It's important for people who believed in Obama's rhetoric to stop making excuses and realize that they were conned. Fool me once, shame on you...

...so, his purity, innocence, and honesty was corrupted from the outside, by others? Did he not choose and hire his own advisors? Isn't this like blaming Cheney for everything Bush did?

"he could understand what was wrong with the world ... and maybe fix it."

Obama the Messiah? What U.S. President could ever 'fix' the problems of the world?

"...perhaps the best course of action maybe for him to take a seat at the back of the bus."

So, let's revert back to racist treatment? This statement of yours is what drove me to the keyboard this early in the morning.

Your arguments are _bizarre_. It is amazing what the Left projected onto Obama in terms of hopes and aspirations. His _only_ career has been that of a politician, yet the Left expected him to be something else? He never ran a city, a state, a company, or ever made/produced anything. His career is an extreme example of Affirmative Action, if anything. For goodness sake, he was awarded a Nobel Prize for simply having been elected. That seems quite premature and misguided in hindsight now, doesn't it?

I admit, I voted for him in '08 and was proud to do so. I've never been more regretful of any of my votes in my 32 years of casting ballots.

Voting for someone because of their race is every damned bit as bad as voting against someone because of their race.

Maybe you folks who are surprised by the recent change in your attitude toward our President should stop voting for candidates who consistently hold positions against individual liberty?

I have a honest question, did you read his voting record, see what bills he had wrote / sponsored / co-sponsored, or listen to his podcast[1] before deciding he was worth your hope for that symbol? The media narrative for both sides is smoke and mirrors. The only real truth is what the do in legislation.

1) Yes, he had one as a US Senator.

I think it's more likely that the Federal bureaucracy is simply more powerful than our elected officials, at least some ways. They provide a great deal of the information Congress and the President use to inform their worldviews and decisions, and probably have well developed methods of getting what they want from the two. The bureaucracy has a real advantage by simply having less turnover, more continuous time in the system, hence more institutional knowledge of how to work the system, than the average politician.

Race is just one of many things that is "wrong" with the world. The two biggest things seem to be the tendency of humans to want to kill or convert anyone who follows a different ideology, and poverty. If I had to guess, in many cases the former is keeping many parts of the world from escaping the latter.

Clinton? Bush? Reagan? Romney?

Both parties have the same masters.

Obama is a vain, stupid man who believes that he is the president of the United States. In reality he is manipulated by a small inner group of people who have the real power and who play him like a puppet. Do you really believe that a man of such limited capabilities can stage a successful campaign to become president? Obama is the biggest con ever played on the American people.

1. They're in power and "but the government lied first" is not going to hold up in court if you're accused of perjury, lying to a police officer, etc. 2. There's something to be said for taking the higher ground. Long after people forget who started it, having a culture that doesn't value honesty hurts everyone.

Is it immoral to lie? If so, why? Is it always immoral to lie, or only sometimes? Why? Does someone else's immoral actions excuse you from your moral obligations? Does the immoral action of the head of state taint the entire organization? Why? If the head of state is a proven liar, but the organs of state you are lying to are honest, is it ethical to lie to them?

If you subscribe to New Testament morals, then there definitely is a moral reason to tell the truth, even if the entire government is corrupt. The government is put there by God to keep order and restrain evil, so when you are acting in that sphere of government, you have an obligation to respect the State as God's agent. (Now if the State oversteps its authority or is using means known to be displeasing to God, disobedience may be in order, but respect should still be there. I expect that respecting someone usually involves telling them the truth.) Also, Jesus says to love your enemies and to not return evil for evil (instead, return good for evil), which would seem to suggest that you have a moral obligation to tell the truth even to liars.

Lawyers on the clock are always careful that what they say is legally sound; why shouldn't politicians be held to that standard? Maybe it'll make them more vague and hand wavy, but perhaps the law could be structured to be proportional to the malice and deceit behind the lie. If they must do something contrary to what they said, they should have to justify their decision in writing why they have changed their mind.

I don't know how to concretely make them irrelevant. We could just ignore them, and consider the cost of government like friction, but they do fuck peoples' lives up and so we can't ignore them entirely. And they are currently the only significant outlet of safety net, as much as they're trying to fuck that up too.

I don't know. Anyone?

My hope is that the Internet will make the needed information available and that enough citizens will get and use the information to get the government we need to meet the challenges of our current world.

E.g., the OP points out some of Obama's superficial nonsense, and we discuss it here. Much more such activity, and Obama will have to think twice and talk once, and we might be on the way to better government.

I will give some examples of US presidents who actually did some things. This will take me into some very contentious history: My goal isn't to take sides in the history but just to illustrate that some presidents actually try to do things. For some of the items in history, you may believe that the presidents did well or poorly; that difference does not concern me here but only that they did do somethings along with, secondarily, to observe that we can differ on the quality of the results. If we do differ on the quality of the results, then we have to accept that presidents who do things can risk failure; one way to avoid both failure and success is not to do anything.

As far as I can tell, no one knows what was in the minds of W and Cheney at the start of Gulf War II -- not even still in the minds of W and Cheney.

But Gulf War II was a big effort and not just some "placating sound bites", platitudes, cliches, fantasy nonsense. I thought that the effort was foolish, but it wasn't small.

So, for Gulf War II, were W and Cheney just pushing out "placating sound bites"? No, I don't think so. Basically I wish all they had done was push out "placating sound bites". Instead, I have to believe that they believed that what they were doing was prudent, maybe even necessary, to "protect and defend" the US. And they had a point: At the time of Gulf War II, doing nothing seemed to risk a significant WMD attack on the US; I didn't really believe there was much risk, but, right, it was a small chance of a big loss and, thus, difficult to evaluate.

Of course, as we know now, what they did in Gulf War II cost the US a lot in blood and treasure. I'm sure there were some brilliant military operations, some grand heroism, and some astounding successes; there were also some major screw ups.

Maybe long term, history will record that the US dumping Saddam in Gulf War II and putting in place a democracy, fragile, a long way from perfect, was a grand turning point in the Mideast, US and world security, taming of radical Islam, and progress for world peace. Hopefully. And I can believe that such was some of what W and Cheney had in mind. I doubt we achieved such success, but maybe.

So, Gulf War II was an example of political leaders actually doing something, that they believed in, that was risky, and that they could get blamed for. I'd say they were high on courage, sense of responsibility, and patriotism but too low on simple, basic, pragmatic smarts.

Else? For Saddam, I'd have put in place one heck of an intelligence operation so I knew what the heck he was/was not doing. I'd turn as an intelligence asset everyone of importance in the place short of his cook and maybe also his cook. Then I'd "Make him a offer he couldn't refuse: 'Behave or you and your family, children, and grandchildren will all perish.'"

Or, for a small example, in Iraq US General "Mad Dog" Mattis told some Sheiks: "I come in peace. I didn't bring artillery. But I plead with you, with tears in my eyes, if you f&&k with me, I'll kill all of you.".

I know; I know; international relations are not supposed to do that. So, adjust the message a little. But, net, I'd have left the thug in power and saved US blood and treasure. If the Iraqi people didn't like their thug, then that was their problem; the role of US policy was mostly just to make sure he was not our problem.

Ike? He pushed the interstate highway system.

Reagan? The Soviets were terrified of Star Wars (I doubt that they should have been), and Reagan used it, along with Poland, etc., to help break up the USSR.

LBJ? He was just determined, beyond belief, to 'fight for freedom' in Viet Nam. He allocated huge US blood and treasure. My view is that the US is fully happy with Viet Nam now (my Brother laser printer was made in Viet Nam and is better than my old HP laser printer), and my view is that the US could have had essentially the same result in 1947, 1956, ..., by doing essentially nothing. Yes, Ho Chi Minh liked to appear on parade reviewing stands in Moscow and Peking -- nothing's perfect -- but actually that meant next to nothing.

Net, lots of US presidents actually try to do big things; mostly I don't like the results; but they don't all just mouth platitudes.

There is one view that the US went from The Great Depression to a hot economy, with 2-3 jobs for everyone who could work, in just 90 days after people started shooting at us. We spent huge bucks, and nearly everything that the bucks bought was junk on a battlefield in a few weeks or sold for war surplus. Still, the spending, even on stuff that was just junk, got us out of The Great Depression.

My view is that mostly the extra spending was just wasted, but, as for the WWII example, have to believe that even wasted such spending can get us out of a great depression. So, I'm not totally against the spending. But the waste was still a black mark. We didn't have just to waste so much of the money.

OBL? Fine. But bringing in Hollywood to make a movie and letting out secret information on Navy Seal tactics was not good. I credit the Navy Seals and the DoD. Even if a president doesn't do anything, there still is the rest of the government, and sometimes it does things. So, can credit Obama for not messing up a good effort across the Potomac River in that five sided funny farm.

US out of Iraq? Another post in this thread says that that was just the schedule anyway.

I can't claim that Obama never does anything. Still, I see a difference: It appears to me that he has the strategy I tried to describe, on a lot of headline issues, pass out a lot of platitudes but actually do something on only a small fraction of those. Otherwise do relatively little and, thus, don't get blamed for failures.

It's all on a continuum and not 0 or 1. It just looks to me like he talks the talk without walking the walk, or some such, more than other presidents since, say, FDR.

Maybe it's good pragmatic leadership, and if so most of the blame is on the mainstream media and the voters. US voters are awash in power, can shake DC just by pulling some levers behind a curtain, and with the Internet are awash in information. If Obama gets away with what the OP described, then the voters get what they deserve.