ignorance was no obstacle, and sheer demagoguery worked. When Obama spoke of the Austrians speaking Austrian, talked of 57 states, and referred<\/a> to a naval translator as a \u201ccorpsemen,\u201d it produced barely a murmur. When he met at the White House with the \u201cactivists\u201d who incited those who laid waste to a section of Ferguson, Missouri, he instructed them \u201cto stay the course.\u201d That produced but a faint rustling.<\/span><\/p>\n

Our postmodern president, a good friend of mine points out, has proved that facts don\u2019t matter. The weakest economic recovery in post-World War II history has been sold as a rousing success<\/a>. We increased our troop levels in Iraq, but miraculously we still don\u2019t have any \u201cboots on the ground.\u201d The man who told his supporters, \u201cIf they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun,\u201d was sold to America by the New York Times<\/em>, the New Yorker<\/em>, and the networks as a post-partisan\u2014one who somehow found a way to blame Republicans for all the country\u2019s ills. Obama also showed that bullying the Supreme Court\u2014calling them out for their Citizens United <\/em>decision in a State of the Union address\u2014could pay dividends down the road. An intimidated Chief Justice John Roberts used pretzel-like logic to redefine the Obamacare mandate as a tax, though the administration had insisted that it was nothing of the kind.<\/span><\/p>\n

Most of the maladies Sullivan attributes to Trump were incorporated into American politics by the man he deeply admires, the man whose face alone, Sullivan suggested, proved his worth\u2014Barack Obama. Sullivan rightly sees the danger of \u201cdemocracy willingly, even impetuously,\u201d repealing itself. That repeal began under the man sitting in the Oval Office today.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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Trump perpetuates the post-modern politics perfected by Obama and inaugurated by the first PoMo Prez, Bill Clinton, who was also the first black president.  You know you're in PoMo Land when a honkie from Hope, Arkansas gets to be black.  Well, why not? Race is just a social construct, isn't it?  And what can be … Continue reading “Obama as Precursor of Trump”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6459","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6459","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6459"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6459\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6459"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6459"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6459"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}