orcishgamer: I hate Obama, but for sane reasons, you might want to check into real reasons he might not be the best president instead of made up stuff that it sounds like you got off a Fox News affiliate.
Sargon: Thank you for being a voice of reason. The gibber and garble can be suffocating at times. I don't want to waste your time but your strong denouncement of Obama made me curious since I often agree with your viewpoints.
I haven't been very good at following US politics in the later years but my impression of Obama has been that although he has mostly been a disappointment he seem to have some good values and do some good things when he can? His opposition towards the SOPA being a good example although that could just be a calculated move to get more support. My intuition is that he is a better man than most of the Democrats in Congress and Senate and certainly compared to the anti-intellectual rabble and Christian extremists that makes up most of the Republican party. Any articles you would recommend?
Edit: To clarify, my opinion of him (so far) is that he is better than most US politicians, but not good.
My problem is that he often says one thing and does another, your example of him denouncing SOPA if of course a good thing, but he has a history of threatening to veto (or when he was in the Senate not vote for stuff) and then when the time came he went ahead and passed whatever it was and just complained about it. Now, I don't think the POTUS has superpowers or that he can act unilaterally, but at best he seems rather weak willed (at worst he's a very effective liar and deceitful person). I cannot say why he does what I'm charitably (compared to how it looks) describing as "caving", I just know he does it and on a regular basis.
Also, Bush may have been a bad president, but he was a bully and he got stuff ramrodded through that I never thought could have happened. Now, I don't think abuse of process is good, but Bush did some things like using his public pulpit to call people out on the floor (which I suppose one might call bullying, but I think it's unfair to call it that in this context) and make them look like what they were, or sometimes just how he wanted them to look.
I guess what I'm saying is Obama could do way more than he does. He's caved or given up on some pretty important issues. He's said the Justice Department will no longer do X and then has sat back and let them do X (where X is a rather negative thing) over and over again.
Again, at best he's kind of a spineless guy, at worst, well, he's a politician. Still, I don't think it's fair to blame him for things that he actually didn't do or for getting cock-blocked by Republicans when he actually did try to do the right thing.