He is a former aide to President Bill Clinton; a long-time confidant of Hillary Clinton,
formerly employed by the Clinton Foundation
(snip)
After her January 2009 appointment as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton wished to hire Blumenthal.
However, Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, blocked his selection due to lingering anger
among President Barack Obama’s aides over Blumenthal’s role in promoting negative stories about Obama during the Democratic primary
(snip)
Blumenthal was a full-time employee of the Clinton Foundation from 2009 until 2013
and served as a consultant for the foundation from 2013 until 2015, earning about $10,000 per month.
Blujmenthal was also one of the fabricators of the protodossier (falsely) alleging that a prostitute urinated on Donald J Trump in a hotel room in Russia
Long before Blumenthal was stirring the pot about Kenya, back in 1991, Obama’s literary agent published a promotional booklet stating that Obama was born in Kenya
I don’t think we’ll ever know the truth but it’s plausible… he tried to do everything he could to destroy America and divide its citizens. Thank God we have President Trump to MAGA.
He supported policies that discriminated against certain groups of Americans by making them score higher on standardized exams in order to get accepted into college, based on the color of their skin.
Obamacare was divisive. I’m not saying I personally disagree with it but it clearly ushered in a period of gridlock.
Generally I liked Obama at the time. But looking back, the way he drove through Obamacare with no Republican support clearly created legislative gridlock which he responded to by going with executive actions at a rate that far outstripped all prior presidents and completely alienated the right. At the time I didn’t really grasp the severity of what was occurring because I generally liked him and agreed with many of the policies, but looking back it’s easy to see how his arrogance, expansion of executive authority and even openly mocking a Trump candidacy at the correspondents dinner in 2011 directly laid the groundwork for where we are today.
On a personal level, I thought the continuation and even expansion of NSA overreach under his watch was indicative of what I felt was a two faced presidency. He ran on eliminating Guantanamo Bay yet despite being a legal scholar he promptly joined office, pivoted his stance on legal grounds and left it persist. He ran on curtailing government overreach but NSA’s abuse expanded until Stuxnet imploded and helped fuel an Iranian drive to nuclear capability and Snowden’s bombshells brought things into the open. The handling of Snowden I also felt was a direct betrayal of a whistleblower who stood up to expose illegal abuse of power under that department’s watch. They charged him under an espionage act and refused to allow a public trial. This thematic ties into the proliferation of drone strikes with limited and murky oversight mechanisms.
To me, the more time has passed the more my opinion of that administration has eroded as the facts of the legal abuses that were allowed to occur beneath the watch of a legal scholar seep out.
Does any of this make Trump great? No, he sucks too, but maybe you can appreciate my apathy when people manufacture outrage because we exchanged one leader who betrayed his office behind our backs with another who arguably does it in plain sight.
I, too, am not a fan of Obama. But I see Trump as being much more divisive than Obama was. Perhaps that’s just the out-in-the-open vs. in-the-shadows distinction.
And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
that’s right up there with
“You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic—you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up.”
It remains to be seen what role Obama had in the Russiagate conspiracy, which split the country in two with the half that voted for Hillary refusing to accept the winner of the 2016 election as their President
As I pondered it this weekend, I remembered everyone in the media and on the left laughing at Trump’s candidacy. The reason the all laughed I think is the same reason Hillary never bothered to even campaign in key midwest swing states, to them they just don’t see those people as even existing. They and most coastal elites live in echo chambers, never met someone working in a steel or auto factory, don’t care. When they try to speak up they get ignored. This was followed by the utter shock of the victory and almost the recoil from the fact that these people exist and will be acknowledged. I don’t think a lot has changed, so as an observer it will be interesting to see if the outcome is different.
In Denver yesterday. Health care worker counter-protesting an idiot. BTW, at one of those “re-open” rallies last week in Michigan, there were a number of Confederate flags. What a bunch of true American patriots.
