Over’t con- cum neofem Arianna Huff’n’Po’s e-RAGgregator, the mighty lame duck is takin’ action to save the future from sure destruction!
Purple is Green at AriannaOnLine. Who’s more cynical: Me – for thinking this is a typical ploy to control the narrative (such as there is one, rather than just a stupid sense of the way things are), with the Forth Estate coordinating with Pennsylvania Avenue Ink to hijack key phrases like “Save Public Land”? Or them – for doing it?
For those unfamiliar with the concept of keyword hijacking, it involves burying some other uncomfortable reality in close semantic proximity to the verbiage chosen for the burial. In this case, let’s call it Building a Presidential Legacy on Sacred Ground or Muddying the Waters of First Nations in the Name of the First and only ever Free World.
Wait. Am I being hasty here. Look at this:
See that? He saves Viro Mints!!
One thing I love about wd’s letting me diarise here is that I can let someone else do my fact checking. Like, what say you about the following Café?
During his eight years in office, Obama has carved out an impressive environmental legacy. He helped broker the Paris Agreement, the most significant climate change deal in history; instituted the Clean Power Plan, described as the strongest action ever taken by a U.S. president to combat global warming; and protected more land and water ― more than 265 million acres ― than any other president in history, including the establishment of the world’s largest marine reserve, among other green initiatives.
One thing I do know is that that there Paris Agreement does not do anything to avert the certain global ruin we face. To deny that is to deny climate change.
café babylon 
purple is green! dang, how fun is that? obama just sent miz sally forth estate dominique a candy-gram…she sent trump a gorilla-gram. dig it:
“Editor’s note: Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar,rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims — 1.6 billion members of an entire religion — from entering the U.S.” eight hyperlinks!
one photo of a huuuuge coal-fired power plant smokestack’s caption was:
““Industry groups accuse Obama of declaring “war on coal” in his plan to cut greenhouse gas emissions cuts from power plants by 32 percent within 14 years.” now that’s one tough climate-change mitigation demand, ain’t it?
oh, yes, he’s cancelling leases his administration sold in western utah, one kinda/sorta in the bears’ ears area, which we can see from here. why? pitkin county pressure: er…the toffs in aspen. kewl. moratorium on the arctic drilling leases he’d opened up? hell, even royal dutch shell gave up trying due to…well, rigs crashing into the rocky shores. damn.
yeah, plenty pop a gander legacy-shopping, and boy howdy, such a low bar for ‘done moar than any other presididn’t!’ dunno if it’s so or not.
but shoot; did anyone mention the shit-ton of permits his admin doled out for off-shore drilling in the gulf and atlantic? awwww…his cap-and-trade failed…what a con that is! green-washing! purple-washing? pipelines? oh, my yes. and fracking? hastens icecap melting by methane thirty times faster? well, he and hillary love em some…until ‘renewables’ (not sustainables, whatever they really are) take over.
but compared to what trump will do!!!!? well, yayuss, prolly. but cripes, davidly, ya made me go and look up the 2 degrees yada, yada. and what a nifty thing it is that climate scientists don’t agree on it, eh? esp. when pre-industrial time was, or what the temps actually were.
ach, it’s all baked in already, the UN sustainability conferences have been a joke since 2012, the first one i ever covered. more in a bit…
fun stuff, davidly.
i went back and found my cop21 part II, quoting darh jamail extensively, and cory morningstar on the gatekeepers 350.org…again. the many climate scientists who believe we’ve exceeded 2 degrees already (we’re past 400 ppm carbon already), the carbon sinks are disappearing, and if you want to see some depressing tweeties, see jamail’s. looks like he’s had some new essays at truthout. can’t think why he’s mentioning trump’s plan to back out of the climate accords, but he the does mention his possible cabinet choices.
Well, gosh, didn’t he take his daughters swimming right next to that leaking Gulf oil platform (don’t know where that photo was shopped, but probably right around the corner from those islands on the horizon.) Isn’t that enough of an environmental legacy for ya, peeples?
Given the way the Constitutional system works, “locked up” under present law is not locked up at all. How fast will a Republican Congress, with fossil fuel state Democrats like Manchin and Heitkamp, change the public lands laws to undo what President Obama has done.
What is curious about the Obama Presidency is how hard people have worked and still are working to ensure that he will have no legacy at all. “That’s what ya get for electing a black President; don’t ever do that again. Stick to the white guys who are successful like Trump.” That is the predominant thread of legacy bashing.
I think that the overhyped hopes for a second New Deal has created a backlash of increased scrutiny of the hypocrisy endemic to any US Presidency. We did not get that as Clinton was leaving office, but it was researched when Hillary Clinton started running in 2006. To some extent, it reflects the anger of 10 (since Democrats took back Congress in 2006) wasted years.
If a hard right regime is indeed good for the left, we should see a massive reaction against the Trump regime shortly, will we not?
Meanwhile, the Obama Presidential Library will occupy needed open space on the South Side of Chicago, and Obama will retire to his post-Presidential career, whatever it is. And we will find that acting when Jimmy Carter argued we should was the best way of all to avoid freezing in the dark as we begin freezing in the dark during a historical period called not too long ago “Human-Caused Global Warming”.
Seems like Mz. Arianna’s webopinion is a too easy a source for ridicule. Was this article actually the worst on Obama’s legacy-pimping? He has the unenviable task on January 20 of playing Adelbert Ames to John M. Stone, just to play on the Dunham side of Obama’s ancestry. I wouldn’t wish that legacy on my worst enemy. That in itself is a horrible humiliation. No doubt The Donald will find a way to make it more humiliating despite his conciliatory words during the transition.
from the OP: “let’s call it Building a Presidential Legacy on Sacred Ground or Muddying the Waters of First Nations in the Name of the First and only ever Free World.” the reason he chose this, i reckon.
To be sure, AriannaOnLine and MSNBC are a bit over the top and hence low-hanging sparkly apples, but the NYT is worse when one considers it from Silber’s recent perspective in how it waves off the part of the President’s legacy that is reinforced unaccountable Executive power to commit human rights abuses as President Prudence not having thought things through to their conclusion insofar as he’ll be handing this toolkit to an actual bad guy. Reminds me of Mme. Reckless, who committed none more than misdemeanor unworthy of our trouble and the people who would investigate her are guilty of treason.
I wonder to what extent the rabid racist/sexist fore-&aftertaste to the legacies of these characters would apply to, say, Jimmy Carter, based upon the sentiment of suspicion amongst the unwashed. My guess is that the only successful legacy rehabilitation that takes place benefits the likes of Reagan and Bush Jr. because everyone that pushes it, from arch-hangers-on to sitting Democratic First Ladies, are members of the ruling class, one and all.
Over the last decade or so leading up to this push for every we don’t like as being “post-truth”, I have read a lot about intelligence having a liberal bias. It’s misleading, but contains a nugget of tangential truth: Libs know that when someone applies a Reagan-like statesman image to Bill Clinton that it is bullshit, but they’ll only call it out in terms that benefit their guy. As time passes, their criticism of Reagan softens, eventually becoming so selective as to be incomprehensible. I mean, how can you have a serious discussion with someone about presidential legacy with someone who would “like” a puff piece on a guy who codifies human rights abuses and an unapologetic racist?
I don’t feel sorry for President Cool in the least. If humans are around long enough to ponder such things, his legacy will fare much better than Clinton’s or Carter’s. His image in this piece already attunes to that of a large portion of the populace. He has too blatantly bathed in blood not to end up on Rushmore. And therewith, the genocidally racist USA manages to rehabilitate itself as those who would put him there.
But, of course, being around long enough and “being around long enough to ponder such things” are two different things. It could be that we’re entering a new era, in which case, the assessment of legacies might be the last thing on the plate. None of them are accurate representations of the truth anyway, so what should it matter?
Hopefully and factually, Obama is the worst president in U.S. history.
And that’s by body count alone; his lies and duplicity are legion.
And then there is the environment: he’s done zero meaningful anything to save this beautiful blue dot.
I’m so bloody fed up with the myth that is “America”.
Okay, rant over…
what’s a poor president to do? how many moons ago was Deepwater Horizon? some ginormous amount of the British Gov’t’s stock is in BP, so the ripple effects of a serious confrontation w/BP could mean….the collapse of the global economy! oh no! better let BP destroy the gulf of mexico w/only a slap on the wrist, truly the cost of doing business, as “punishment.” get your USRDA of sweet crude in every crawdad! extra lovely benefits for small children & pelicans.
oh yeah, re DAPL, who’s commandante in chief of the army corps of engineers again? donald trump & his unelected shady business ties? hunter biden & his ukrainian oil amigos? oh man, so awful, trump has ties to these oil/gas firms in Sioux lands! so awful. wonder what the Carlyle Group is up to these days? think BP gives to the Clinton Foundation?
Exxon-Mobil and the like as well as the DOD & the like know more about the state of the environment than probably anyone on the planet. as far as any of us can tell, despite some glossy “beyond petroleum” BS, their policies & agendas are same as it ever was: “Mr. President, we must not allow a mine shaft gap!” “Earth’s atmosphere coming to resemble that of Venus presents unique entrepreneurial & security challenges.”