Obamamania Ad Nauseum

Charles Blow has added to the media hagiography with a column enthusiastically titled "Obama's Back!"

Month after lonely and harrowing month, establishment pundits like Blow have been "howling in the wind" and hoping against hope that the former president would finally step up to the mound as a closer/relief pitcher for #Resistance, Inc. What the gosh darn heck took you so long to reappear, as the liberal class turned its lonely eyes to you? Woo woo woo?

Well, the answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind:

We have been howling into the wind so long that people dubbed our extreme objection to this deeply immoral and unscrupulous man Trump Derangement Syndrome. But, in fact, the new Bob Woodward book and the Op-Ed in this newspaper by an anonymous administration official prove us right. The fact is that most Americans now believe that Trump’s relationship to the Russian hacking and the hush money payments to women who say they had affairs with him are unethical or flat-out illegal.

 And regarding Obama's laundry list of complaints about Trump: 

He could have read similar words in a thousand essays written since Trump was elected.

But, for me, I deeply appreciate his words for another reason: He is loosening Trump’s stranglehold on the news.

There is only so much time in a news day, only so many column inches in a newspaper, only so much prominent real estate on a website. Up to this point Trump has dominated the news by overwhelming it, and no one has had the weight to challenge that dominance. Obama has that weight. Just by speaking he’s altering the diet of the news people consume.

 So there are a couple points which I didn't bring up in my previous post critiquing Obama's speech. His re-animation was a trifecta of a propaganda campaign, coordinated with the Woodward book and the anonymous New York Times op-ed. A lagging Obama even mixed my sports metaphors. He finally brought up the rear and crossed the finish line in hopes of Dems crossing that "most important election evah in our entire lifetimes" finish line in November.

Plus, as far as Blow is concerned, it's not the ex-president's words that count as much as his legendary existence. Blow condemns both himself and the corporate media class when he says that nobody else has had the strength to challenge the Trump saturation of news. Especially not the news people.

My published response (it was awarded a golden "Times Pick" for the sole reason that it fell into their "variety of views" ideal. In other words, it was an extreme outlier among nearly a thousand other comments ranging from O-gasmic to O-bsequious.)....

The recent gushing over Barack Obama as our born-again savior is deja vu all over again. I don't care if it's Obama, or Trump, or Hillary, or Bernie: the expectation that there's this one politician out there who can make it all better is unhealthy and antithetical to democracy.

Get past Obama's awesome delivery and comedic timing, and read the speech. He started out with the Founders and civil rights leaders, touting them as inspirations for people to go marching. Not so much to display our citizenship via teachers' strikes, sit-ins and boycotts, and other disruptions to the ruling order. We are simply to vote for Democrats in the mid-terms.

Obama is directly attacking Trump because it's that magical time that comes just once every two and four years and our votes become the sum of our civic duties. As much as he lauded candidates running on "new" ideas like Medicare for All, he didn't, as some of the hype has it, actually endorse single payer health care himself. As a matter of fact, his list of 80 endorsements includes no progressive challengers to Democratic incumbents.

 Of course the most amazing part of Obama's speech was that it rendered Trump temporarily comatose.

Meanwhile, whose fault is it that Trump controls the news? It's not just his. The media chooses to parse all his inane tweets and televise all his rallies. Because it's cheap, it's easy, and it engenders lots of outraged, lucrative clicks.

There's a lot more to fear in America than just Trump.

My heretical remarks opened the floodgates of outrage from the liberal Times commentariat. I'd reprint them, only they were so derisory that the moderators removed the worst of them, along with my own insulting replies. But they fit the usual mold: How dare you, a lowly ignoramus, insult the greatest president of our lifetimes? Medicare for All is impossible! Stop being such a purist! You took a cynicism bath. You're such a picky eater. What are your expert credentials and sources for your misinformation? You are destroying party unity!

In other words, ask not what the Democratic Party can do for you, because asking for nice things and demanding justice will make their privileged heads explode. 
 
 Surprisingly enough, nobody called me a deplorable closet Trumpie, but give 'em time.