Barack Obama has been the subject of three of my last five columns, so — as I am a big fan of accountability — I’m promising up front that this will be the final one for the month of May.
There are a couple of reasons for all of the recent attention. Thanks to Obamagate, the guy has been hanging around the news like a winter foot fungus. Also, absent any live baseball right now, trashing Obama is the closest thing I’ve got to a pastime these days.
The Obamagate stuff isn’t going to go away anytime soon, even though my friend Kurt Schlichter is convinced that no real justice will come of it. I tend to agree with him but, as I wrote last week, I am going to harp on it for a while. Today’s column, however, is about taking the former president to task for something else.
Another Classless Obama Moment
The latest of The Lightbringer’s antics to set me off was the virtual commencement address that he gave over the weekend. Matt wrote about it on Saturday:
On Saturday, Barack Obama criticized the government’s response to the coronavirus during an online commencement speech.
“More than anything, this pandemic has fully, finally torn back the curtain on the idea that so many of the folks in charge know what they’re doing,” Obama said. “A lot them aren’t even pretending to be in charge.”
In 2009, Barack Obama played golf the same day that his administration declared H1N1 a public health emergency.
Obama’s criticisms of the response to coronavirus are laughable—especially considering who’s doing the criticizing. Obama’s response to the H1N1 pandemic was so bad that his former Ebola czar, Ron Klain, admitted that Obama botched it.
Perhaps my least favorite aspect of the false, revisionist history about his legacy is the portrayal of him as an above-the-fray, eternally class-act. He’s a Chicago politician. They begin their careers in a toilet-swirl of corruption and stay in the sewer the rest of their lives. He didn’t come out of that system and suddenly become imbued with angelic qualities upon arriving at the White House.
Obama’s penchant for violating the unwritten former-president code that says one does not publicly badmouth one’s successor is really wearisome. He’s had the best of both worlds: He constantly badmouthed President Bush when he was in office, but W. stuck to the code and didn’t respond. Now he’s going off on Trump when it’s his turn to zip it for a while.
Here is an example of that revisionist history I was talking about:
In recent days, Obama, with his legacy on the line, has made a point of taking on Trump head-on after remaining quiet throughout much of the president’s time in office.
“It basically amounts to more than three years of staying quiet and remaining on the sidelines building to this moment of ‘Hey Trump, we’re over your bullshit,’ ” an Obama administration aide said of the former president’s recent actions. “He’s had a lot on his mind and it’s finally all coming out.”
I got a kick out of “remaining quiet,” and “staying quiet.” More than a year and a half ago, Obama gave a much-ballyhooed speech that Politico said offered a “full-throated rebuke of Trump’s presidency.”
It probably killed him to stay quiet even that long.
But Trump! Or Something…
President Barack Obama and President-elect Donald Trump shake hands following their meeting in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, Thursday, Nov. 10, 2016. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)
Trump detractors are fond of saying that he is divisive. He is saddled with that reputation solely because he won’t let the Democrats and the media (redundant, I know) run all over him.
As always, the leftists — especially Obama fans — are projecting. Obama was the one who referred to Republicans as “the enemy” and called religious people “bitter.” He routinely threw law enforcement under the bus in favor of criminals. Had there been a few shreds of journalistic integrity left in America, it would have routinely been reported that he was divisive and sowing seeds of discontent.
He’s just awful. Expect it to get worse now that he realizes that he has to hold his nose and campaign for his thoroughly useless former VEEP.
I promise I won’t write anything about it until June though.
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PJ Media Senior Columnist and Associate Editor Stephen Kruiser is the author of “Don’t Let the Hippies Shower” and “Straight Outta Feelings: Political Zen in the Age of Outrage,” both of which address serious subjects in a humorous way. Monday through Friday he edits PJ Media’s “Morning Briefing.” His columns appear every Tuesday and Friday.
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