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<\/figure>\n\n\n\nPhotograph Source: Peter J. Souza \u2013 CC BY 2.0<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n The<\/em> Atlantic<\/em>\u2019s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg recently conducted a long and obsequious interview with Barack Obama<\/a>. The interview was occasioned by the apparent defeat of Obama\u2019s fascist successor Donald Trump and by the recent release of the first volume of Obama\u2019s much-awaited presidential memoir A Promised Land<\/em> \u2013 Obama\u2019s third book about Obama, soon to be followed by a fourth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It sucked. The interview that is. I can\u2019t and won\u2019t read the memoir. Myself also (like Obama) the author of three books on Obama, I have read enough of the 44th<\/sup> president\u2019s dreary, pedantic, fake-progressive, and fake-poetic prose to last a lifetime. No more, please.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The interview warmed the Obama fan Goldberg\u2019s heart by \u201cremind[ing him] of what a thoughtful president sounds like.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n A Dark Irony<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Reading between the lines of the Goldberg-Obama dialogue last week, I was struck not for the first or the last time by the great irony of Obama\u2019s ex-presidency: his high-popularity<\/a> has been driven largely by the awfulness of Trump, who Obama helped create and usher into power, Weimar-like. With all due respect for the dismal awfulness of Hillary Clinton\u2019s campaign, sexism, and the James Comey intervention, Obama\u2019s depressingly conservative and neoliberal presidency (more on this below) was no small part of how and why the Democrats were unable to turn out their party\u2019s progressive base in sufficient numbers to block Trump\u2019s terrible ascendency. Obama helped render transparently inauthentic the Democrats\u2019 progressive pretense, feeding a mass alienation and demobilization Trump was able to exploit in disastrous ways.<\/p>\n\n\n\n How perverse Obama\u2019s image is burnished by the monster he did a lot to hatch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s working for him. Along with the undeserved acclaim, Obama has climbed high into the nation\u2019s obscenely opulent oligarchy \u2013 delayed reward for his eight years of presidential service to the rich and powerful. A Promised Land <\/em>is no small part of the big Obama cash-in. The book contracts for his and his wife\u2019s White House memoir the Obamas $65 million.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On Manly Responsibility, Keeping One\u2019s Word, Defending the Vulnerable, and Richie Rich<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The most revealing and revolting part of Goldberg\u2019s fawning dialogue with \u201cthe most admired man<\/a> in the world\u201d related to masculinity among other things:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Obama: \u201cI will say that I\u2019m not surprised that somebody like Trump could get traction in our political life. He\u2019s a symptom as much as an accelerant. But if we were going to have a right-wing populist in this country, I would have expected somebody a little more appealing.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Goldberg: \u201cNot a man-child?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Obama: \u201cYes. If you think about populists from the past, someone like Huey Long\u2014he wasn\u2019t from the right; he was a classic populist, rooted in the earth; he knows the lives of the people he is rallying; he genuinely understands them. I guess I would not have expected someone who has complete disdain for ordinary people<\/em> to be able to get attention and then the following from those very same people\u2026I guess I\u2019m also surprised by, and this is not an original thought on my part\u2014but I think about the classic male hero in American culture when you and I were growing up: the John Waynes, the Gary Coopers, the Jimmy Stewarts, the Clint Eastwoods, for that matter. There was a code. This is something I always emphasize. I may be African American but I\u2019m African and American. This is part of me. The code of masculinity that I grew up with that harkens back to the \u201930s and \u201940s and before that\u2014there\u2019s a notion that a man is true to his word, that he takes responsibility, that he doesn\u2019t complain, that he isn\u2019t a bully; in fact he defends the vulnerable against bullies.<\/em> And so even if you are someone who is annoyed by wokeness and political correctness and wants men to be men again and is tired about everyone complaining about the patriarchy, I thought that the model wouldn\u2019t be Richie Rich\u2014the complaining, lying, doesn\u2019t-take-responsibility-for-anything type of figure<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is a Richly ironic passage, no pun originally intended. The critique of Trump is accurate enough. But how manly and mature (by Obama\u2019s Gary Cooper-esque criteria) has Obama\u2019s career been? True to his word? Defending the weak against the strong? Taking responsibility? Obama\u2019s 2007-08 campaign rhetoric was loaded with false claims of progressive identity, values, and intent. But, as many Left critics (myself included) who had studied his pre-presidential career easily predicted, Obama kicked progressive policy proposals, activists, and beliefs to the curb in \u201cpragmatic\u201d service to the masters of capital and Empire. As president, the \u201cbrown-faced Clinton\u201d Obama sided with bullies and against the vulnerable at home and abroad, like when he:<\/p>\n\n\n\n * Murdered an American citizen in Yemen, Anwar al-Awlaki, despite the fact that al-Awlaki had never been charged with (let alone convicted of) any crime, in September of 2011 \u2013 and, just two weeks later, ordered another CIA drone strike that murdered al-Awlaki\u2019s 16-yar-old son, Abdulrahman, along with the boy\u2019s 17-year-old cousin and several other innocent Yemenis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n * Blew up serious efforts to set binding carbon emissions at Copenhagen in December of 2009.<\/p>\n\n\n\n * Offered no substantive support to the remarkable working-class uprising in Madison, Wisconsin in February and March of 2011.<\/p>\n\n\n\n * Gave the okay to escalated oil drilling and fracking in the absurd name of \u201cenergy independence\u201d as the planet tipped over into more deadly levels of climate catastrophe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n * He stepped up to the plate for the big financial institutions and health insurance and drug companies but not for the non-affluent majority with his massive Wall Street bailouts and his not-so Affordable care Act.<\/p>\n\n\n\n * Immediately dropped campaign commitments to advance the Employee Free Choice Act, which might have re-legalized serious union organizing in the U.S.<\/p>\n\n\n\n * Helped dismantle the genuinely populist Occupy Movement (which had been fueled in large part his transparent obedience to Wall Street) in the fall and early winter of 2011.<\/p>\n\n\n\n * Became a major enemy of government whistleblowers<\/p>\n\n\n\n * Set a record for the number of \u201cillegal\u201d immigrants deported and yes introduced caging for migrant children at the southern border.<\/p>\n\n\n\n * Gave George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and the rest of their messianic-militarist gang a free pass for torture, assassination, and launching a monumentally criminal and mass-murderous imperialist war.<\/p>\n\n\n\n * Took personal command of the drone attacks and then far surpassed the Bush administration in \u201cautomated\u201d killing from the sky.<\/p>\n\n\n\n * \u2026the list goes on (see my 2010 book The Empire\u2019s New Clothes: Barack Obama in the Real World of Power<\/em><\/a>, for a semi-exhaustive account of Obama\u2019s first year in the White House.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n On \u201cDisdain for Ordinary People\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n It is ironic for Obama to accuse Trump of fake populist \u201cdisdain for ordinary people.\u201d As I predicted in one book[1]<\/strong> and documented in three others[2]<\/strong>, Obama\u2019s Citigroup-Goldman Sachs-Council on Foreign Relations presidency was a monument to precisely such disdain. As William Greider noted early on, Obama gave Americas \u201ca blunt lesson about power, who has it and who doesn\u2019t.\u201d Americans, Greider wrote, \u201cwatched Washington rush to rescue the very financial interests that caused the catastrophe. They learned that the government has plenty of money to spend when the right people want it. \u2018Where\u2019s my bailout,\u2019 became the rueful punch line at lunch counters and construction sites nationwide. Then to deepen the insult, people watched as establishment forces re-launched their campaign for \u2018entitlement reform\u2019\u2014a euphemism for whacking Social Security benefits, Medicare and Medicaid.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Along with the American working and lower classes \u2013 \u201cordinary people \u201c \u2013 other vulnerable folks on the wrong side of Obama\u2019s \u201cprogressive\u201d presidency included<\/a> the record-setting number (three million) of \u201cillegal\u201d immigrants he deported from the country, the immigrant children he put in detention cages, the Hondurans he murdered by the right wing coup regime he backed. the tens of thousands of Libyans, Africans, Yeminis, Syrians, Palestinians, and others who were killed and\/or maimed by his armed forces and US-backed allies\u2019 bombs, missiles, artillery, bullets, and drones.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Especially depressing in light of Obama\u2019s accurate observation (in his memoir and in his discussion with Goldberg) that the Tea Party and then Trump arose on the basis of racist horror over the presence of a Black family in the White House, Obama did nothing or close to it to stand up for Black folks, poor ones especially, during his presidency. Given Obama\u2019s much-ballyhooed status as the nation\u2019s first Black president, one of the models of presidential conduct that Obama helped pass on from his predecessors to the racist Trump is profoundly peculiar: a tendency to downplay the role of systemic racism and to emphasize the role of Black personal and cultural responsibility in the creation of the nation\u2019s stark racial inequalities. As the Black scholar William A. Darity, Jr. noted<\/a> in an incisive December 2016 essay titled \u201cHow Barack Obama Failed Black Americans,\u201d President Obama trafficked heavily in the culturally white-supremacist claim that Blacks\u2019 economic difficulties were largely the result of Blacks\u2019 own \u201cself-defeating or dysfunctional behavior.\u201d Obama\u2019s failure to fight meaningfully for Black equality and racial justice beyond the symbolic fact of his own technically Black presence in the White House was all the more distressing in light of the unpleasant fact that his ascendancy sparked a white racist backlash that would target Black Americans who did not share the Obamas\u2019 elevated status and protection. Obama did little if anything to advance or shield Black Americans while setting them up for intensified hatred and assault from whites who sadly but predictably took Obama\u2019s presidency to mean that Blacks and other non-whites were \u201ctaking over the country\u201d \u2013 and that racism no longer posed meaningful barriers to Black advancement and equality. Those were absurd beliefs that Donald Trump was more than happy to fan and exploit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n No Gary Cooper, Obama has not taken any responsibility for his betrayals. He sounded positively Richly Rich in his Goldberg interview, as if he had nothing to do with the nightmarish and racist Trump experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hollow Resistance<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n After greasing the skids for Trump\u2019s victory, Obama tried to sell the despicable fiend to the nation. The day after the 2016 election, Obama went out into the White House Rose Garden to spout his standard bipartisan and conflict-avoidant drivel about how we\u2019re all \u201cAmerica[n s] First\u201d<\/a> and should trust the winner to \u201cwant what\u2019s best for the country.\u201d That was complicity. Obama knew well (but privately) that Trump was an authoritarian, white-nationalist and even fascist menace but went out to publicly endorse the maniac\u2019s election and then to absurdly express faith in the malignant lunatic\u2019s supposed commitment to democracy and the common good.[3]<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n It was a revolting, man-childish performance followed by four years of mostly keeping his mouth shout about a maniacal fascist president who blamed Obama for every national and global malady under the sun. I document this childish passivity at length in the second chapter, titled \u201cWhere\u2019s Obama?,\u201d of my new book Hollow Resistance: Obama, Trump, and the Politics of Appeasement<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Along the way, Obama went off to Martha\u2019s Vineyard and Netflix, to become fantastically rich, the delayed payoff for his eight-plus years of serving concentrated wealth and power. See the fourth chapter, titled \u201cPlaying, Cashing In,\u201d of Hollow Resistance.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n What a man! Obama has taken zero masculine, Jimmy Stewart-like responsibility for having helped launch and sustain the pandemo-fascist Trumpenstein, which continues to insanely menace the nation and world for two more months.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Obama\u2019s Fake and Complicit Surprise at \u201cPopulist\u201d Fascism<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n As in the interview passage block-quoted above and speaking of disingenuousness and the underestimation and downplaying of evil, Obama and Goldberg referred repeatedly to Trump as a \u201cpopulist.\u201d This is a squishy word that triangulating neoliberals like Obama, Tony Blair., the Clintons and Emanuel Macron (and I suppose Goldberg) use to falsely conflate the humane leftish progressivism of a Bernie Sanders and an Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez with the racist ethno-nationalism of a Trump, a Marie Le Pen or a Nigel Farage. The problem here is that Trump isn\u2019t a populist or just a \u201cconservative\u201d (another perversely normalizing term Obama employs to describe Trump and the Republifascists in the interview), he\u2019s a fascist. (If you want to know exactly how that\u2019s an accurate judgement, please read the first chapter, titled \u201cIs it the Fascist Apocalypse Yet? This Happened Here,\u201d in Hollow Resistance.<\/em>)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Obama knows I\u2019m right about this, privately. In October of 2016, Obama privately told<\/a> Hillary Clinton\u2019s vice-presidential candidate Tim Kaine that \u201cyou\u2019ve got to keep a fascist out of the White House.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Which brings us to Obama\u2019s frankly unbelievable claim of surprise at the Republican Party\u2019s collaboration with the insidious Orange Super-Spreader. Behold this passage from Goldberg\u2019s recent lovefest with the \u201cthoughtful\u201d Obama:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Goldberg: \u201cIn The Atlantic<\/em>, Anne Applebaum and others have been writing about the issue of complicity. I\u2019m wondering what you think of people who are smarter than Donald Trump\u2014Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio, these sorts of politicians\u2014and their role in all of this.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Obama: \u201cThis is the thing that has surprised me<\/em> the most over the past four years. Donald Trump\u2019s character and behavior haven\u2019t surprised me. This was all evident before the 2016 election. I didn\u2019t expect him to significantly change. I did not believe how easily<\/em> the Republican establishment, people who had been in Washington for a long time and had professed a belief in certain institutional values and norms, would just cave.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s dishonestly honest for Obama to say that he hasn\u2019t been surprised by Trump\u2019s character and conduct since we know that Obama privately (and accurately) understood Trump to be a \u201cfascist\u201d on the eve of the election. But Obama\u2019s claim of surprise at the extent to which the Republican establishment crawled under the umbrella of Trump and defended the orange-brushed ogre\u2019s evil white-nationalist presidency is not credible<\/em>. Obama is too intelligent not to know that the Republican Party crossed over into proto-fascistic, white-nationalist and \u201celiminationist\u201d space during if not before his election<\/a>, which catalyzed and accelerated the party\u2019s fascistic drift.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe\u2019re Making [COVID-19] Harder Than It Should Be\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI Think is Fair is to Take a Look at What\u2019s Happened in Canada\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n The former president\u2019s trademark fake-progressive<\/a> disingenuousness was also on display when Goldberg asked Obama to reflect on how much of COVID-19\u2019s death and destruction should be blamed on Trump, eliciting this deep reflection. \u201cWhat I think is fair,\u201d Obama intoned, \u201cis to take a look at what\u2019s happened in Canada, where they still have had big problems but their death rate per capita is about 61 percent lower than ours. There are a whole set of explanations around that\u2014universal health care in Canada, and in some areas they may not have the same population densities. But it is a comparable country on the same continent.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Note two things Obama\u2019s left out. First, Canada\u2019s health insurance system isn\u2019t just universal, it\u2019s free to the Canadian people, underwritten by a Single Payer: the Canadian government. Like most of the rest of the civilized industrial world, but unlike the U.S., Canada has made health care a human right. That\u2019s a big part of Canada\u2019s healthier outcomes on COVID-19 and other diseases and ailments.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Second, Single Payer health insurance, supported now by 7 in 10 Americans<\/a>, was coldly kicked to the curb by Obama in favor of a health insurance reform that disastrously left the big private insurance and drug companies in parasitic, premium-driving control of the absurdly expensive and dysfunctional American health care system.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Note also Obama\u2019s excessive, ponderous, fake-eloquent wordiness: why say \u201cWhat I think is fair is to take a look at what\u2019s happened in Canada,\u201d when a normal person could just say \u201cLook at Canada\u201d?<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThis Would Have Been a Hard Thing for Any President\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n But the most sickening thing about Obama\u2019s answer to Goldberg was his trademark nauseating appeasement and downplaying of right-wing evil. Listen to Obama\u2019s epic understatement of Trump\u2019s mass-murderous role in fanning and fueling the COVID-19 pandemic to the point where America became home of a fifth of the world\u2019s cases and deaths: \u201cThis would have been a really hard thing to deal with for any president<\/em> and we\u2019ve seen countries that have acted responsibly and taken the right steps and they\u2019re still seeing an uptick<\/em>\u2026 We\u2019ll get through this. But we\u2019re<\/em> making it harder than it should be<\/em>. It would have been hard no matter what, but we\u2019re making it harder. It would have been hard no matter what, but we\u2019ve made it harder<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n That is shameful statement that takes underestimation and conciliation \u2013 appeasement \u2013 to a despicable low. Europe and Asia\u2019s \u201cuptick\u201d is mild compared to the wild and reckless take-off Trump has fanned in the U.S. And Trump is of course far from being \u201cany president.\u201d The virulent racist, pandemo-fascist Social Darwinist herd-immunitarian Trump and his Republifascist allies, enablers, and followers have fanned and fueled the pandemic from the beginning in numerous overlapping ways: publicly denying its lethal impact while (as we learned from Bob Woodward before the election) privately understanding its deadly nature early on; falsely and repeatedly claiming that the virus would soon disappear; backing neo-fascistic protests of state-level protection measures; embracing quack cures; opposing and undermining efforts for a comprehensive national testing plan; failing to issue a common-sense national mask mandate; failing to use the Defense Production Act to order the manufacture of adequate medical supplies; infecting his own White House staff and Secret Service personnel; demeaning and denying basic medical and public health science and expertise; influentially modeling and encouraging reckless behavior by holding unmasked and non-distanced events; mocking and lethally politicizing mask-wearing; holding super-spreader events that directly expanded the virus; using his own infection to downplay the lethality and danger of the disease. (The ugly white-nationalist \u201cMillion MAGA[t] March\u201d that far-right forces held with Trump\u2019s approval in Washington two weekends ago was notable among other terrible things for its participants\u2019 persistent stubborn refusal to wear masks. The super-spreader death cult continues after the Super-Spreader-in-Chief\u2019s electoral loss, naturally enough.) Trump\u2019s vicious herd-immunitarian \u201ccoronavirus adviser\u201d Scott Atlas (a radiologist who stands against the conventional wisdom of medical science) recently urged \u201cpeople [to] rise up\u201d against new Covid-19 restrictions in Michigan \u2013 a not-so-veiled call to pandemo-fascist violence. Atlas tells Americans not to shy away from big Thanksgiving gatherings because their older relatives are already close to death anyway.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Trump and his team and allies are on pace to have epidemiologically exterminated half a million if not more Americans, disproportionately poor and nonwhite, by February 2021. Meanwhile, Trump\u2019s malignant refuse to concede the election and participate in an orderly transition is damaging the incoming Biden-Harris-Obama-Citigroup-Council on Foreign Relations administration\u2019s ability to act against the disease. As many as 200,000 more Americans will needlessly die before their time from the pandemic in coming months thanks to Donald Trump\u2019s continuing genocidal-racist pandemic madness. This monstrous malignancy of a man is a racist and eugenicist mass murderer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Obama statement that \u201cWe\u2019re making it harder than it should be\u201d is punk-ass appeasement on steroids. It is shameful. It is cowardly. It\u2019s not manly at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n How pathetic. How Weimar.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Low-Bar Barry: \u201cHey, We\u2019re Not Genghis Kahn\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Then there\u2019s the related and absurdly low moral bar that Obama sets to claim that modern history under the reign of his beloved Western-world system, capitalism-imperialism, is progress. At one point in his sit-down with Goldberg, Obama described how the 13th<\/sup> Century Mongol emperor Genghis Khan would overwhelm a town. \u201cThey gave you two choices,\u201d Obama said. \u201cIf you open the gates, we\u2019ll just kill you quickly and take your women and enslave your children, but we won\u2019t slaughter them. But if you hold out, then we\u2019ll slowly boil you in oil and peel off your skin.\u2019\u201d The \u201cObama-like point\u201d here, was, in Goldberg\u2019s words, \u201cIf you think today\u2019s world is grim, simply cast your mind back 800 years to the steppes of Central Asia.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cCompare the degree of brutality and venality and corruption and just sheer folly that you see across human history with how things are now,\u201d Obama told Goldberg, \u201cIt\u2019s not even close.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n This \u201cObama-like point\u201d is deadly historical horseshit laced with lethally reactionary consequences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Obama and Goldberg might want to review the U.S. siege of Fallujah, conducted during the reign of the messianic militarist George W. Bush, whose monumentally mass-murderous invasion and occupation of Iraq ranks as one of the greatest crimes in history. Bush\u2019s petro-imperialist war, ordered on thoroughly and absurdly false pretexts, killed more than a million Iraqis. It was absurdly defended by presidential candidate Obama as a well-intentioned \u201cmistake\u201d driven by an excessive zeal to spread democracy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n During his Goldberg interview, the deeply conciliatory Obama recalled feeling sympathy for the arch war-criminal and Katrina butcher George W. Bush when people on the streets of Washington jeered his predecessor as they rode together to Obama\u2019s first Inauguration. (The murderer of Mesopotamia subsequently became a favorite of Obama\u2019s wife Michelle.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Or Obama could also review his bombing of Afghan children<\/a> during the first week of May 2009. That\u2019s when U.S. air-strikes killed more than 140 civilians in Bola Boluk, a village western Afghanistan\u2019s Farah Province. Ninety-three of the dead villagers torn apart by U.S. explosives were children. Just 22 were males 18 years or older. As The New York Times<\/em> reported:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIn a phone call played on a loudspeaker on Wednesday to outraged members of the Afghan Parliament, the governor of Farah Province, Rohul Amin, said that as many as 130 civilians had been killed, according to a legislator, Mohammad Naim Farahi. Afghan lawmakers immediately called for an agreement regulating foreign military operations in the country.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201c\u2018The governor said that the villagers have brought two tractor-trailers full of pieces of human bodies to his office to prove the casualties that had occurred,\u2019 Mr. Farahi said.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201c\u2019Everyone at the governor\u2019s office was crying, watching that shocking scene.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cMr. Farahi said he had talked to someone he knew personally who had counted 113 bodies being buried, including those of many women and children. Later, more bodies were pulled from the rubble and some victims who had been taken to the hospital died, he said.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The initial response of the Obama Pentagon to this horrific incident \u2013 one among many such mass U.S. aerial killings in Afghanistan since October 2001 \u2013 was to absurdly blame the civilian deaths on \u201cTaliban grenades.\u201d Obama\u2019s Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressed deep \u201cregret\u201d about the loss of innocent life, but the administration refused to issue an apology or acknowledge U.S. responsibility for the blasting apart of civilian bodies in Farah Province. By telling and sickening contrast, Obama had just offered a full apology and fired a White House official because that official had scared New Yorkers with an ill-advised Air Force One photo-shoot flyover of Manhattan that reminded people of 9\/11.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What a man!<\/p>\n\n\n\n Genghis Kahn would have been impressed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As Goldberg would never dare to observe, Obama\u2019s historical comparison point is a glib way of trying to whitewash the continuing sins of the great white West and the American Empire, including Obama\u2019s own murderous transgressions, like the backing of a murderous coup in Honduras, the destruction of Libya and much North Africa, the wars on Syria and Yemen, the mass-murderous bombing of Pashtun villagers (children included), and the slaughter of hundreds of Arabs and Muslims (children included) with drones. The people on the wrong end of those and other U.S. crimes ordered, approved, and defended by Obama can be forgiven if they are unimpressed by his claim that at least they weren\u2019t being murdered, maimed, and tortured by Genghis Khan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Perhaps that\u2019s how Obama rationalized not prosecuting the George W. Bush and Dick Cheney regime for torture and for launching a criminal, mass murderous war on blatantly false pretexts: \u201cHey, at least they weren\u2019t Genghis Kahn.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n But this is standard Obama. I am reminded of a passage in Obama\u2019s second book about Obama, The Audacity of Hope <\/em>\u2013 a 2006 campaign volume whose titled was crassly stolen from his former preacher Rev. Jeremiah Wright, soon to cut out of the Obama family photo album for being too loudly and justly critical of American imperialism. The volume contained long passages obsequiously whitewashing<\/a> American domestic and imperial history. There Obama wrote about \u201cjust how good our [U.S.-American] poor have it\u201d compared to their more truly miserable counterparts in Africa and Latin America. Obama elegantly avoided less favorable U.S. contrasts with other wealthy nations, the only reasonable comparisons, where more humane and democratic norms, institutions, and policies create significantly lower levels of poverty and inequality than what is found in the militantly state-capitalist U.S. Obama naturally omitted Washington, Wall Street, and corporate America\u2019s imperial responsibility for the poverty and misery that is rampant across the vast world -capitalist periphery.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Obama\u2019s moral benchmark Genghis Kahn is a revealing bit of historical cherry-picking when it comes to claiming that Western- and U.S-led-history is progress. To cite one of many counter-examples, the Indigenous civilizations that populated North America \u201cbefore Predator came\u201d (to use Ward Churchill\u2019s terminology for the arrival of Europe\u2019s genocidal \u201csettlers\u201d) lived remarkably healthy, peaceful, and poverty- and inequality-free spirit lives of ecological balance and harmony. Their eradication by rapaciously propertarian and eco-cidal white imperialists was historical regression, not progress. It\u2019s not for nothing that the Iroquois name for George Washington was \u201cTown Destroyer.\u201d Adolph Hitler, whose fascist regime is something of an anomaly for Obama\u2019s notion of Western-led history as progress (as if two and half centuries of Black chattel slavery in North America), was inspired and impressed by what the United States did to Indigenous people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe First Real Experiment in Building a Large, Multiethnic, Multicultural Democracy\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Speaking of Obama\u2019s longstanding habit of whitewashing the United States, he thoughtfully and ponderously told Goldberg that \u201cAmerica as an experiment is genuinely important to the world not because of the accidents of history that made us the most powerful nation on Earth, but because America is the first real experiment in building a large, multiethnic, multicultural democracy. And we don\u2019t know yet if that can hold.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Say what now? Most of homo sapiens <\/em>continues to confront and experience the [the United States of] America as the most powerful and dangerous Empire<\/a> in history \u2013 a blood-soaked Superpower that has directly and indirectly murdered tens if not hundreds of millions across the globe. This Empire has long supported and supplied dictatorships and has functioned in its own right as a type of de facto<\/em> global dictator over vast swaths of the Earth since 1945. It has enforced a savagely unequal world system of exploitation and ecocide, raping the world\u2019s human and other natural resources for the benefit of a privileged minority within the United States and other wealthy states.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The world outside the U.S. has little experience of the United States as a model and force of democracy (multi-ethnic and multicultural or otherwise) \u2013 quite the opposite. But then neither do U.S.-Americans themselves! A vast body of sound empirical scholarship shows clearly that the United States is a corporate and financial oligarchy where majority public opinion is technically irrelevant or close to it in the making of policy and the structuring of social and political life. This is consistent with the intentions of the nation\u2019s absurdly venerated Founders. An elementary reading of the Federalist Papers, the proceedings of the U.S. Constitutional Convention, and the relevant historical scholarship shows that the last thing the nation\u2019s original merchant capitalist and slave-owning masters ever wanted to see break out in \u201cthe American experiment\u201d was popular sovereignty\/democracy. It hasn\u2019t broken out yet, as was and remains clear before, during, and since \u201cWall Street Barry\u201d Obama\u2019s time in the White House.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Obama\u2019s description of the U.S. as \u201cthe first real experiment in building a large, multiethnic, multicultural democracy\u201d seems to require an apology at least to India and Brazil, though one could certainly think of other nations that might rightly feel insulted by that statement (not that any nation subject to the dictates of capital and military complexes can actually be a functioning democracy.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Deeply Conservative<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n If this all sounds counter-intuitively conservative and right-wing, that\u2019s because Barack \u201cThe empire\u2019s New Clothes\u201d Obama has always been a conservative and right-wing wolf wrapped in deceptive, faux-progressive sheep\u2019s clothing. In his arrogant conversation with Obama, Goldberg said this: \u201cA colleague of mine says that in some ways you\u2019re a never-Trump conservative.\u201d Obama replied without protest, adding this: \u201cI understand that.<\/em> There\u2019s this sense of probity, honesty, responsibility, of homespun values, that I admire. That\u2019s the Kansas side of me.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Kansas? Please. That\u2019s the Columbia University, Harvard Law, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Robert Rubin, military-industrial-complex, Council on Foreign Relations side of Obama.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What\u2019s the matter with Obama isn\u2019t Kansas, it\u2019s his allegiance to the ruling class, now rewarded with ascendency into the upper reaches of the oligarchy (part-ownership of an NBA franchise beckons to the sports nut Obama).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Starting in the summer of 2004<\/a>, I tried without success to warn American progressives and liberals about how militantly corporate-neoliberal, imperialist, objectively <\/em>white-supremacist and flat-out right-wing Obama was, something I knew very well from my years in and around Chicago and Illinois politics between 1996 and 2005. But people didn\u2019t have to take it just from a scar \u201cradical Leftist\u201d like me. They could have read the moderately liberal New Yorker <\/em>writer Larissa MacFarquhar<\/a>, who offered poignant, precisely accurate reflections on the future president after sitting down with Obama in the spring of 2007. \u201cIn his view of history, in his respect for tradition, in his skepticism that the world can be changed any way but very, very slowly,\u201d MacFarquhar determined. \u201cObama is deeply conservative. There are moments when he sounds almost Burkean\u2026It\u2019s not just that he thinks revolutions are unlikely: he values continuity and stability for their own sake, sometimes even more than he values change for the good<\/em>\u201d (emphasis added). MacFarquhar cited Obama\u2019s reluctance to embrace single-payer health insurance on the Canadian model, which he told her would \u201cso disruptive that people feel like suddenly what they\u2019ve known for most of their lives is thrown by the wayside.\u201d Obama told MacFarquhar that \u201cwe\u2019ve got all these legacy systems in place, and managing the transition, as well as adjusting the culture to a different system, would be difficult to pull off. So we may need a system that\u2019s not so disruptive that people feel like suddenly what they\u2019ve known for most of their lives is thrown by the wayside.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n So what if large popular majorities in the U.S. had long favored Single Payer (as Obama once claimed to), with good reason? So what if Single Payer would let people keep the doctors of their choice, only throwing away the mob protection pay-off to the private insurance mafia? So what if \u201cthe legacy systems\u201d Obama defended included corporate insurance and pharmaceutical oligopolies that regularly threw millions of American lives by the wayside of market calculation, causing enormous harm for the populace?<\/p>\n\n\n\n But then, that\u2019s what Obama has always been all about: appeasement of the ever more insane and fascistic right-wing. This was the Reagan-praising and 1960s-hating Obama I knew him from Illinois, where his best friends in the State Senate were Republicans crackers. This was the Obama that Adolph Reed, Jr., tried to warn<\/a> liberals and progressives off of in early 1996:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIn Chicago, for instance, we\u2019ve gotten a foretaste of the new breed of foundation-hatched black communitarian voices; one of them, a smooth Harvard lawyer with impeccable do-good credentials and vacuous-to-repressive neoliberal politics, has won a state senate seat on a base mainly in the liberal foundation and development worlds. His fundamentally bootstrap line was softened by a patina of the rhetoric of authentic community, talk about meeting in kitchens, small-scale solutions to social problems, and the predictable elevation of process over program \u2014 the point where identity politics converges with old-fashioned middle-class reform in favoring form over substance. I suspect that his ilk is the wave of the future in U.S. black politics, as in Haiti and wherever else the International Monetary Fund has sway. So far the black activist response hasn\u2019t been up to the challenge. We have to do better.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Who did Obama choose as his mentor as a freshman U.S. Senator in 2005? The right-wing Demublican, blood-soaked imperialist, and appeaser of the right Joe Liberman. Of course.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Countering a Fascist President with a Self-Blaming Self-Help Group for Victims of Racism<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Speaking of appeasing fascist evil with a \u201cfundamentally bootstrap line[s]\u201d that advances \u201csmall-scale solutions\u201d to \u201cthe point where identity politics converges with old-fashioned middle-class reform in favoring form over substance,\u201d Obama\u2019s appearance in an hour-long special supposedly about his memoir on MSNBC last Friday night was almost too neoliberally pathetic to be believed. It was straight out of Reed\u2019s hauntingly prescient warning a quarter century ago<\/em>. Asked about his pandemo-fascist successor\u2019s reprehensible refusal to concede defeat in the 2020 election, Obama severely understated Trump\u2019s record-setting record of lying and misstatement by saying that the current White House occupant has \u201ca flimsy relationship to truth\u201d (that\u2019s like saying that \u201cHitler stretched things a bit when he claimed that an international Jewish and Bolshevik conspiracy was trying to enslave humanity\u201d). Then Obama droned out the following lame, conciliatory, and bipartisan bromides and banalities to his fawning MSNBC interviewer Jonathan Capehart:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI think Joe Biden is right to say that we should all make an effort to do our best to lower the temperature and listen to the other side. But I think when you have a current president whose entire style is to fan division, that\u2019s hard while he\u2019s on the stage. In some ways, I think it will be useful for us to just get back to the normal arguments between Democrats and Republicans. There are things that transcend partisanship\u2026 I didn\u2019t enjoy having to call Donald Trump and congratulate him for having won the night of his election four years ago, but I did it because that\u2019s part of my job. And the same way that George Bush called me and invited me and facilitated my transition \u2014 you know, that\u2019s part of the continuity of our democracy that allows us to have arguments, have differences, but at the end of the day, still be confident that this is a government of, by and for the people.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n (There\u2019s that phrase again \u2013 \u201cour democracy,\u201d a curious description of an Open Secret<\/a> corporate and financial Oligarchy).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Oh, yes, America, lets\u2019 get back to \u201cnormal arguments\u201d with a Republican Party that has gone proto-fascist\/eliminationist and that is currently failing to speak up against its Dear Leader\u2019s openly crass attempt to subvert a presidential election he clearly lost by a big margin. Yes, we have to \u201creach out across the aisle\u201d and \u201clisten\u201d to vicious, science-denying, white-nationalist Republifascists \u2013 this while the corporate Democratic establishment engages in ugly attacks on its own party\u2019s left (Sanders and AOC) wing, which must be punished for an unforgivable sin: running in accord with the majority progressive and anti-oligarchic sentiments of the citizenry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The lion\u2019s share of Obama\u2019s astonishingly dull and vapid appearance on MSNBC consisted of personal conversations with members of My Brother\u2019s Keeper (MBK), which the network described<\/a> as \u201can initiative Obama launched during his presidency aimed at breaking down barriers for young men and boys of color, that touched on mentorship, education and race \u2014 and the bias that still affects them despite their success.\u201d That was a deceptive, overly generous description. Like its founder, MBK is deeply conservative.<\/em> In his aforementioned essay on Obama\u2019s betrayal of Black America, William Darity noted the deep irony of the one and only Obama program designed specifically for Black Americans\u2014a program rooted in the idea that racial disparity is largely about Black behavior:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThere is one major initiative that the Obama administration has inaugurated that is black-specific, but it is the exception that proves the rule. It exposes all the issues at play. My Brother\u2019s Keeper is a program premised on the view that young black men constitute a social problem and need interventions that will alter their outlook and actions. The focus is on reforming young men rather than directly increasing the resources possessed by them and their families and removing the constraints they face.<\/em> Again, the underlying ideological motivation is the belief in black cultural deficiency, and, again, this type of initiative is another expression of failure to pursue bold policies that confront the fundamental causes of racial disparity in American society.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Thanks so much, Barack Obama.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Thanks for blowing up the struggle for Black equality. Thanks for blowing up Single Payer. Thanks for blowing up serious global climate control efforts in Copenhagen. Thanks for blowing up the Employee Free Choice Act. Thanks for blowing up Bernie Sanders, twice. Thanks for Hillary Clinton. Thanks for Pete, Amy, and Sleepy Joe. Thanks for blowing up Occupy. Thanks for blowing up boys and girls in Bola Boluk. Thanks for blowing up Libya. Thanks for blowing up millions of immigrants\u2019 struggles to escape misery and poverty in Mexico and Central America. Thanks for pioneering kids in cages. Thanks for helping blow up democracy in Honduras. Thanks for murdering Anwar al-Awlaki and his teenage son. Thanks for whitewashing American capitalism and imperialism. Thanks for blowing up whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden. Thanks for helping Israel murder Palestinians and for keeping U.S. dollars and hardware going to the vicious reactionary state of Saudi Arabia. Thanks for blowing up efforts to prosecute torture. Thanks for heling advance fascism in Ukraine. Thanks for helping generate, elect, and appease the fascist Donald Trump, a president so awful that tens of millions of Americans are now all too understandably grateful to be presidentially assaulted by the right-wing corporate Democrat Joe \u201cNothing Will Fundamentally Change\u201d Biden.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Thanks for all that and so much more, Obama.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Endnotes<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n 1. Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics<\/em> (Routledge, March 2008).<\/p>\n\n\n\n 2. The Empire\u2019s New Clothes: Barack Obama in the Real World of Power<\/em> (Routledge, 2010); They Rule: The 1% v. Democracy<\/em> (Routledge, 2014); Hollow Resistance: Obama, Trump, and the Politics of Appeasement<\/em> (CounterPunch Books, October 2020).<\/p>\n\n\n\n 3. Here\u2019s what Obama said in the Rose Garden to the nation the day after Trump\u2019s chilling election victory:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cNow, everybody is sad when their side loses an election. But the day after, we have to remember that we\u2019re actually all on one team. This is an intramural scrimmage. We\u2019re not Democrats first. We\u2019re not Republicans first. We are Americans first. We\u2019re patriots first. We all want what\u2019s best for this country. That\u2019s what I heard in Mr. Trump\u2019s remarks last night. That\u2019s what I heard when I spoke to him directly.<\/em> And I was heartened by that\u2026 we all go forward, with a presumption of good faith in our fellow citizens \u2014 because that presumption of good faith is essential to a vibrant and functioning democracy.<\/em> That\u2019s how this country has moved forward for 240 years. It\u2019s how we\u2019ve pushed boundaries and promoted freedom around the world.\u2026that\u2019s why I\u2019m confident that this incredible journey that we\u2019re 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 \u2014 you take the baton, you run your best race, and hopefully, by the time you hand it off you\u2019re a little further ahead, you\u2019ve made a little progress.<\/em> And I can say that we\u2019ve done that, and I want to make sure that handoff i<\/em>s well-executed, because ultimately we\u2019re all on the same team <\/em>(emphasis added).\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Obama should never be permitted to live these ignominious words down.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Paul Street\u2019s <\/strong>new book is The Hollow Resistance: Obama, Trump, and Politics of Appeasement<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" NOVEMBER 23, 2020 (counterpunch.org) Obama, Trump, Jeffrey Goldberg, and Richie Rich BY\u00a0PAUL STREET Photograph Source: Peter J. Souza \u2013 CC BY 2.0 The Atlantic\u2019s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg recently conducted a long and obsequious interview with Barack Obama. The interview was occasioned by the apparent defeat of Obama\u2019s fascist successor Donald Trump and… Continue reading