Barack Obama's Many Failures; Or, Why I Dislike Him So Intensely

The outrageous presidential election promises and assorted hyperbole of the last presidential election have nudged me into reflecting on the Obama Presidency. Let's start with a simple question: Do you remember some of Obama's campaign promises?

• Change We Can Believe In.
• Close the Guantanamo detention facility.
• Renew the assault weapons ban.
• Reduce oil consumption by 35 percent by 2030.
• Take away tax breaks for companies shipping jobs overseas.
• Institute a tax hike for the rich.

Yes, I remember those promises as well as many others that have never come close to living and breathing in the real world. All those campaign promises were merely grist for the Washington DC politico mill and typically are regarded by cynics as meaningless puffery never to be taken seriously. All politicians on the campaign trail lie through their teeth, right?

The trumped up promises meant to excite the base and convert at least some vacillating independents with no real world intentionality behind them seldom do more than briefly irritate me. What really burns me up are the disgraceful sins of omission and commission for which President Obama bears direct responsibility.

Here’s my list of heinous actions/inactions for which President Obama will be judged throughout history.

• Obama refused to prosecute Central Intelligence Agency and other U.S. Government torturers and failed to prosecute the CIA official who willfully destroyed video tapes of U.S. led torture. He did not convene even one fact-finding commission; he ensured almost all significant government documents on the torture program remain classified. Instead, he had people like John Kiriakou prosecuted and jailed for leaking details of the CIA’s use of torture, including waterboarding, while the torturers themselves and the administration officials who authorized it were never  prosecuted or punished. Additionally, Obama held no one accountable for the CIA intentionally and illegally hacking into the computers of the Senate Committee charged with overseeing the CIA and looking into the issue of the CIA’s use of torture against suspected terrorists. To be sure readers know what exactly I’m talking about, here’s a quote from Spencer Ackerman’s article on CIA torture in The Guardian, 9-11-16: “. . . taking power drills to the heads of captured men; making them stand with their arms stretched above their heads for days at a time; leaving at least one of them naked until he froze to death; waterboarding them to the point of catatonia as bubbles rose from their open mouths; and inserting pureed food into their rectums while claiming it was necessary for delivering nutrients.” And remember, Obama never outlawed secret prisons or extraordinary renditions; he merely suspended their use.

• Obama flat out refused to prosecute the senior Wall Street players and Big Bankers responsible for the systemic fraud that precipitated the 2007-2008 Great Recession. Even worse, the Department of Justice refused to even look for high-level Wall Street/Big Bank miscreants whose fraud brought the country to its knees. Perhaps worst of all, after the financial crisis the Obama Administration shielded and feted the Wall Street oligarchs and big bankers (who overwhelmingly supported his 2008 presidential campaign) as it simultaneously prosecuted and imprisoned less powerful Americans, such as small mortgage brokers and loan appraisers, for what were trivial offenses when compared to the massive national and international fraud created by the unbridled greed of Wall Street and the big banks. 

• Obama devastated Latino communities across the nation by deporting more undocumented immigrants than any previous American President. Actually, Obama deported over three million people—more than all of the previous 20th Century presidents combined.

• Obama prosecuted three times more whistleblowers (and more official leakers) under the infamous and scurrilous Espionage Act than all other U.S. Presidents combined. The Espionage Act is significant because it became a favored tool of the Obama Administration in its unprecedented crackdown on freedom of the press. The other side of that coin is Obama gave high-level leakers, such as General David Petraeus, what were light slaps on the wrist in the form of being charged with misdemeanor offences or not being charged at all, and here you better be thinking Leon Panetta, Secretary of Defense, and Michael Vickers, the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, both of whom leaked Top Secret information and totally skated, courtesy of Obama.

• Although the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution states that no person shall be "deprived of life, liberty, or property . . . without due process of law," Obama ordered that Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen and Muslim cleric living in Yemen, be tracked down and killed by an American drone without any judicial proceeding and then fought for years to keep the basic facts and legal rationale concerning the “targeted assassination” of an American citizen from the public. Two weeks after al-Awlaki was killed, his 16-year-old son, American citizen Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, who the U.S. government later acknowledged was not a terrorist or a combatant of any type, was also killed in a U.S. drone strike while eating dinner at an outdoor restaurant in Yemen. The Administration’s lame explanation boiled down to: “Shit happens. Get over it.” In my mind, both those extrajudicial killings without due process were in direct violation of the law and illustrate exactly why Obama, in his extrajudicial exercise of presidential power, was a very dangerous president. 

• Obama promoted and approved the increased use of warrantless surveillance—through the NSA, CIA, DIA, and FBI—against citizens not formally accused of crimes, compiled secret evidence, forced corporations to work with them in secret, and approved the use of secret evidence and testimony in secret courts. That surveillance program, as was revealed by Edward Snowden, involved a literal electronic dragnet of every Americans’ phone metadata without judicial review or approval. A program James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, flat out lied about under oath to the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, certainly with Obama’s knowledge and approval. 

• Obama never opened a national public debate about the scale of the intentional and incidental collection of Americans’ communications under Executive Orders or under NSA rules overseen by the secret court (FISC) authorized by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. As a result, the American public had NO meaningful way to self-governance on this issue, which meant the public was never allowed to engage in a national debate about whether the rules for collecting, searching, and using those private messages were the right rules. Obama simply asked the American public to trust him to do the right thing. I believe his historical actions as President specifically negate that trust. Readers should recall that in 2008 Obama made the following promise to Americans: “No more secrecy. That is a commitment that I make to you.” Another big lie.

• In 2012, Obama drew a line in the sand on Assad’s use of chemical weapons in the conflict in Syria at a point when none had been employed. When Assad boldly called Obama’s bluff by killing nearly 1,500 civilians in chemical weapons attacks, Obama averted his eyes and pretended not to notice. Once Assad knew Obama was a toothless tiger he escalated his attacks on the opposition. Obama also refused to establish no-fly zones over Syrian conflict areas, especially Aleppo, so that hundreds of thousands of refugees could find safe havens from the war. As a result of his inaction, Russian and Syrian air strikes targeted non-combatant areas, including hospitals, killing thousands of innocent women and children. Obama’s indifference toward and abandonment of Syria’s nationalist opposition empowered not only Assad but also the Islamists, Iran, and Russia. That abandonment helped Isis establish itself as a major force in the region, to the point where it attacked Iraq and very nearly brought the country down. When those developments cascaded, they triggered a mass outmigration that involved over half Syria’s population and ignited a xenophobic backlash that empowered conservative nationalists across the West. The U.S. and our allies shrugged their collective shoulders as the worst humanitarian disaster since World War II unfolded daily across the news channels. All thanks to Obama’s indifference and inaction.

• Obama’s administration, operating through the offices of the U.S. Export-Import Bank, spent nearly $34 billion building 70 fossil fuel power generating stations around the world. That legacy of pollution, adverse health effects, excess deaths, and global warming will long negatively affect those countries and the world and are courtesy of a President who labeled global warming “terrifying” and used his influence to broker the world’s first international agreement to tackle it. But, unknown to most Americans, his administration poured billions of dollars into power generating projects that are still pushing the Earth closer to the edge of climate adversity.

• Obama failed miserably to enact effective policies to combat climate change and the policies he did support were late, weak, and too partisan to be enacted into law by Congress. Obama also passed up the opportunity to thwart Donald Trump’s destruction of US climate action programs by declining to settle a lawsuit James Hansen, the former head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, his granddaughter, and 20 other young people had filed against the federal government, accusing it of unconstitutionally imperiling the living environment. If Obama had agreed to settle the suit quickly after Trump’s election, the US legally would have been constrained from various attacks the Trump Administration has made against climate change programs and would have prevented that Administration from favoring fossil fuel resources, such as coal. But that opportunity disappeared when Obama decided not to settle the law suit.

That he failed miserably on the above and many other promises as he strengthened and expanded what has become a national security state is undebatable and undeniable. I’d like to leave you with one last thought: Barack Obama is a very well-trained constitutional lawyer, which makes the actions cited above all the more legally reprehensible and culpable as well as morally repulsive. At this point, readers should recall Obama’s pledge to run the “most transparent administration in history,” explicitly barred the agencies from “conceal[ing] violations of law, inefficiency, or administrative error.” And that from a President who actively prevented anyone in his or past administrations from being prosecuted for torture.

So, looking objectively at this short essay, I have to ask myself why have I taken the acts of this failed politician so personally. After all, I wholeheartedly detested that moronic asshole, George W. Bush, but not nearly as viscerally. The reason was I always knew The Shrub was the enemy personified, especially with the sinister Lord of Darkness, Dick Cheney, whispering in his ear. I knew W would do heinous things because that was simply who he was. In short, he was too dim-witted to know better or to be able to reflect on the nature of his acts. Barack Obama was different; he was not only a progressive but an eloquent, intellectually gifted progressive. Thus, sadly, I bought his eloquent line of bullshit and fell for his charisma and his empty promises. The bitterness of my awakening is almost too painful to relate.

I, for one, was very, very happy to see him leave the White House.