The liberal commentariat is abuzz over the news that former president Obama is getting paid $400,000 for a speech to the Wall Street firm Cantor Fitzgerald despite earlier calling those firms ‘fat cats’. I don’t know why they are surprised. Obama has always been friendly towards the big banks and anyone who followed his career could see that even before he was first elected. All his talk criticizing them was just talk, the usual populist posturing of Democrats.
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Desperate to show something, anything, that will deflect criticism that he is a loser who has not achieved anything of substance in his first 100 days and that he has in fact caved on many of his campaign promises and totally stabbed his supporters in the back, Donald Trump has released his tax ‘proposals’, a grandiose name for a vague “one page of double-spaced bullet points with some hefty margins” as Stephen Colbert said. Like with so much of what the Trump administration, it looks like the kind of thing that a middle school student who hasn’t done any research or even reading would come up with. But Derek Thompson does an analysis of it anyway though there is a long way to go before it has any hope of being implemented.
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Donald Trump is undoubtedly an awful president, a vain, needy, pathological liar and narcissist whose main goal in life seems to be to enrich himself and his family. But we should not let his awfulness result in our viewing his predecessors with rose-tinted glasses and seeing them in retrospect as better than they were. We must never forget, for example, that Barack Obama’s drone killings and policies in Libya and Yemen and other parts of the world were awful and his excessive claims of presidential power laid the foundations that Trump is now taking advantage of.
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One of the enduring facts about the American media is that there is a group of influential members of the media and intellectuals who like to think of themselves as liberal but are reliable advocates for the use of military force and especially bombing the hell out of other countries in the name of ‘humanitarian intervention’. These people can be relied upon to cheer wars as long as it can be wrapped up in a gauze, however flimsy, that it will magically result in the emergence of a nation that is democratic and respects human rights and the rights of minorities. Of course, once the whole exercise goes sour as it almost always does, they studiously avert their gaze from the havoc they caused and look longingly for the next war for which they can advocate action.
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Matt Taibbi reviews a new book Shattered by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, based on anonymous (of course) sources within the upper echelons of the Hillary Clinton campaign and say that despite her running for president for about a decade, they could not figure out exactly why she was running, at one time even toying with the slogan “Because it’s her turn”. It makes for depressing but revealing reading about the mindset of the Washington political establishment class.
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