Yeah, that’s true. I also remember a time when the CIA was doing their dirty work down in South America while Jimmy Carter was in office. Dude isn’t as great as everybody thinks he is
Jimmy Carter may have not have been a great president and the US government may have sone some shitty things while he was in charge, but he is probably the most upstanding American president of the last half century. Pretty much everyone after (with maaaybe the exception of Obama) has been of lesser character.
Which, now that I’ve written it out, sounds really sad. The best the country could do was Jimmy Carter, who … wasn’t great.
Dude, Obama ordered more drone strikes than any president before him. Just because he was a good speaker and charismatic doesn’t make him a good person.
How many drone strikes did Truman order? How about Garfield? Maybe a metric of “Everyone who came before” isn’t very good for technological advancements like that.
I’m an idiot, so I don’t know if this is a sensible take. However, coming from a place of political strategy, I’m not sure a lot of presidents can out-maneuver military much. Presidents have term limits and military personnel don’t. Both for understandable reasons to be clear. However, it sets up a dynamic where one knows the ins and outs like the back of their hand and the other is like a substitute teacher with a class full of CIA operatives.
Yeah he helped create it. The first US president to begin to embrace neoliberal ideology and fictitious capital. Set the path for Ronald Reagan to bring in neoliberalism proper. And armed the Mujahideen, which lead to the crisis in Afghanistan. This is equivalent to Eisenhower warning everyone about the military industrial complex.
It’s frustrating. They say good things when they are removed from power. He sounds like a good person, but he was not a good president. Obama will probably gradually come around to this kind of talk when he gets older too. He recently all but admitted middle class decline due to concentration of wealth was responsible for the rise of MAGA. Don’t know if he will ever admit that drone “assassinations” he was in charge of were war crimes (assassinations in quotes because more than half the time the intelligence wasn’t even correct).
Too bad this guy wasn’t in a position to do anything about that back when that started happening.
That was sarcasm
I think people really overestimate the power that the president has, realistically when it comes to these sweeping systematic changes the only thing the president has is veto power. Otherwise you just have to hope that everyone else in congress and the supreme court do what you want them to do
Oligarchy is baked into the U.S. constitution. Only rich (land-owning) White Males had any say. The Senate (mostly wealthy) has a permanent veto over any real power sharing. Oligarchy is nothing new in the USA, they have just added window dressing to make people THINK it ever was a democracy.