President Obama — the consummately swaggering misleader

© 2016 Peter Free

 

24 November 2016

 

 

President Obama, still distorting truth to his own ends

 

Recently, the President bemoaned "false news" — as if he stood for truth and justice.

 

What a laugh.

 

 

Activist Glen Ford took him down

 

Black Agenda Report's executive editor is difficult to fool:

 

 

President Obama traveled to Berlin last week to browbeat Europeans on why they should continue to play junior partners in Washington’s quest for full spectrum global domination, but kept returning to his post-election obsession: the existential threat posed by “fake news” on social media.

 

It was as if the realization had just dawned on the lame duck president, that his own powers to create “facts” and manufacture “news” out of thin air would soon be gone.

 

Without the Clintons in the White House to continue the neoliberal project, history might conclude that the First Black President’s only enduring legacy was...that he was the first Black president.

 

It’s a question of who gets to decide what’s “fake” or not.

 

[T]he ruling class, which he so faithfully serves, has lost control of the social and political narrative, without which it cannot “protect” its wealth, privilege and power.

 

[T]he system is no longer capable of providing relief to the working and “superfluous” classes (that means most Black folks). They can only spin tales of fantasy and distraction – fake stories and phony narratives.

 

American “Exceptionalism” is “Manifest Destiny” with Native American genocide and Black slavery blotted out. It is the falsest narrative of all, tailored for imperial conquest and an “end of history” — meaning, the end of everyone’s narrative except the imperialist.

 

© 2016 Glen Ford, Obama’s Musings on False Narratives and Fake Stories, Black Agenda Report (23 November 2016)

 

 

To expand Mr. Ford's conclusion, imperialism and rampant plutocracy are arguably the same thing.

 

 

The moral? — Personal confidence and dark soul

 

My daughter said she will miss the President. He has such "confident swagger."

 

I saw and appreciated this appeal. There has been no American president in my lifetime, whom I felt was aesthetically more pleasing in his domestic and international appearance. But that is different than being actually good. The "Devil" deals in illusion.

 

Cynically manipulated appearance is what this President gave us. He demonstrated only that a "black" man of illusory moral substance can be just as meanly spirited, cynically exploitive and selfishly conniving as his white predecessors.

 

I will miss the President's handsome confidence. But not his oligarchically selfish and manipulatively lying soul. He looked good, but wasn't.

 

And that is an excellent metaphor for our times and most.