Made the mistake of saying Obama is a horrible person and conflating his actions as the head of the US empire with Trump in another thread, liberals really hate people criticising him, it's wild. I'm not American so it's easy to forget how saintly a figure is to some people over there.
It is what it is. Obama has saint status. Hell, 1000 years ago back in '11, Maxine Waters went in on him and his protectors:
WaPo: Maxine Waters and Congressional Black Caucus need to be 'unleashed'
We don't put pressure on the president. Let me tell you why. We don't put pressure on the president because y'all love the president. You love the president. You're very proud . . . to have a black man [in the White House] . . . First time in the history of the United States of America.
If we go after the president too hard, you're going after us. . . . When you tell us it's all right and you unleash us, and you tell us you're ready for us to have this conversation, we're ready to have the conversation. . . . All I'm saying to you is, we're politicians. We're elected officials. We are trying to do the right thing and the best thing. When you let us know it is time to let go, we'll let go.
But to criticize Obama was to ask for a beat-down. (Trust me, that threat extends to African American pundits who dare to say something negative.) This, in turn, caused black members of Congress to pull their punches or go mute on important issues for fear of riling up the folks back home who would view them as disloyal.
Or as a friend put it to me yesterday, the relationship between Obama, black members of Congress and their constituents is like that of children of divorced parents. Congress is the mom. Their constituents are the kids. And Obama is the father who's seen only once in a while. Mom won't say anything bad about the father in front of the children because they'll shout back: "Don't talk bad about my father!"
And that's only 1st term. Hell, 2011 was a dark year in general with Bam's
Grand Bargain and selling out. Thank god a lot of dems actually pushed back on that. We were also in the middle of completely failing Haiti, droning the middle east, and of course the murder of 16 year old American Abdulrahman al-Awlaki and another teenager that year, shortly after murdering his American father.
and also of course, immigration wasn't really a bright spot that year too (or any year)
By a ratio of more than two-to-one (59% versus 27%), Latinos disapprove of the way the Obama administration is handling deportations of unauthorized immigrants.
www.pewresearch.org
Disapproval of Obama's policy is most widespread among those who are aware that deportations have risen during his tenure. Among this group, more than three-quarters (77%) disapprove of the way his administration is handling the issue of deportations. Among those who are not aware that an increase has occurred, slightly more than half disapprove.
Awareness of the level of deportations is higher among foreign-born Hispanics than among native-born Hispanics—55% versus 25%. It is even higher among those who are most at risk of deportation. Seven-in-ten (71%) Hispanic immigrants who are not U.S. citizens and do not have a green card—a group that closely aligns with the unauthorized immigrant population
2—say the Obama administration has deported more unauthorized immigrants than the Bush administration.
How much of that is willful ignorance on the part of the native born here? And then you realize that this is definitely a trend in every issue that touches the outside world where americans have these massive blinders on.
Don't talk bad about my father!
So we've got excuses for these issues and basically everything else. I've partaken in a few from time to time through the years, but you're right that it's bullshit. We mock "shining city on the hill" rhetoric offered up by xenophobic nationalists, and we lament the idolship of a legitimate monster in Reagan, but don't realize that plenty of americans on the left side have been offering up similar bullshit for our people.
So instead of circling the wagons around the literal evil shit our leaders do, we should've been asking "are we the baddies" - but we don't and as a country I'm not sure we ever will. Mekanos is right with the hegemony aspect as American hegemony is taught and accepted across the aisle. And it doesn't help that most of the time we pretend that we don't even have a problem.
We can't let the others win, because they're worse, and that's it. That's the justification, as ancient as it is, and we'll see it again after the next Democrat has their turn to commit atrocities, make them and their rich friends money at the expense of the rest of the plebes, and then fuck off into the sunset.
It's whatever. That defensive reflex to protect your own is nowhere near uniquely american, but it's really scary when we do it given our reach as THE global projection of power and our penchant for snuffing out a lot of brown and black lives.
shodhganga.inflibnet.ac.in
