Obama's 2015

I positively loathe those dreadful end-of-the-year reviews now upon us; still, I didn't want this year to pass without acknowledging just how spectacularly wrong I was about the president's 2015.

Obama should have been the lamest of ducks for the past 12 months, yet …

… he restored diplomatic relations with Cuba; he reached a nuclear agreement with the otherwise incorrigible Iranian government; he is well on his way to securing the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade accord (hardly the working-class disaster deemed by some); he successfully defended the Affordable Care Act before a dubious Supreme Court; he has contained ISIS, notwithstanding Republican hysterics that we are doomed to slave under Sharia smuggled into the republic by a Muslim-loving, America-hating chief executive; and he passed a budget — one not particularly to my liking, but passing any budget through this unspeakably torpid Congress is nothing short of epic.

Best of all, President Obama has given congressional Republicans a nasty case of the political shingles. Try as they might to triumph, they keep losing to a lame duck. There's an operatic beauty to it — the amplified pseudoconservative frenzy, that is — that just gets better and better.

Here's to an even more splendid 2016.

***

Please tweet this to @Reince. I did. Help make his day year. 

 

Comments

[S.Holland]

Amen amen amen... How many times has he been counted down......here's to 2016!

[Bob]

Besides being so capable Mr. Obama has been blessed with a wealth of cockeyed opponents. At the moment they think they've found a sure-fire show stopper: http://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Politics-And-Diplomacy/US-has-been-spying-on-Netanyahu-Wall-Street-Journal-says-438812

Considering Congress and Netanyahu's unprecedented maneuvering this was wise on the White House's part, but the righteous will be filled with fire and brimstone.

Btw, riddle me this: If today's conservatives are pseudo because they're not traditionalists are today's liberals fraudulent because we're not laissez-faire?

[David Duff]

Undoubtedly, Ol' King Barack' is the worst president in decades. Of course, it will take you Lefties several more decades to realise!

[Peter G]

I think we have Trump to thank for this. What other looming disaster could have persuaded a significant portion of a Republican dominated congress to get some things done. That speaks to me of fear. It was all very well to make gridlock central to your governing strategy in order to appeal to the more extreme elements of the Republican party but they aren't the whole ball of waxy ooze. And the people to whom this governing philosophy appealed support either Trump or Cruz, either of which spells presidential electoral disaster with potentially lethal down ticket effects.

So no government shutdowns before the election. No defunding of Planned Parenthood. It looks to me like the Republican party is getting ready to unencumber themselves of some of their more toxic policies or at least mitigate their more dreadful electoral consequences. I can see why. It's pretty hard to sell the idea that you can make government work when you spend all your time proving you can't.

[Turgidson]

Quite the contrary. When the dust settles and all the cynical and manufactured hysteria and short-term nitpicking about his administration fades away, he'll take his place among the country's top 10 presidents and it will be well-earned. Barring a major foreign policy or economic crisis happening in his last year (certainly possible - a couple more wackos committing mass murder and claiming inspiration from ISIS are hard to prevent or rule out), I think he's pretty much locked this down.

But given that 30% or so of the country thinks he's a soshalist job destroying Kenyan more loyal to Islamic terrorists than the very country he leads, it's going to take quite a bit of time for the dust to settle. And a rump of dead-enders will curse his name until the (very) bitter end.

As Vonnegut might have said : So it goes. Obama has no more fucks left to give about any of that.

I am not looking forward to February 2017. No matter who wins, I will no longer feel the comfort of having near-total confidence in the president's judgment, and knowing that even if I disagree with his decision, he arrived at it with care and thoughtfulness. I respect Hillary's tenacity and knowledge and think she'll be a decent president, but have nowhere near the same level of confidence in her judgment.

[RM]

I love the Obama who has no fucks left to give. I second your misgivings about February 2017. I trust Obama. I don't have near the same level of trust in HRC.

[The Dark Avenger]

Let's look at the record: Unemployment down from a double-digit figure when "Ol Big Ears" first took office to around 5%, the economy has gotten out of the ditch that it was in under the previous POTUS, binLaden was located and killed, which, again, his predecessor failed to do, and he reached a multilateral agreement to limit Iran's nuclear program despite the worst efforts of the so-called leader of Israel and his Republican stooges in the US Congress.

This is your brain on NRO(dot)com. Any questions?

[David Duff]

@ DA:

"In November 2015, the real unemployment rate (U-6) was 9.9%, nearly double the widely-reported unemployment rate (U-3) of 5.0%."

The 'deal' with Iran which the Iranians never signed is the biggest joke since Munich!

And now we here that he is openly boasting of his intention to ignore the Constitution and circumvent Congress on gun laws.

Just please don't burst into tears when the next Republican president does exactly the same. 'What goes around comes around'!

[David Duff]

Oh, I almost forgot, have you checked recently how much America owes?

[The Dark Avenger]

Lots of things you forgot, David:

The U-6 statistic you mentioned? It's been falling since 2010, and if you look at the following link you can see it rose as part of the economy crashing under GWB around 2008.

http://portalseven.com/employment/unemployment_rate_u6.jsp

You get a C on that one.

As for Iran, they're apparently are keeping their side of the nuclear bargin these days:

toward a major milestone in the nuclear agreement reached this summer with six world powers: "implementation day."

It's a term with no fixed date, but it will be a big deal when it arrives. It's the day when the United Nations Security Council lifts the financial and banking sanctions against Iran, and more than $100 billion in frozen assets will be freed up. But the day can only happen when international inspectors confirm that Iran has taken a number of steps to shrink and open up its nuclear program.

All the signs suggest this is happening faster than many in the West expected.

Iran and Russia recently announced that most of Iran's stockpile of enriched uranium – more than 20,000 pounds – had been loaded on a ship bound for Russia. Depending on how highly it is enriched, uranium can fuel either a nuclear power plant or a weapon of mass destruction.

The shipping out of enriched uranium was unusually speedy for an Iranian-Russian transaction, says Mark Fitzpatrick, executive director the American branch of the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

Iran must still disable its heavy-water reactor at Arak, though that shouldn't take more than a couple weeks once it begins, says Ali Vaez, who follows Iran for the International Crisis Group.

That would close off the so-called "plutonium pathway" to a weapon.

The other big component everyone is watching is the removal of thousands of centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium, and that seems to be speeding right along.

One reason the centrifuges seem to be coming out faster than expected is that the Iranians were evidently not very cautious when it came to removing about 10,000 older, inactive centrifuges, known as IR-1s.

Fitzpatrick says Iran may have considered them all but unusable after sitting idle so long, so they just pulled them out relatively quickly. They have been taking more time with some of the other models, but Vaez says the remaining 1,000 active IR-1s should be removed by the end of next week. Some more advanced models must also be dealt with.

Fitzpatrick says there's also a theory that not preserving the older centrifuges could give Iran a reason to keep technicians employed building new ones, to be used as replacements if anything breaks down.

Rejoining The Global Financial System

Iranian negotiators originally predicted that completing its nuclear commitments it would only take two to three weeks, which was never seen as realistic in the West.

But now even Yukiya Amano, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which has to verify all these steps, says an implementation day by the end of January can't be ruled out.

Analyst Ali Vaez also thinks that's possible, while Mark Fitzpatrick thinks early February may be more likely.

When it happens, Iran will effectively rejoin the international banking system. In short, Iran will be more of a player in the region and beyond in 2016.

http://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2016/01/01/461610337/as-iran-moves-swiftly-on-nuclear-deal-sanctions-could-go-soon

Of course that story was from yesterday. Things may have changed since then.

As for circumventing the Constitution, that, too, is Breitbart misinformation as well. Could you name me the article and section in question he'll violate, David? We are talking about the same Congress that wouldn't pass a bill to deny people on the no-fly list the right to buy a gun. A sane person might call that being on the side of the terrorists. What do you call it?

As for what America owes, as has been pointed out to you before, it's money we Americans owe ourselves.

Congradulation, David. Not only have you contradicted yourself in three comments or less,(a long-term view will show Obama's shortcomings--let me tell you about the ones you can see now) you've managed to demonstrate why the Republicans aren't taken seriously by thinking people in these United States these days.

Far from bursting into tears, you've given me my first laugh this morning.

Keep up you good work of passing on the RW noise without any reflection and research, David.