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Hilarious. At least one of these isn’t even Obama, the 2008 mortgage crisis that resulted in the bailouts was under GWB and the bailouts began under him. Just like the inflation from the COVID checks Trump even signed that got blamed Biden.
The Kunduz Hospital Bombing
Don’t forget running on healthcare reform then just entrenching insurance companies further
He and Bush laid the ground work for the Trump administration. Actually scratch that. All presidents from Reagan on did that.
Then Rich Senile Reagan.
“Rich Reagan”? More like Narcissist Reagan.
- Pedophile
Porque no dos? I would have added Pedo Reagan too.
Reagan Classic was way more senile than Senile Reagan
Too close to call, tbh
So is the narcissist whose only riches comes from corruption
Theseist. He’s a theseist. Narcissus is the kid who got sexually harassed and cursed to fall in love with his reflection for being asexual. Theseus is the asshole who abandoned his girlfriend on an island to go kidnap Helen of Troy when she was 12 years old, with the intention of imprisoning her until she was old enough to marry. Now granted, Trump wouldn’t wait, but I still think Trump has a lot more in common with Theseus.
Bigly Reagan. Big, beautiful Reagan?
In 8 years, mind you.
The only thing I actually miss is having a president with eloquence.
I like seeing empire mask off. The PR of decades past has allowed the word to forgive American crimes, it’s harder to do when we see it laid bare.
Are you from Australia? That would make sense, here next to them, there’s nothing to like.
Having seen both, I like mask on.
No doubt, Obama and Trump are both criminals. For me, the difference is the culture of cruelty His Supreme Excellence has cultivated.
They are both criminals - war criminals. But the main difference is the blatant corruption and dismantling of the rule of law. Trump is a war criminal and a political/civil criminal while obama, like all non-trump presidents, is mainly just a war criminal.
Yeah it’s weird, mask off seems to have eroded people’s ability for outrage.
I’m not sure if it’s any better. I’m not sure what will cause people to care enough to demand change. So far fucking gas prices has done more to get the average person woke than anything.
right? i’m sure it happened a bit with actual reagan but who the fuck else had cultists literally crying with joy in the streets as they pray to them as a god? Who else inspired “normal” people to storm the fucking white house?
With trump it’s like a fucking far cry game
I think you have a good point here.
I only wish this had led to an actual reckoning of the country’s true history rather than the much more common reaction, “Trump ruined our great country!”
Much like instead of reflection about neo-colonialism after 9/11, Bush spat out “they hate our freedoms.”
That’s like an ongoing single morning for this admin, plus whatever crimes they cook up the rest of the day. Yes, Obama sucked. What’s your point, to say this admin shouldn’t be our focus, or to admonish those erroneously looking back with rose colored glasses and experiencing nostalgia? Because I don’t blame anyone practicing escapism from the hellhole that has been 2026.
I think the point is the Democratic party should not take their recent victory and go back to Obama era Democratic politics. They have the opportunity be be better than the party in the meme and they ought to take it.
Then say that. This meme doesn’t lead me to that thought. A good joke or meme doesn’t need further explanation or dialogue to get you there. This was poorly written using very old low hanging fruit. Just criticize the current leadership, they have TONS you can bring up without trying to tie in obama from two decades ago.
It led me to the thought so maybe it’s a you problem.
If you’re only getting half the audience, its awful writing, so to speak. If it’s a me problem, it’s a problem, I’m the freaking audience. A key demo. You kinda want the key demographic to get the joke, ffs.
if you are the key demographic you should just read it a couple more times until you realise what it’s saying.
Take the al-Awlaki thingie for example. I always find it interesting that using drone strikes on an objectively evil group (in this case Al Qaeda) gets so many panties get knotted…
“The extrajudicial killing”… Do these people really expect that when fighting such groups, the only possible way should be to parachute in, wrestle them to ground until they submit and extradite them to the US to face a judge?
Imagine if we had to do that with the nazis
So it’s fine to rabdomly drone strike america? An objectively evil group of people?
The problem is that what you are advocating could allow the president to label any citizen traveling abroad as a terrorist and then drone strike them. al-Awalaki was definitely an extremist who’s teaching definitely radicalized young men into joining al qaeda, however it wasn’t ever definitivly proved he was a member, or even an immediate threat. As a US citizen you are allowed to exercise your freedom of speech, even if it leads to people joining an extremist group. It’s not like we’re out here drone striking Alex Jones or any other right winged agitator.
Imagine if we had to do that with the nazis
We actually did do this to American citizens who fought for the Nazi. They were tracked down, court martialed or tried in federal court, and then sent to prison for treason.
Do you think Al Qaeda works with an official member list or something?
Do you think it’s impossible to definitively tell if someone is or isn’t a member of al qaeda?
Expanding on that, if it’s impossible to tell if someone is or isn’t a member of al qaeda, does that give the president carte blanche to declare anyone who’s knowingly or unknowingly associated with the organization as a terrorist deemed worthy of an airstrike?
Are you saying he was unknowingly associated with them?
And expanding on that, that even if he knowingly was, that it’s impossible to tell for anyone?
I am saying that is a possibility, if not for him than for someone in a similar hypothetical. Especially considering that organizations like the Taliban are still designated as a foreign terrorist organization, while also considered the legitimate leadership org of Afghanistan.
The point is that the criteria required for the government to label someone as a terrorist is subjective. Which is kinda important considering it means that after being labeled a terrorist the government is allowed to kill you.
that even if he knowingly was, that it’s impossible to tell for anyone?
Even if you are knowingly associating with an org labeled as a terrorist organization, it does not mean the government can murder you. People interviewing Hamas and telling people of their experiences about the genocide are not automatically targeted by drones. American citizens working in Afghanistan are not considered terrorists because they work with the Taliban.
Sure, and when it’s about your hypothetical example of someone not doing evil things I certainly agree
But why pick this case, where it certainly worked as advertized? It would make much more sense to pick an example where they clearly had the wrong motives
Sure, and when it’s about your hypothetical example of someone not doing evil things I certainly agree
Because using it on this man who may have been doing “evil” things, opens the window on it being used on perfectly innocent people. My point is that a president should not have the ability to do it all.
But why pick this case, where it certainly worked as advertized?
You think the government killing one questionably “evil” man validates the killing of two innocent children? The government should not be able to extrajudicially murder any of its own civilians. I really don’t see how you cannot fathom the potential harm that can come about by allowing the government this kind of power.
The big thing for me is that he was a US citizen. The president does not have the authority to order the extrajudicial murder of a US citizen. Anwar Al-Awaki was a US citizen, so were his children, who were also subjected to extrajudicial murder.
I think that’s a pretty sad take, really.
If he’s lucky enough to be born in the US: treat him with knightly virtue and send in delta to extradite him and bring him before the king. If not: treat him like a peasant and just throw his body in the ditch
The point is, this is the legal take. Obama broke the law as written in the constitution.
Yeah if someone chooses to point to the constitution above basic ethics, I think that’s a pretty sad take
Laws are ethics that have been debated, voted upon and written down for all to reference.
A government that does not conform to its own law is weaker for it. This illegal action can now be called out as precident if the president finds it their ethical duty to drone strike another US citizen for potentially false accusations. And wether an accusation is false or not should be determined in a court of law. The ethics of that was heavily debated back before Habeus Corpus was made law in the 1700s after being debated for over 500 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habeas_corpus
Ethics are essentially opinion that vary from person to person and can change on a dime.
If the next president decides federated social media platforms are clearly a bunch of psychos plotting to kill everyone and it’s their ethical duty to drone strike every member and their family, I’d hope the president would obey the law and arrest everyone to be judged in court.
I’d hope they wouldn’t drone strike everyone and say, "Eh, Obama did it, why can’t I?
The great ethics debate that concluded that yes, you can just drone strike them on weak evidence if they’re not a US citizen flag emoji
Basic ethics? What’s ethical about trying someone in absentia and then blowing up children?
Yeah I suggest you watch just any war documentary and ask yourself the question “where are the courts??” whenever someone gets killed
Yeah I suggest you watch just any war documentary and ask yourself the question “where are the courts??”
Can you not delineate between a war against a separate government, and a government killing its own civilians without due process?
And yes… There are always courts involved in just about any modern conflict. The Nuremberg trials for example kinda cover what should happen when a government participates in extrajudicial murder of their civilians.
Anwar al-Awlaki ran a fucking website. He needed drone-striking? Needed it so bad, that his 16 year old kid was acceptable “collateral damage”? How many Americans meet the same moral criteria for assassination? Maybe you?
He ‘ran a website’ where he recruited people to carry out bomb attacks, which they did.
As soon as I start running such a website, yeah, I guess I know I’m crossing a certain line somewhere
What you’re arguing for here is that the children of every software developer who has worked on US military websites is fair game for murder. If you put up a recruitment ad for the air force, your daughter deserves to die. If you’re the guy who made the navy’s banner ad, it’s no big deal if your son is killed. And that’s to say nothing of the family of every member actually engaged in combat.
You see how absurd it is, surely?
Who says their children should be targeted?
I always find it interesting that using drone strikes on an objectively evil group (in this case Al Qaeda) gets so many panties get knotted…
I’m so glad that we’ll always be able to trust the president to unilaterally decide which groups are evil and to use his power in the interests of the people.
I mean, can you imagine what would’ve happened if some bad actor got in and used those sorts of things for precedent? Like, what if a Republican president had got in and decided to, I don’t know, accuse random Venezuelan fishing boats of being “narco-terrorists,” and used the exact same power to kill them for sport? Just spitballing here.
But I mean, what are the odds of that, right? Surely we can trust the United States president with the power to be judge, jury, and executioner for the entire globe. This is a very sane and reasonable position, and I just can’t understand why anyone would get their panties in a knot over it.
Well I see a clear distinctinction between striking an Al Qaeda group and those fishing boats, for one. Maybe get them to explain themselves and if wrong impeach and put them in prison?
Explain themselves? Impeachment? Prison? Is that a joke?
The reason you don’t understand the backlash is because you don’t understand how this works.
Those were things that were at least theoretically possible in the pre-9/11 system. What Bush changed and Obama continued, was making it into a system with zero accountability. All the executive has to do is claim that they think someone’s a terrorist, there is no court, no evidence required, no higher authority they answer to or that could hold them accountable. One, single person has total and complete authority to kill anyone in the world. And what al-Awlaki showed is that this applies even to US citizens.
Theoretically, if Trump wanted to, he could launch a drone strike on Ilhan Omar’s house and the only obstacle would be the political backlash. Y’all simply do not appreciate the degree to which the executive acquired dictatorial power in the “post-9/11 world.” Bush was just Trump but with literally 90% of the country supporting him. Trump has only gone further because of the groundwork Bush laid. The “emergency” powers from post 9/11 are still in place, they were never going away.
The president can ride his bike with no handlebars.
I do and I certainly agree that the US should dispose of this ridiculous system
But I don’t think the al-Awlaki case is a good one to use as an example because he so clearly was a ‘good shoot’. Better to use examples like the one you cited
Al-Awlaki is cited because he was the first US citizen to be targeted under the policy. The criticism isn’t about whether he was guilty or innocent, it’s about the flagrant disregard for due process.
It’s important to talk about cases like that precisely in order to confront the brainworms of, “He was probably a terrorist so who cares?” That mentality is precisely what got us here and it’s impossible to fix the problem without firmly rejecting that way of thinking.
You don’t get to give the government permission to ignore due process in some cases and not in others. That’s not how laws or systems work. Either they have to follow the process even when you personally think the person is guilty, or they can ignore the process even when you think the person is innocent. Once you’ve given the executive the power to make the decision unilaterally, you don’t get to challenge that decision. Because that what having the power to make a decision unilaterally means.
If you get stormed by 10 Al Qaeda freedom fighters and one is a US citizen, do you try to shoot that one in the leg to allow him his fair day in court?
Or do you spray all ten of them left to right and then left again because, you know, that’s what you do in a war
The thing is, he wasn’t the first US citizen to be killed by the US government. It’s just that in times prior to this the government had to provide credible evidence that the person was an immediate threat.
The Obama administration refused to elaborate on why they considered this person as an immediate threat. They just labeled him a terrorist and then sent the drone.
I would simply not get stormed by 10 Al Qaida freedom fighters by not going to their country in the first place.
Also, can we just take a moment to appreciate how wildly you’re distorting this? He was not killed “storming” someone with 9 other people. There was no physical danger. He was killed by an unmanned drone, by someone probably sitting in an air conditioned room on the other side of the world. And this was in Yemen, a country we weren’t even at war with. So when you say, “that’s what you do in war,” apparently, it’s also what you think we should do in peace.
What would you say if Yemen launched a drone strike in the US, claiming that the US was harboring a terrorist? That cool with you? Is that just “what you do in not-war?”
Completely ridiculous. What you’re saying right now is exactly what actual authoritarianism looks like.
Abdulrahman was a 16 year old student, he wasn’t in al-Qaeda.
He wasn’t the target of the attack. He was just unlucky enough to be studying a few feet away from the Al Qaeda guy that was
It’s it important, legal concept of imminence. It’s self-defense if somebody points a gun at you, and you kill them in response. It’s murder if you go to somebody’s house, find them, and kill them because they hang out with bad dudes.
The al-Awlaki case was more like the latter example. He was accused of being a propagandist for al-Qaeda. He had not taken up arms, he had not engaged in violence, and any threat he posed was not imminent.
Moreover, the Obama administration recognized this, and argued that the President’s assessment constituted due process of law, without the courts. Practically speaking, it means that the President can charge, try, and carry out the sentence of death, and there’s no responsibility on anyone’s part to prove that it was justified.
The upshot is that, for example, the President can now say that you’re an “antifa terrorist,” and execute you, even if all you did was post a meme mocking Hegseth, and you have no recourse.
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At a certain point, things turn into a war where it’s impossible to go ask politely to turn themselves in.
If you ‘hang out’ with a group that’s at war with the US, and not in your ‘posting memes’ sense but in the kinda more serious ‘multiple bomb attacks’ sense, yeah then you run the risk of not getting the full judicial process
How does a judicial system establish that you hang out with a group that’s at war with the US without the full judicial process? What’s stopping the judicial system from denying anyone the full judicial process? What’s stopping them from deciding you hang out with a group that’s at war with the US?
Well as soon as I hang out with them and start posting videos on how you should join us and kill innocent civilians, yeah, I don’t think you’d need ‘the full judicial process’ to know what I’m up to.
The whole point of the judicial process is that you have to have a chance to defend yourself against accusations. Who decides when the evidence is clear enough to justify an extrajudicial intercontinental execution?
In the case of the US, they gave this power to the president
If I had to decide I’d create some kind of commission for something so sensitive
Gah, I keep forgetting how hard abstract thinking is. In more concrete terms: President Obama accused Anwar al-Awlaki of being affiliated with al-Qaeda. We don’t actually know if that was true. The administration never had to prove it in court; it just killed him.
The reason that we have due process of law, and courts, is to protect the innocent. Forget memes, that was just an example. Under the precedent set by Obama, the President can convict you of any crime just by saying so. You and I could be affiliated with al-Qaeda, and threaten national security. Period. Don’t bother to deny it, you are a terrorist, and there’s nobody and no process to hear your denial. No lawyers, no court, no appeals. If the President said so, so it is.
And that’s dangerous.
We pretty much know that he was though - he posted the videos himself. It’s pretty naive to think that only a court could ‘actually’ decide on that.
And do you have the same concern for the tens of thousands other (alleged) Al Qaeda members they bombed? Or the tens of thousands (alleged) ISIS members they bombed?
So it would’ve been really easy to prove the case in court. That’s not an excuse not to have a trial. They knew where he was (to drone strike him), they could’ve tried to arrest him. Hell, there’s even the concept of trial in absentia. Killing anybody and saying that the President’s say-so is all the process that due is exactly what kings do, and what the American Revolution was about.
And, yes, I do have a problem with the way that many other cases were handled. We’re well down the slippy slope to a place where the man in charge can blow up boats in the Caribbean without evidence or trial, solely on his (dubious) claim that they’re drug-runners.
So, fuck-you very much, Obama.
Lol the American revolution was about taxes. If it was about not having an all powerful king-like figure at the top, that constitution would have came out a little bit different…
If you’re fighting a war against an org like Al Qaeda, where you have to kill tens of thousands of people, it’s completely ridiculous to go through the courts for each one. It might be ideal, but it’s not possible
That is an oversimplification of the causes of the Revolution. Anyway, I thought you seemed to be seeking to understand why people were upset about the extra-judicial killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, but it appears that I was incorrect. In short, it’s about trashing legal doctrines that slowly developed over nearly a thousand years in order to protect individual rights, and tearing down “innocent until proven guilty in a court of law” that’s supposedly a bedrock principle of justice.
In a war there’s still army lawyers involved in vetting attack strategies. There’s still rules of engagement.
Would you be in favor of the reverse? Other countries coming to the US and just fucking bombing your house because your an American and maybe you went on a date with a soldier one time? It’s pretty easy to make this argument when you have the biggest gun.
Are you saying they bombed him because he went on a date with a soldier?
No it was an example of having some random meaningless connection to a terrorist. A US soldier is the terrorist in this example. They drone striked people for essentially having some social connection to someone else they thought was a terrorist.
Some social connection? They were living with them and posting jihadist recruiting videos
So then let’s copy that exactly. Someone is an American who lives with a US soldier and posts tiktoks about the US Army. Is it ok to drone strike them?
What happens when someone else who posts memes does a bomb attack? Do you trust the government to differentiate between memeing for fun and memeing with intent to kill?
Well I suggest you read up about the content of this guy’s videos and see if you can make that distinction yourself
Democrats aren’t perfect so we must keep republicans in power.
Democrats aren’t perfect, so hold them accountable. It’s not zero sum.
it’s not zero sum
Yes it literally is in this case
Democrats aren’t perfect so stop discouraging people from voting third party and using their influence to put pressure on the Democrat establishment. They’ve gotten this bold and useless because they know that no matter how shitty or ineffective they are theres a horde of ‘vote blue no matter who’ voters who will just bend over and take it. Because it’s always ‘the most important election ever’ and ‘not the time’. But if people hadnt started believing that shit decades ago, you wouldn’t be in this position now. Sunken cost fallacy is real and is being exploited against you. Break the pattern.
Voting third party always hurts the voter’s interests in FPTP systems. It’s called the spoiler effect. Learn how the US electoral system works before telling people how to vote.
In primaries that’s safe.
In ranked choice voting that’s safe.
In first past the post elections, that’s suicide.
The problem is all the rich donors and political consultants getting more influence than regular people. You break that by electing people willing fight back instead of comply, and by putting pressure on the politicians who take the bribes.
You don’t put pressure on them by promising to give the party that’s even worse more power, that only tells those politicians that their best option is to aim for the shitty type of voters voting for the bad party.
I mean, I ONLY vote third party in primaries. I’ve even done some work promoting these candidates. But if they don’t get that early support, being on the ballot on Election Day is useless.
I mean, that’s not true though. If the Democrats had seen a sizable percentage of their voting base swinging left anytime in the last 30 years, then they wouldn’t have been so quick to try the failed strategy of courting centrist Republicans. The lie they feed you every time is that you have to suck it up and vote for the lesser evil ‘just this once’ and it works because their voting base is self-policing. But if enough of you had said ‘no that’s enough of this bullshit’ decades ago, the world would be a very different place. It can’t keep being ‘just this once’ every single election.
If the Democrats had seen a sizable percentage of their voting base swinging left anytime in the last 30 years, then they wouldn’t have been so quick to try the failed strategy of courting centrist Republicans.
I’m a third-party voter, and Democratic party hater, but I’m not sure this is true. The Democrats have repeatedly shown that they would rather let the Republicans take control, than let Leftists have a shot.
I agree with the rest of what you said though
I think even if that is the case, that is useful. If a party is so willing to shoot themselves in the foot that they refuse to win elections because they don’t want to cater to their constituents, something else will rise in that power vacuum.
No it won’t. You’re assuming the US electoral system is fair and reasonable.
It’s not a lie they feed me. It just the system they built. Everyone knows it and short of violent revolution, it requires dismantling from the inside.
And we’ve all tried sitting out or voting third party. That’s given us the even worse outcomes.
But establishment dems don’t even get on the ballot if they’re primaried.
I’m not really into accelerationist rhetoric.
When has a sizable portion of the Democrat base ever sat out or voted third party? Sure, individuals may have tried once or twice, but the point is that it needs to be a sustained effort that’s not being actively discouraged by the rest of the voters. By calling them Russian trolls or bots or idiots or whatever else. I think it’s way more idiotic to keep doing the same thing over and over, keep watching the party shift further and further right, and keep saying “theres no other choice! Game theory! It’s functionally a two party system! Not voting for Democrats is the same as voting Republican!”. That’s such a short-sighted point of view, and only works if you look at each election in isolation, not on a long enough timescale. If you’re not willing to do it for yourself, maybe do it for the voters 3 decades from now.
https://themidtermproject.org/turnout
According to this, 74% of the USA sat out of the midterms this year. Surely you agree that 74% of the population includes “a sizable portion of the Democrat base”. The Democrats are so far right, people on America’s left outnumber people on America’s right 2:1. And the Democrats keep losing elections, because even though most Americans support UBI, universal healthcare, free education, electoral reform, and clean energy, they don’t vote for the Democrats. Non-voters got America into this fascism situation. It will take people voting, protesting, and giving mutual aid to get America out of it.
