Wednesday, August 22, 2018

A Silver Lining In Presidential Politics


The news has been so bad, for so long, that it's hard for an optimistic fatalist like me to find any good in it. One possible silver lining for the cloud that has been raining on us occurred to me today.

Presidential politics is not only studied on a day-to-day basis, it is also studied carefully beneath the microscope of history. Mr. Trump will be generating an awful lot of study, for an awfully long time. People across the political spectrum are already quick to compare him to other men who have held the position. One fascinating area of study will be the reasons that a persistent minority of American voters place Mr. Trump at the very top of the list of presidents, while the majority of the people are more likely to place him very near the bottom. Oh, excuse me, the silver lining. I digress at the drop of a hat.

When one considers the last three presidents, the three presidents so far in our young 21st Century, one thing jumps right out. The president in the middle was black. There it is! Right in the photos!

We've had George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump. Bush destroyed the world's economy and started several wasteful and destructive wars, and Trump has been rushing pell-mell to destroy the entire fabric of American life, social, political, and economic, since the day that he was declared the winner of the election of 2016. Both of them had the stated goal of destroying the social safety net and moving all of the money towards the very top while cutting social programs and moving working Americans along the road to either prison or debt-slavery. To make matters worse, both Bush and Trump always manage to sound rather illiterate and foolish in their public pronouncements. They always manage to sound like a couple of idiots, don't they? We all remember that they do.

And here is the silver lining, shining brightly in that overcast sky. Barack Obama, the black president, was always well considered and intelligent in his public discourse. His temperament was one of relaxed awareness, like a Samurai, and he took whatever the office, or ungrateful white Americans, threw at him with equanimity and good humor. In the meantime, he managed to do a very good job of steering the country through perilous times, getting us out of some of Mr. Bush's real messes in the world, restoring some of our allies faith in us, lowering our budget deficits, representing the country overseas with dignity, and taking at least some baby steps to improve the security and prosperity of the American people.

Mr. Obama, the BLACK president, stands as the clear choice for best president in the 21st Century to date. In contrast to Mr. Bush, he is a highly intelligent and well organized man with a strong moral compass. Compared to Mr. Trump, Barack Obama is a fucking genius across the board, and a saint besides. And he's black!

The black man wins! The black man shows those white mediocrities how it's done! Isn't that wonderful? What a wonderful lesson for our children! Doesn't that make you smile?

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