1.
You have to love Barack Obama but you don’t have to like him. It’s certainly not possible to like him as much as he seems to like himself. The age of Obama 2.0—his time after the White House—has just peaked with the opening of his presidential library in Chicago and there’s a lot to say about the ex-President today and none of it is particularly good.
Even the Times which loved Barack and tied much of its national political coverage to his coattails? The same publication in a recent thumb-sucking analysis, after the opening of the Obama Center a few months ago, used the h-word, hagiography. Or what the rest of us might describe with fewer syllables a push by the Big O for hero-worship. That’s putting it mildly. Barack has actually taken a cue from King Tut.
Tutankhamen the pharaoh was a relatively minor player in the 3000 years of classical Egyptian history but he is the one we know best today because his pyramid was super cool and remained relatively intact until it was rediscovered in the early 20th century. This is something that is true of kings, pharaohs, emperors and movie stars: the ones who history knows best are not necessarily the most important. King Tut was unremarkable as pharaoh and ruled only about as long as Barry was in the White House—and died at age 19. A major Egyptologist once wrote of Tutankamen, "The pharaoh who in life was one of the least esteemed of Egypt's Pharaohs has become in death the most renowned,” the fame mostly coming from traveling international exhibits of artifacts from Tut’s tomb. This is looking a lot like Barack Obama circa 2026 as well. He’s been out of office ten years and has been on a mission to improve his historical profile.
The cover of People, a new podcast on literature, children’s books, music criticism—Barack is practicing what other politicians have long known. The importance of getting the last word in. He’s doing a high-brow podcast with Malcolm Gladwell who is the New Yorker’s resident thinker-in-chief. Barry has a book coauthored with Bruce Springsteen, as well as the two original Obama autobiographies, Dreams from My Father and The Audacity of Hope. Just a few years ago he came out with the first volume of his White House memoirs which runs to 700+ pages. Volume Two is said to be due out maybe later this year.
The legacy of a modern leader is digital first, actual policy or accomplishments in office second, and brick and mortar, third. But since antiquity there’s also what he or she writes—or has others write—about him or herself, and in that regard Barry has a lot to say, as evidenced by that first volume of his White House memoirs. Winston Churchill’s History of the English-Speaking Peoples by contrast runs to four volumes and is not autobiographical despite the considerable role Churchill played in some of the English-speaking peoples’s greatest moments. Based upon ex-President Obama’s track record, if Barack were writing four volumes, all four would be all about him. Yet people who adore Barack Obama and consider him a political messiah may not be able to tell you a thing he did in office. They just think he looked cool doing it, whatever it was. And he did. And, frankly, that’s important but not as important as Barry thinks.
How you look in news clips, talk-show appearances, what you say even if it’s complete rubbish, your smile, your clothes—post-tenure in office appearances included—and a big shiny archive building can all lead to immortality. That’s apparently this ex-president’s thinking. Obama’s role model is not that other president from Illinois, Abraham Lincoln, so much as it is that other incredibly famous black person from Chicago—Oprah—the original Big O. Barry’s stock in trade these days is marketing an image, his own. Business is good.
The New Yorker magazine ran an interesting piece a few months ago, before the opening of the Obama Center, kind of catching up with the ex-President who is now technically retirement age, sixty-five. He’s still a good-looking guy but the photo accompanying the article made him appear shopworn and, frankly, puffy, which in politics is often considered a sign of corruption. The New Yorker like most of the mainstream press has offered near-slavish coverage of Obama from the beginning of his career, and a handful of books on the Obamas have been written by the magazine's staff including Peter Slevin who interviewed Barry for this recent piece. Barack offers reporters a perfect symbiosis: He grants access and they gush enthusiastically on the subject of the article. But Slevin’s story makes two points—one incidentally and one intentionally—that lead credence to the idea that the former president may have lost his way.
Regarding the constant demands for his time and attendance in the age of Donald Trump, and even before, Slevin writes: “He told me that, during his time in the White House, he had a recurring dream about sitting on a park bench unattended, or stopping by a bodega unrecognized. ‘Captivity,’ he said, was the hardest part of the job. ‘The loss of anonymity is profound, and you don’t get it back.’” Oh please. What a crock of shit. No president in modern memory even comes close to Barack Obama in his desire for public attention and adulation, even after his time in D.C. If you google “Barack Obama interview 2026” you get for example Bryan Cohen sitting down with the former president. The Jewish community, btw, especially Jewish journalists like Mr. Slevin and Mr. Cohen loved Barack because he offered white absolution to Jews who may be the most guilt-driven ethnic group in America next to Catholics.
In fact a Times political correspondent suggested a year or so ago that Governor Shapiro of Pennsylvania naming his dog after the Obama’s dog was among the governor’s qualification to be seen as a contender to the Democratic throne. “Among the likenesses,” she wrote, “they both managed to end up with family dogs named ‘Bo.’ And Mr. Shapiro’s cadence, rhythms and sometimes even hand gestures can seem so reminiscent of the former president’s that some people have started jokingly referring online to Mr. Shapiro, who is Jewish, as “Baruch Obama.” You couldn’t make that up. The Jewish community is also extraordinarily wealthy—wealth that Barack drew upon in office and is still profiting from. His partners post-presidency are very often wealthy whites while he has mostly taken black people for granted throughout his national career. He knew that we would vote for him regardless, and we don’t have the money to interest him now. Barry likes bread a whole lot.
In any case, continuing with his forays into the media, just this year there has also been a Stephen Colbert interview, a sit-down with ABC News, the People Magazine cover as mentioned, yada yada. By contrast Barry’s predecessor George W. Bush hasn’t really said shit in years. Bill Clinton and Joe Biden are both elderly and presumably infirm, and mostly silent, although Clinton looked surprisingly okay during his recent Congressional testimony on sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. You may say the only reason former President Bush hasn’t spoken up is because he’s a war criminal, which is true, and no one really wants to hear what he has to say—he only broke his silence recently, on the 25th anniversary of 9/11—but it’s also because there was once a tradition of former presidents maintaining a low profile in order to let the country move on to a new generation. No longer.
In the New Yorker article, asked why he doesn’t speak up more about his successor Donald Trump: “Obama argues that, if he constantly responds to Donald Trump, ‘I’m not a political leader, I’m a commentator.’” Someone should break the news to him. He’s not a political leader either. His term is over. He was like this in office too, actually, it was all Barry, all the time.
Preening in front of white women—white chicks who think he’s hot were a big part of his constituency. White girls who wanted to take a walk on what they thought was the wild side although Barry’s values appear pretty conventional compared to most black revolutionaries. There were even older white women who thought that Barry looked, to quote Joe Biden, “like a clean-looking black man.” You know what young white women say about black guys? Once you go black, you never go back. That’s Barry. Millions dreamed about starting that journey with Obama. Power, prestige, what’s not to like? To these female supporters of Barack, First Lady Michelle Obama was merely an abstraction. Barry is always trying to be cool—he was a chick magnet by nature but also by design. He was cool but not so much anymore.
In office he talked about his poor basketball skills in order to remind everyone that he was once a baller. He wore his shades low, he saluted the Marines with Starbucks in the same hand. A cool and relaxed brother who just happened to be the most important guy on Earth. He’s tried to do pretty much the same thing as Barry 2.0 but it’s not going as well. He’s like a beautiful woman—an aging actress let’s say—who is no longer getting the big roles and who needs to be repeatedly told she’s still the hottest in the land. Barack can hardly complain, as he did in his magazine interview, that he can’t lead a normal life’s when he’s just built a pyramid dedicated to himself on the South Side of Chicago. The second point in the New Yorker, that is explicitly made, is that the former president has spent his decade out of office with one particular aim in mind, getting rich. Cue 50 Cent’s “Get Rich or Die Tryin,” a thug’s anthem, but it hasn’t been risky business for Barry. Instead it’s been a sure thing.
Obviously there’s nothing wrong with money and he has as much right as anyone else to build a little, what, hundred-million-dollar nest egg? But there can be something wrong with what you do to make the bread, bro, especially when you’re a self-described man of the people but have very expensive tastes. The specific caveat is that there’s nothing wrong with money unless your whole public vibe is based upon being one with the downtrodden and hero of ordinary peeps. Which has basically been Barack’s rap from day one of his career, as a “community organizer,” lest we forget. That community is now billionaires.
Because there are few ordinary people involved in Barack’s life these days and weren’t that many either when he was President of the United States, when the rich got richer, according to the stats. Income inequality in the United States rose during his term in office. Also in the minus column the Israelis, backed by Democratic Party elites and Republican whackjobs, got everything they wanted from Barry except a war against Iran. Which is why his party is now leaning far more to the left than Barry himself and, looking abroad, a new generation of Americans wants to cut loose a militaristic Israeli state, while taxing some obscene wealth at home. Something that Barry could have done but did not because American elites were important to fundraising, then and now.
Owning multiple multi-million dollar homes, cruising on billionaire’s yachts and burning more aviation fuel in private jets than the U.S. Air Force is using to bomb Tehran—where is Barack’s street cred now? He likes to be around the rich, the powerful and, frankly, the white. He particularly likes white journalists because they are star-struck and don’t ask hard questions and are impressed by Barry’s black manhood. He likes white movie stars too. He has no more use for poor minorities now that he doesn’t need our votes than he had for poor whites while he was in office. Yet Barack even wants average people’s money too. There’s a word for this kind of behavior. It’s called greed. If you go to the Obama Center website, the moment you log on, Barack is asking—pretty persistently as you navigate—for a $40 contribution. That’s a lot of money for a struggling middle class dealing with inflation and the potential ravages of A.I. If you want to visit the museum at the Obama Center, an adult ticket costs $30 and it’s $23 for a kid. He just doesn’t get it. And an argument can be made that he never did. Although that’s kinda unfair, it’s nonetheless illustrative of a guy who has gotten lost since leaving the White House.
Every time Barack opens his mouth now to speak—because he says many Democrats demand him to speak out, which is probably true?
Every time he speaks as a political leader or as a commentator he sucks all the air out of the room that is the Democratic Party—a party that is trying to move forward, to move on actually, in the inevitable new reality in which conservatives are not freaks but people with legitimate claims and legitimate views. Hello! Views that are supported, btw, by a good deal of the population, including some blacks, Latinos and Asians. Many of whom may not subscribe to Donald Trump’s version of conservatism, but liberal values—which turned into elitism—have taken some pretty heavy hits too.
Of course part of the reason for Barack’s frequent appearances in the media, despite his inner yearning for anonymity, is also to draw interest and/or contributions to his new presidential center—but he was like that before the foundation was even laid of his 200,000 square-foot Obama Center. The way his post-presidency has evolved, you expect to see him next on infomercials at 2 a.m., except the money isn’t good enough. Because the product that Barack is always selling is himself and his presidency ex-post facto and he expects to be paid big bucks accordingly. The only thing that is unspoken by Barry—because he has something to say on practically every subject including music, literature, technology and nutrition—ketchup shouldn’t be consumed after age eight per the former president, fyi—is his relationship with his successor. He owes Trump an apology, frankly. And the rest of the country too, actually. Not simply because he did not invite Donald Trump to the Obama Center opening in Chicago, which he didn’t.
There’s a certain intolerance shown by Barry, not just by Trump. Barack didn’t tolerate social conservatives very well which is, like, what, half the country? If you didn’t agree with Barry in office you were basically a hick. Barack might actually have benefitted from less time in that private school in Hawaii and instead a few semesters in a public school in, let’s say, the American South. There was a moment in Trump’s campaign against Hillary Clinton for example, at a correspondents’ dinner? Barack actually mocked Trump in a snarky way and said he would never be president. Famous last words that Barry should be reminded of now.
What followed was a bullshit impeachment attempt—like something you’d see in a developing country—and, under Joe Biden, the attempt to convict Trump of poor document handling that President Biden himself was guilty of as well. The Republicans tried to remove Bill Clinton too, less we forget, but President Clinton—the country’s chief law enforcement officer—lied to a federal grand jury. The Republicans set Clinton up for a fall and Clinton took the bait willingly. He was getting hummers in the Oval Office, bro. But out of the gate, Donald Trump was treated as a pariah before he actually earned the title. Barack’s friends in the press were the major culprits.
CNN’s early coverage of the first Trump Administration was adamant in its bias against anything that The Donald said or did. The White Lady took over from there. Recent Times coverage of the war against Iran is a good thing, actually, but neglects to mention that the primary American enabler of Israel—thru decades—has been the Democratic Party and the White Lady herself, the New York Times. Speaking of hypocrisy in the age of Trump, the Times, the Washington Post and the New Yorker all editorially endorsed the invasion of Iraq, the most disastrous American War since Vietnam.
Yet they ride a high horse about the war against Iran which is so far—the jury is still out—merely the third most disastrous war in American history. We’ve had a kind of race to the bottom and so far the press is neck and neck with President Trump.
2.
Barack’s finest moment was actually before he entered the White House, when he first opposed the Iraq war. You may add that the Obama administration also refused to buy in on an attack on Tehran—against the wishes of many Jewish Americans and of Israeli prime minister Netanyahu. That’s true, and blessed be Barack for that display of common sense. But not making a horrific mistake is hardly grounds for presidential greatness. Barack did do one other great thing in his career. Getting elected in the first place. It was a truly transformational event.
Two great things if you consider his wooing of Michelle Obama, who has helped make him the man he is. Aside from those accomplishments however he has been pretty much the new black face of the same old world order. He just looked cooler doing it than the usual white guy.
But Trump took advantage of women!
So did Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, bro. LBJ had his fatal heart attack while in communion with the wife of one of his ranch employees, did you know that?
How many women did Jack Kennedy dick down in the White House? Is that an argument that the Democrats really want to make? How about Bill Clinton and that cigar? Who Democrats defended, not the cigar but Bill.
The Trump administration is guilty of much of what it has been accused of in fact, but how much of that was a reaction to the unprofessional and unfair way that The Donald was treated by liberals from the first day of his first presidency? Yes, unfair. The rebellion of January 6, and it was a rebellion, did not start his administration, it came at the end. Democrats want to ignore the lead-up, including a failed impeachment and all the Ukrainian plot bullshit. The idea was to hamstring or remove Trump. In President Trump’s second term he has returned the favor.
A lot of people like to speculate about alternative history, right? One alternate possibility is that if Trump had been treated like a guy who just won the Presidency of the United States, which is no easy feat, he would have been co-opted by Washington and the Establishment just like everybody else who goes to D.C. We’d probably be looking at a lot less damage now, bro—like, how exactly has the decision to isolate and vilify Donald Trump worked out for the country? Or for the mainstream press? Wouldn't it have been a better idea to give him the respect due an elected president and try to make the most of his time in office? And, by comparison, we don’t really even know about corruption in Barry’s administration, btw, because Barry wasn’t covered aggressively by the press, which offered mostly blowjobs on his administration.
Trump and his cronies may be making a lot of money during his time in the White House, but Barry has made a lot of money post-presidency from many of the same people who had business before his W.H. administration. The difference is amount and timing, that we know of, because Barry wasn’t covered. He made millions from gentrification in East Austin, for example, money that helped to fund the building of the Obama Center. What’s the ethical difference? At least Trump isn’t a liberal hypocrite. He’s openly trying to make bank. As it turns out, so is Barry.
The media, especially the Times, acted as if they were Obama cheerleaders. The Washington Post ran an interesting piece a year or so ago that said the Times’ Washington Bureau policy—until the Trump Administration—was to avoid investigations of a presidential administration in order to assure access to the administration. Knowing what Barry was doing on a superficial level and having access to top officials was more important to the newspaper of record than digging, which would have upset the White House and dried up interviews. During the Biden Administration, that’s why there was no reporting of the president’s infirmity. Not because reporters didn’t know that Joe Biden wasn’t healthy but because they didn’t want to get locked out of the loop. Especially not with Donald Trump in the wings and waiting for his second chance. Today if President Trump spits on the street it’s an investigative headline. The press has as many questions to answer as Donald Trump does.
Why do you think Trump is slapping his name on anything he can find? Because the chattering classes that include the historians and so many journalists will never give him any kind of praise or grant him any legacy, other than shame. You’ll say, well, that is the way it should be, he doesn’t deserve any better. His handling of immigration, although people in both parties wanted something done, including Barack Obama, has been violent and criminal. He has spoken of attacking the national debt, which the D’s were largely uninterested in, but the war in Iran makes that highly unlikely. He talked about attacking Greenland, too.
The Democrats pushed the country toward transgender that people of both parties have questioned but the Trump Administration has been more vehement in opposition. The incumbent president has called out the Israelis although he started, disastrously, as their bitch. What has Trump done well? He’s given voice to half the population, the conservative half, who don’t think the country is headed in the right direction, even if conservatives haven’t really proposed a persuasive alternative. Corruption? Oh please, yet again.
We still don’t know exactly what kind of thug Barry is (thuggery is part of the player profile, after all) but we’re learning a lot more about his character post-presidency than before. Barack Obama is not the Black Boy Scout he makes himself out to be. The worse Trump looks, the better Barry does, even if common people have to suffer. His math was cynical in a couple of areas. A former CIA officer has revealed that Barry's White House had a meeting every Tuesday to draw up a list of assassinations in the Middle East. And every Tuesday there was a different list because the people on the previous list had been whacked. On the domestic front, Barry's Department of Education supported the University of California policy (under a Jewish UC President and a majority-Jewish Board of Regents, full of Democratic donors) that on-campus criticism of Israel was tantamount to antisemitism and could get a student disciplined or kicked out. Indeed a group of Muslims at UC Irvine was expelled for protesting the visit of an Israeli soldier who gave a sponsored talk on his heroism in the IDF. The IDF guy had a right to speak but students also had a right to protest, unless the subject was the Jewish State. Despite a mostly intimate relationship with the White Lady, Barry even took a Times reporter to court to try to force him to reveal his sources. The Big Lie of Barack’s post-presidency is of course that he has had nothing to do with the attacks on his successor. Oh please, yet again. The decision about how to treat The Donald in office, like the Obama Center itself, was made on the South Side of Chicago. At least until Barry bought that 29-acre waterfront estate at Martha’s Vineyard, at a surprisingly low price.
Even President Biden’s people accuse Obama of never letting go of power. It’s just pure coincidence that everyone involved in trying to hamstring President Trump, even before he deserved it, or who tried to convict him in the impeachment and criminal trials, has ties to Barry, including President Biden’s attorney general who Barack as president had tried to place on the Supreme Court. There’s blood on Barry’s hands in other words. There’s nothing wrong with political assassination, btw, if the assassin really knows how to handle the knife and it's quick. In this case it was a clumsy effort and has resulted in a prolonged worse outcome for everyone.
Much of what Trump does these days is pure contrariness and the reason is that he was never accepted or shown any respect. He won the election, bro. Twice. The people have spoken. Barack Obama has set the tenor of our times as much as Donald Trump has. Would it have been too much to ask that the two men talk? But Barry, who is kinda immature, only thinks about his rep, not the rest of us who aren't shielded by wealth like he is. Barry’s defenders say he has been playing the long game with Trump, waiting to defeat him in the next election, but in the meantime he’s thrown a lot of average people under the bus.
Indeed Donald Trump likes Obama. Or did. Just like white chicks do. Everybody likes Barry, it could be the name of a White House sitcom, he’s a supremely likable guy and Barry could have used that to the country’s advantage.
There was a photograph of the transition and the two men sitting next to each other and Barry looks like Barry but Trump has his hands between his legs like a guy who is starstruck and is next to somebody cooler than himself. Which he was. Barry says Trump has never called him. Has Barack ever telephoned President Trump? Barack has no problem talking about him, how about talking to him? That’s why Barack’s claims to street cred are so shaky. Even a thug knows that you have to show people respect, particularly an adversary. Then, if the adversary offers up an unguarded flank, that’s when you sink the knife in all the way. Instead of just whining all the time like a bitch, the way Barry does, in his I-wouldn’t-do-that way. That’s why Obama’s post presidency has raised questions about his presidency, that he was shielded by the press and that his aides were holding his hand. Obama 2.0 has not been a particularly impressive iteration.
W wanted some of Barry’s magic to rub off on him too. When the two men—Barack and the war criminal George W. Bush—have been seen together, like at the funeral of the war criminal Vice President Dick Cheney, W reaches out to Obama like they’re BFF. Which is probably not Barry’s feeling. But it’s like the old saying about the Big Man on Campus. “The girls want to be with him and the guys want to be like him.” He’s a stud in other words. The importance of cool, whether it’s the African American version or the white version a la Brad Pitt, for example, is real and powerful. Barry is not supercool, however, there are actually very few of us who fit that description. He’s not Denzel for example, or a Nelson Mandela, but he has been a lot closer to the mark than his competition. And Barack may be cool but Michelle is cooler. She has street cred that her husband can only dream of.
One of the problems that Barack faces is what he believes is one of his greatest strengths: his writing. With the first volume of his memoir an obvious question is how much of this is coming from him, since his editorial acknowledgements at the end of the book go on for four pages of names. This work has been as highly choreographed as a Hollywood musical.
Ezra Klein of the White Lady, who has some editorial chops, believes that a politician’s speeches are actually more indicative of where he/she really stands than his/her intimate moments, like being overheard on a hot mike, that reporters love so much. Klein thinks that the scripted moments are more revealing than bar talk, for example, or pillow talk presumably. It’s a novel and probably accurate perception. In this light, Obama’s first volume, although the book seems like it’s full of intimacies, can actually be viewed as one of Barry’s longer speeches. So, like, even with all the speechwriters and editors involved in the published work, the memoir is actually Barry raw. It’s repetitive of his prior work and completely self-centered. He returns to the subject of who knew that a guy like him, as a young man, would one day be famous—it’s, like, his favorite theme. The point is he can be surprisingly shallow about fame. He also ignores the first rule of writing, to keep it succinct.
Hemingway used to tell his editors that if he had more time to write he could make his work shorter, while Barack is into every detail of being Barack. Even something as potentially juicy as life in the White House loses readers at 700+ pages, with a second volume to come. But Barack is after a certain audience, just as he has been in his entire post-presidency. And it’s not common people, bro. There is a market for what he has written, certainly, including a lot of folks who might not open the book but who want to own it—an appearance on a bookshelf can be just as important as the reading, as Fitzgerald notes in The Great Gatsby. But it’s mostly historians and political scientists/operatives who will swallow the whole enchilada.
Speaking as a black reader who put The Promised Land down after fewer than 100 pages, hopefully never to pick it up again, there were only two really interesting parts early on, before bailing out to watch YouTube dance videos instead. When he said, of his bruising campaign for state senator in Illinois, “I don’t like to lose.” Bro, that is the truth. This Negro does not take prisoners. And when he’s talking about Michelle setting limits and telling him she’ll back his try for the gold ring one more time but if it fails he needs to get a regular job and be at home at night for child-rearing. As you read these words you can almost hear Michelle Obama speak. It reminds a nigger instantly of two lyrics from Tina Turner’s “What’s Love Got to Do with It?” The very title of the song and principal refrain is one, when a black woman draws a line in the sand for a brother, and second when Tina asks the $64 million question: “What’s your plan—if you can’t be—good to me?” Which also raises the issue of infidelity. Barry is a self-described player. And part of the player profile is that he hits a lot of booty.
Barack Obama has been exposed to more willing pussy than any leader in world history. He has played upon his sexuality which is fair—JFK did the same thing—starting with that photo back in the day of Barry wading into the surf in Hawaii. In the White House, Michelle presumably would have cut his nuts off and served them to him for breakfast. Not to get all graphic. But Barack 2.0—who is obviously still looking for something in his post-presidency—sounds a lot like a middle-aged rich guy who buys a sports car. Next thing you know, married or not, he’s cruising for chicks. The Obama’s marriage is fair game for history because few Democratic presidents or presidential candidates in recent decades have been above infidelity. And we know that the press turned a blind eye on Barry’s failings in office.
“Such is the role of sex in history,” says Katherine Hepburn who explained the dynamic in The Lion in Winter, playing Eleanor of Aquitaine who was a serial hottie—Queen of France as a young woman and later Queen of England—and who plotted to displace her husband the king, Henry II, and put her favorite son, Richard the Lionheart, played by a young Anthony Hopkins, on the throne.
Have you seen that movie?
King Tut almost certainly got around too and had a lot of babes at his disposal. In other words, who is fucking whom and who has fucked whom is always a legitimate question among both the powerful and the powerless. And remember the old rule of thumb in American politics. With Republicans the errors tend to involve money while with Democrats you see sins of the flesh, like with Mr. Epstein. So far Barack has reversed that trend but there’s still time for him to cross over. He’s an exceptional guy, after all. Anyway, Barack's newest venture is a podcast about literature, with some selected works of fiction, but he really needs to begin with history. He might learn something. The first book reviewed should be The Gallic Wars by the Roman writer J. Caesar.
The author was just as media conscious for his time as Barack is for ours and was trying to influence a consular election or whatever, back in Rome, with stories of military exploits that he wrote about third-person. But Caesar was also trying to teach Romans about their adversaries—the Gallic tribes that were eventually defeated—peoples/cultures who average Romans would never see but that Caesar had to summon public support against. He begins the book with one of the greatest opening lines in all history: “Gaul is divided into three parts”: Gallia est omens divisa in partes tres for those who know Latin. It’s a geography lesson which has reverberated through two millennia. There’s nothing like that in volume one of Barry’s The Promised Land. Even the title is unoriginal.
Former President Obama could have told us how Washington really works, for example, especially the Israeli lobby which has been so problematic for American democracy and for the U.S. Treasury. How, for instance, power and money in D.C. really influence daily lives away from Washington.
Or, alternatively, what the fiscal dangers are for the U.S. that so frighten conservatives and that Barry contributed to, frankly. Or what the Supremes are really like. And the military—the generals—what motivates the Pentagon aside from patriotism? How about an explainer on the elites of Wall Street, Hollywood and Silicon Valley, all of whom Obama knows well because he took so much of their money as contributions? Instead we get who knew he would be famous and who did not. A lot of navel-gazing that we’ve read previously.
If he’s going to be trite, why not describe what it’s like to be a chick-magnet? His first volume would be back on my nightstand in a heartbeat and he would certainly find readers across a wide swath of the public. Not to sound all superficial. What is the temptation like since so many powerful men seem to take a fall in the boudoir? But not only is he no Caesar, he’s no Marcus Aurelius either, because there’s very little genuine reflection except upon the Nature of Barry. He’s a pretty transactional guy and the transactions he has been most interested in profit himself. He’s no Denzel, as mentioned. It’s a pity for all of us.
One way to describe Barry is actually what actor would best portray him. Idris Elba comes to mind but he’s gotten too old to portray a young Barack convincingly, unless the script is titled Barry in Winter. Elba is a very good actor and from his interviews he appears to be kind of clueless, too, like DeNiro, no disrespect intended, or disconnected, living in his own world, like Marlon Brando did, which can be kinda a requirement of greatness in Hollywood. The dumber, the better, for some. You are the role and don’t spend too much time thinking about it.
Will Smith would have done a good job early on, he did a very credible performance as Muhammad Ali, and he’s certainly dumb enough. He is famous for having said he could have been president if he had tried. (“I honestly think I could be the President of the US if I really wanted to,” he told Playboy magazine decades ago.) But he’s box office poison after the slap heard round the world. It may have to be someone who comes out of nowhere, just like Barack himself when he entered the political scene. All we can say is not Denzel and not Michael B. Jordan either.
Neither of these actors could even repeat the lines in which Barry orders his United Nations ambassador, for instance, to abstain on the resolution condemning those West Bank settler-bitches who keep killing Palestinians and taking their land. President Denzel would have sponsored the damn resolution. The problem, as has been pointed out by others, is that Barry is not slave-descended, he doesn’t have that blood in his veins, unlike Michelle and the Obama girls. The 50% of Barry that is of righteous heritage, his upper half so to speak—his heart and soul—was not the part that touched ground every morning when he woke up in the White House. Does that make sense? Don’t forget that Barack cut loose his own pastor from Chicago on the campaign trail because the guy spoke in favor of the Palestinians. Barry has some shit in his closet too, just like Donald Trump.
You’ll say, oh, you’re just jealous. Of course that’s true. The guy was not a great president but he was kinda beautiful at one time. No more. And that’s all the more reason, actually, to call him out and get Barry back on track. Michelle must be pretty tired of doing all the work of forcing the ex-President to keep it real. It’s time for the rest of us to step up. Call this an intervention.
Barack is a great guy but he wasn’t a great president and there is a difference. He seems to be trying now to portray himself as A Bro for All Seasons—a Renaissance Negro—which is cool, he is what he is, but the period of his presidency is a closed book, two volumes or four, the Obama Center notwithstanding. Btw, my crib in Austin is actually a few blocks away from another presidential archive, the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library, where staff says they are often asked by visitors if Lyndon Johnson is entombed in the building. Admission for adults is half what Barry is charging in Chicago, if you're curious, and for kids it’s free. Admission is also free if you’re named Lyndon or Claudia which was Lady Bird Johnson’s real name. In Chicago is admission free for all Barrys and Michelles? The prosecution rests its case, bro.
But consider these two men for a moment, LBJ and Barack Hussein Obama, former presidents both. Barry was a community organizer, law prof, state senator, U.S. Senator and President of the United States. His public career arc covered more or less a couple of decades. LBJ on the other hand was a Congressman, Senate Majority Leader, Vice President and President, an entire lifetime spent in D.C.
Looking at LBJ’s accomplishments and failures in a nonjudgmental way, he stole his Senate election which is hard to do, even in Texas. He was present at the Kennedy assassination. He passed civil rights legislation that gave blacks and Latinos greater access to the vote, and he fucked up Vietnam. He recorded his telephone calls which created one of the great research troves in history. LBJ who knew Congress like no other President did—LBJ would have made Obamacare bulletproof, which Barry failed to do.
President Johnson even addressed the elusive issue of chicks and the White House by comparing his domestic body count—as opposed to his foreign body count, in Vietnam—he compared his body count to John Kennedy’s: “I’ve had more women by accident than Jack had on purpose,” he famously said. But Barack Obama’s presidential edifice is 50% larger than LBJ’s. How wrong is that?
Anyway, this is all historical revisionism. But you know one president who doesn’t get revised by history? The other one from Illinois. He freed the slaves and the greatness of that legislation will never change.
Barack on the other hand was a decent president but not earth-shattering for good or bad. He can give interviews and write about himself until Hell freezes over but that assessment is probably not going to change. The real question is, when Barry’s time comes—and we hope it’s a long way away: Does he want the full-pharoah treatment and to be mummified? He’s already got that pyramid, on the South Side of Chicago.
