gotta have a trust to bust a trust

"Having positions" is part of the problem.
The problem when sincere and unbending ideological convictions are treated as something to be lauded rather than regarded as a mental disorder, especially when its coupled with the corrosive environment of extreme toxic partisanship

You know we've already had political compass maps of PARD in the past, right? I've still got an image of everyone's dot on the grid stuck in a folder somewhere

You don't have a dot?

If you had to guess who the only other person in the center on PARD was, who do you think
its cheating if you remember the thread

So your dot representing where your personal values and up on a grid is superior to our dots representing our personal values?

Seems kind of ideological to me. Being in the middle of a grid is different than being a pragmatist or having no ideological commitments, it is just a different place for the dot to be.

Is where the X Y intersect the no values, I'm a bystander position?

People who dont have ideological commitments will generally wind up in the middle of such grids when taking a test. You're confusing being in the center for centrism. I'm happy for pragmatic solutions from any ideological side as long as they work. What I liked about Obama was that he was a moderate pragmatist who said he was guided by "dont do stupid shit", promising to carefullt consider options and choose based on cost/benefit rather than ideology. What I didn't like about Obama is that he consistently came to the wrong decision, that he was incompetent in his judgment.

Obama did a great job recovering the Bush economy leading to this period of economic growth that is about stop unfortunately under Trump. He killed several of America's worse enemies as Commander In Chief although struggled with Syria. He improved healthcare tremendously expanding it to millions and eliminating preexisting conditions.

Obama didn't do enough for blacks in America or for poor in America. If you liked Ronald Reagan than there was a lot to like about Barack Obama.

Obama did a great job with the dumpster fire he had to deal with.

This post was edited by Skinned on Mar 3 2020 07:03am

Obama gave us the slowest recovery in history by artificially stimulating the economy with QE and bank bailouts and zero interest rates and other purely monetary policy to prod it along without building real underlying goods, services and wealth.
Trump gave us actual-but-exaggerated growth by deregulating and waging a trade war. His boom has seen clear actual growth reflected in shipping indexes and supply lines and demand for workers

There's no scenario where Obama in 8 years didn't see a recovery from the Bush collapse, because he couldn't hold back such market forces. But that last year of flatlined growth followed by a massive explosion starting on election day is clearly due to Trump and the expectation of his economy, which has paid off now. Now that doesn't mean Trump's economic boom will last forever, and only a fool claims to always know where the market is going. The jury will be out on Trump until a few years after he leaves office, so I don't think we'll have a full picture of what he accomplished until 2026+



He deserves the credit for going after Bin Laden because as Carter shows, its a risky move that takes balls. Trump of course did it about a half dozen times with every other top Al Qaeda / ISIS / Quds Force leader
If we're looking at the totality of their foreign policy, then this is not even a close comparison. Obama was a grade A fuck-up, Trump sold his soul to the devil to keep winning at everything. Obama didn't deliver on any of his promises to really end wars or avoid new entanglements, his every intervention was a complete disaster and god knows he made the Arab Spring worse, blinked at Putin in Ukraine, and was personally responsible with his schizophrenic policy for making what should have been a minor suppression of rebels in Syria into one of the worst post-WW2 humanitarian disasters that sent destabilizing shock waves through europe. Trump's been shitting tiffany cufflinks by comparison
I feel like with how many threads we've had about the Obama foreign policy vs Trump foreign policy I'm just beating a dead horse here so I won't keep going



A good thing, at a high price, sold on a lie, forged in a process corrosive to democracy and disastrously mismanaged on rollout.
Having expanded coverage and insuring the high risk pool with pre-existing conditions is an important thing that needed to happen, but I can't imagine how they could have fucked up the path getting there any worse than they did. My premium and deductible spiked 70% in a single year even though Obama promised the mandate would make it pay for itself and if I liked my doctor I could keep him. And it was drummed up in the worst farce of a legislation process I think any major bill has ever done, hammered out in a smoke filled room while fraudulent hearings were held and then swept aside and a bajillion page document introduced and voted on instantly without anyone reading it. And then what happened? Insurers fled the markets as they collapsed and were operating at a loss, states had to run in and subsidize individual markets at hefty expense, the insurers were put into unfunded risk corridors and the damn Obamacare websites never worked.

If we could go back and do it again, would anyone actually want to take a path remotely resembling what Obama did?



What could Obama have done for blacks or the poor in America? Expanded Medicaid and other social benefits under his watch seem like plenty good.
Getting such generous access to healthcare with guaranteed benefits that they have now is probably the best thing he could have done for them, all things considered.
Its not like the big pushes for decriminalization and social justice and cop-hating so common on the far-left now are actually good for the blacks and poor in America. You put a bunch of criminals back on the street and have cops not show up to calls anymore and it isn't the rich white people getting shot when the homicide rates skyrocket. Which they are, at least around here

I gotta say, I did enjoy the conversations about how Facebook has a monopoly. Could have used the same argument to say that Coke has a monopoly on soda because nobody else can produce Coke.