"How hard can that be? Saying that Nazis are bad," former President Barack Obama asked a crowd in Illinois over the weekend.
Just as Obama's sins do not excuse President Trump's inexplicable answer to the Charlottesville riot, Trump's words don't excuse the most divisive modern president, a man whose unilateralism and contempt for the process and the Constitution helped create the environment America now find itself in.
While Obama's self-reverential speech was crammed with revisionism, the most jaw-dropping contention from the former president was probably a defense of his record on free speech: "I complained plenty about Fox News," the scandal-ridden Obama explained, "But you never heard me threaten to shut them down, or call them 'enemies of the people.'".
Most of all, let's not forget that Obama did a lot more than complain about Fox News.
None of Trump's actions thus far rise to the level of any of these Obama attacks on free expression.
"Democrats aren't just running on good old ideas like a higher minimum wage, they're running on good new ideas like Medicare-for-all," Obama noted.
The former president's haughty finger-wagging reminds us that the Trump presidency is, in big part, a manifestation of a fracture that was the result of the systematic destruction of process and subversion of political standards by his administration and its allies.
http://thefederalist.com/2018/09/10/barack-obama-reminds-us-why-donald-trump-is-president/#.W5bFdI3MpSV.twitter
Just as Obama's sins do not excuse President Trump's inexplicable answer to the Charlottesville riot, Trump's words don't excuse the most divisive modern president, a man whose unilateralism and contempt for the process and the Constitution helped create the environment America now find itself in.
While Obama's self-reverential speech was crammed with revisionism, the most jaw-dropping contention from the former president was probably a defense of his record on free speech: "I complained plenty about Fox News," the scandal-ridden Obama explained, "But you never heard me threaten to shut them down, or call them 'enemies of the people.'".
Most of all, let's not forget that Obama did a lot more than complain about Fox News.
None of Trump's actions thus far rise to the level of any of these Obama attacks on free expression.
"Democrats aren't just running on good old ideas like a higher minimum wage, they're running on good new ideas like Medicare-for-all," Obama noted.
The former president's haughty finger-wagging reminds us that the Trump presidency is, in big part, a manifestation of a fracture that was the result of the systematic destruction of process and subversion of political standards by his administration and its allies.
http://thefederalist.com/2018/09/10/barack-obama-reminds-us-why-donald-trump-is-president/#.W5bFdI3MpSV.twitter
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