Three bad presidents

Biden has a low bar

Lots to say about Trump and Trumpism some other time.  My view is that Trump accurately saw that the middle class is being destroyed by bipartisan neoliberal policies, but is too flawed a person to follow through correctly to deliver concrete benefits.  Biden will now be able to push through some helpful things until the Democrats lose the Senate.

Obama

Matt Stoller: you cannot get a single elected left-wing politician to say that Obama was a bad president. Think about that. We cannot have an honest discussion of what it meant to use power when Democrats were in charge, so the language of dissension is polluted with incoherent nonsense. All the grand philosophical musing and Democratic Socialists of America study groups do not matter when not a single elected official outside the Republican Party can make the simple, obvious point that Obama’s policies straight up made things worse.

From Lambert Strether

• Legitimizing torture
• Legitimizing warrantless surveillance 
• Bad policy choices for financial crisis recovery 
• Bad energy policy

To a large extent, Obama ended up legitimizing a lot of bad policy from Bush.

“No drama” is calming but not helpful.

GW Bush

Lambert:

To convey the full horror of the Bush years would not a series of posts, but a book. The entire experience was wretched and shameful.  

Of the many horrors of the Bush years, I will pick three. (I am omitting many, many others, including Hurricane Katrina, the Plame Affair, Medicare Part D, the Cheney Energy Task Force, that time Dick Cheney shot an old man in the face, Bush’s missing Texas Air National Guard records, Bush gaslighting the 2004 Republican National Convention with terror alerts, and on and on and on. An I didn’t even get to 9/11, “You’ve covered your ass,” WMDs, and the AUMF.

• The White House Iraq Group
• Torture at Abu Ghraib
• Warrantless Surveillance and the Destruction of the Fourth Amendment