Barack Obama
September 9, 2018 — John Hinderaker
After staying mostly quiet for the last year and a half, Barack Obama has emerged to campaign for the Democrats in the midterm elections. The king of hypocrisy wasted no time denouncing President Trump for being divisive and failing to respect the Constitution. He also tried to claim credit for the economy’s taking off as soon as his policies were reversed. Did I mention chutzpah? A number of observers have
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September 1, 2018 — Paul Mirengoff
Susan Glasser of the New Yorker calls John McCain’s funeral “the biggest resistance meeting yet.” I think Glasser is right, but is this a good thing? Glasser certainly thinks so. She seems ecstatic about it. McCain probably would have thought so too. He was a world class grudge holder. McCain was also capable of forgiveness, but that capacity ran in only one direction — left. It’s rich, though, that Meghan
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July 2, 2018 — Scott Johnson
Our relative freedom from the sound of Obama’s voice should not mislead us into thinking he has retreated into postpresidential respectability. We know that’s not his way. In the New York Post column “The myth of Obama’s disappearance,” Paul Sperry documents in excruciating detail that he is still out there seeking fundamental transformation. He’s not going anywhere. He hasn’t changed his stripes. He means to put us back on the
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June 17, 2018 — Scott Johnson
An overwhelming wealth of story lines emerge from the IG report on the Clinton email “investigation,” as I call it, released this past Thursday. I posted it via Scrbid here. As Andrew McCarthy pointed out before the election in 2016 and repeatedly since (perhaps most recently here), the fix was in from the beginning. The fix was in because Obama was in on the wrongdoing and he was the head
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June 8, 2018 — Scott Johnson
Glenn Reynolds could have trademarked his expression of exasperation “I don’t want to hear another goddamn word about my carbon footprint.” I have a similar feeling about of exasperation complaints of President Trump’s challenges to veracity. Reading Marc Thiessen’s great column today about newly revealed disgraces committed by Team Obama in furtherance of the Iran deal, I don’t want to hear another goddamn word about Trump’s lying. Here is the
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June 4, 2018 — Paul Mirengoff
Ben Rhodes couldn’t. . .I mean. . .process. . .I mean. . .just couldn’t. . .process Donald Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton. Fortunately, Barack Obama was available to process it for him. When you have the arc of history down cold, processing setbacks, even really bad ones, isn’t that hard. Matthew Continetti writes a devastating piece on Barack Obama’s processing, as described in Rhodes’ new book. To assist Rhodes, Obama
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May 31, 2018 — Scott Johnson
In my notes on the HBO documentary The Final Year — here (part 1) and here (part 2) — I lacked film clips of either of the films two highlights. The reaction of Obama fabulist Ben Rhodes accounts for one highlight. Video of the clip is in the tweet below. David Burge (Iowahawk) comments that “it takes a heart of stone not to laugh your ass off.” This video of
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May 22, 2018 — Paul Mirengoff
Barack Obama wasn’t much of a president. His signature accomplishment may turn out to be paving the way for Donald Trump. Obama isn’t the genius his boosters (with his encouragement) made him out to be, either. I don’t consider him a first rate or deep thinker. If you disagree, identify one of his deep thoughts. Claiming to be on “the right side of history” doesn’t count. Neither does “let’s funnel
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March 12, 2018 — Scott Johnson
Omri Ceren’s tweet below is at the same time a valuable piece of media criticism and history. The letter to Khameni cited by Omri is described well in the Wall Street Journal story by Jay Solomon and Carol Lee. We are living in strange, strange times, and the press is a virtually insuperable obstacle to understanding them. Omri’s tweet is a valuable reminder on that score as well. In 2013
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February 21, 2018 — Paul Mirengoff
The Washington Post takes up the same theme raised by Charles Lane on Fox News — President Trump’s tendency to compare himself favorably to Barack Obama. Post reporters Philip Rucker and Ashley Parker cite the same statement Lane did — Trump’s claim that “I have been much tougher on Russia than Obama, just look at the facts.” Like Lane, Rucker and Parker choose their words carefully when they contend that
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February 21, 2018 — Paul Mirengoff
Yesterday on Bret Baier’s Special Report, his panel was discussing President Trump’s latest tweets about Russia. Charles Lane suggested that we reflect on how Trump has attacked Barack Obama over Russia and asserted his superior toughness towards Putin. “There was a time,” Lane said, when the very fact of such attacks and assertions by a president regarding his predecessor would widely have been considered outrageous. Lane may be right. But
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February 12, 2018 — Paul Mirengoff
CNN reports that during his speech today to the National Sheriff’s Association, Attorney General Sessions said this: I want to thank every sheriff in America. Since our founding, the independently elected sheriff has been the people’s protector, who keeps law enforcement close to and accountable to people through the elected process. The office of sheriff is a critical part of the Anglo-American heritage of law enforcement. Outrage followed. Not from
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February 12, 2018 — Scott Johnson
I await Roger Kimball’s commentary on the official portraits of President and Mrs. Obama unveiled today for display in the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. Speaking as a layman, I can say that I find Obama’s portrait unflattering and unaesthetic, so perhaps it fits in some sense. I can also say that it put me in mind of Andrew Marvell’s great metaphysical poem “The Garden,” which I have not thought about
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January 24, 2018 — Scott Johnson
Since early on in the phony baloney Clinton email investigation, Andrew McCarthy has insisted that Madam Hillary was never to be charged. The rationale is overdetermined, but she would never be charged in part because President Obama was himself implicated in her misconduct. McCarthy noted that Obama, using a pseudonymous email account, had repeatedly communicated with Clinton over her own non-secure email account. Today McCarthy draws on the latest tranche
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January 14, 2018 — Paul Mirengoff
Yesterday, writing about former president Obama’s hack remark to David Letterman on the absence of “a common baseline of facts” shared by Americans, I asked whether Obama really is as shallow a thinker as he appears to be. It was not a rhetorical question. To be sure, Obama has failed to display appreciable depth since he wrote his fictionalized autobiography, Dreams From My Father. His signature pronouncements and phrases are
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January 13, 2018 — Paul Mirengoff
David Letterman asked former president Obama what he considers the more dangerous threat to a democracy, the president demeaning the press or a foreign power sabotaging the voting process. Obama must think it’s the latter, because in his answer he demeaned the news media. Obama stated: One of the biggest challenges we have to our democracy is the degree to which we don’t share a common baseline of facts. If
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January 12, 2018 — Paul Mirengoff
I don’t know whether President Trump called any countries “s***holes” yesterday. However, I wouldn’t be surprised if he disparaged certain countries, as is his wont, and he may well have done so profanely. If he did, and if doing so hurt America, then Sen. Durbin and others in the room should have kept Trump’s statement to themselves. No patriotic American would hurt this country’s international standing just to embarrass the
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