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Where the Hell Is Barack Obama?
I’m sick of Obama staying above the fray while that fray is swallowing us whole
My patience with Barack Obama’s patience is at an end. Since leaving office at the beginning of 2017, the former president made it his priority to lay low. Under normal circumstances, no one could begrudge him that choice. He had just been president for eight years. He was tired. His family was tired. He had more than earned the right to fuck off and enjoy himself, especially given the endless stream of bullshit he had to endure as our first black president.
These are far beyond normal circumstances and he no longer has that right. Over 20,000 Americans are dead. In a blink, national unemployment levels are about to blow the Great Depression’s metrics out of the water. States that are on life support have been forced to compete for vital goods because the federal government has abandoned them. Congress is on fucking VACATION. We’re living through a national death spiral. Right now.
So where are you, Barack Obama? I’m not asking that wistfully. This is not a folk song. I wanna know: WHERE THE FUCK ARE YOU? Oh, Obama is still tweeting good tweets. That’s very nice of him. Know who else is tweeting? All of us. Know what it’s gotten us? NOTHING.
Obama can do far more than tweet, and he hasn’t. This is by design. While our collective house burns to the ground, Obama has chosen to pull a Phil Jackson: eschewing a timeout and remaining firmly on the bench, trusting us to figure it all out for ourselves. Up until his imminent endorsement of Joe Biden, which itself is not a terribly productive action, he deliberately made a point of not getting in the way, which is delightful because Democrats still working in government have taken his lead and ALSO decided to not get in the way of Republicans, nor of our impending doom. The influence that Obama has left on the table has been so staggering as to be obscene. What’s even worse is that his void has been filled by a bunch of his former operatives who have used the Obama brand name to burnish their own halos while they do and say patently awful shit.
