Germans Loved Obama. Now We Don’t Trust Him
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That being said. Those societies that are now disenchanted with him and America are naive fools who need to wake up and smell the stench. America is not your friend. We are an abusive friend, at best. The worst thing about it the relationship is that because we are never held to account or responsible and get away with anything and every abuse towards our "friends" like the spoiled rotten brat we are; we never grow and learn how to actually be a true friend or even civil. Friendship is a two sided relationship; this is a cry for help, please smack us around and shame us deeply so we can be humbled and build back up a sane character.
* (the only President Germans loved is probably Kennedy, the most misunderstood Reagan)
Anyone who has fallen out of love with Obama probably wasn't looking hard at him in the first place.
Of course the actions by the administration were more constructive than the rhetoric but I certainly grew up in fear of imminent nuclear war.
And when you say i will close Guantanamo Bay in a year - you tend to believe that kind of stuff.
The worst thing about the whole "we used to love him until he did x" misses the issue that leads to these situations in the first place; it would more accurately be "we used to love him until we realized he lied to us."
That's what American political campaigns are and have, as long as I've been listening to them, always been: A long series of lies and overstatements told in order to gain office. That people continue to believe them and lavish praise onto these liars encourages them and guarantees we'll continue to see this happen long into the future.
You want to stop the flooding? Put the shovel down.
I don't know where that quote is from -- I grew up hearing it from my father.
"Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely."
It's from a letter written by Lord Acton to Bishop Creighton in 1885. A more complete quote is:
"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority, still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it."
You most certainly aren't. I normally cite this as an international phenomenon, but it's gotten to the point where either people know that or they've had their heads buried in the sand, so it's hardly worth belaboring the point any more (not that it'll stop me, but I no longer feel quite so tied explaining it over and over).
We have to consider the possibility that Obama really did believe in the ideas he pitched during his presidential campaigns, but that once he entered in to office something very powerful changed his views. The measure of how powerful that agent of change is would depend on how deeply Obama held his convictions.
So we have two possibilities:
1) Obama is a purely evil, lying, power-hungry individual
2) Obama's ideology was forced to the sidelines by a system that is immune to such purity
I'm not sure which is more terrifying.
-- Said he could cut the deficit by half in his first term. Instead he actually added over 5 trillion to it.
-- Said he would reduce unemployment to under 8%. Today, it still hovers around 10% if you take into account the people who stopped looking for work.
-- Said the stimulus would create 3.5 million jobs. Instead, we actually lost 1.1 million jobs AFTER the stimulus.
-- Said he would make health care more affordable. You simply can't add millions of people to the health care ranks and expect rates to go DOWN. Simple supply and demand economics.
-- Said his investment in Green energy would create 5 million jobs. After spending $90 billion, instead of 5 million jobs, we had several solar companies go bankrupt after securing guaranteed government loans, many of which left tax payers on hook for hundreds of millions of dollars.
And yet, he still got re-elected.
Unless you actually read his proposed policy documents, which made it pretty clear that he had no clue what he was talking about.
TBH I regret not seeing it before. He gave off every whiff of a man who sought power for its own sake. But he was glib, he was black, and at the time he seemed better than the alternatives.
This mobile version even has two versions of the canonical tag [1][2]. All HN has to do is read that tag.
[1] <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/30/opinion/sunday/germans-lov... />
[2] <meta name="canonicalURL" content="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/30/opinion/sunday/germans-lov...
If we had enough people (with enough money, unfortunately) running for office and then behaving responsibly and in the best interests of their constituents, we might be able to start reversing this trend. Unfortunately, that's a whole lot of time, effort, and -- of course -- money, and not only are all of those difficult to come by, the will to start is hard enough to come by. That's an opportunity you have to create, there's virtually no payoff, a low likelihood of success, and a high probability of upsetting a great many very powerful people.
Germans would want the US leader that has the most benefit for Germany, not the US.
It is very naive to not understand that the leader of the US has a large impact on the world at large. Having an administration who have all but said that foreigners do not have any rights isn't good for anyone.
The leader of the US does have an impact on the world at large, that's true. However his priority is the USA. Just as the priority for Merkel is Germany, UK of Cameron etc etc.
Spying even on their allies (Right to Privacy),Guantanamo Bay (I'll just bunch this up as general human rights), various Wars on bogus reasons (Rights of a sovereign nation), TSA Detentions of Foreigners (Right to Freedom), etc.
So they've demonstrated that they don't seem to care much about the rights of foreign citizens, and also in some instances the rights of their own citizens, for example the abuse of Manning, the fact that Snowden has to seek asylumn, etc.
As for the other stuff you mention, I don't agree with your premises. I don't believe the wars were bogus, and I'm comfortable with terrorists being held in Gitmo.
And more importantly it's painful listening to a bunch of computer programmers spout off about politics and world events. I value 4Chan's analysis of current events more than Hacker News' and that's not even a joke. There are very few things more irritating than a spoiled rotten 20 year old's explanation of how the world works.
Please you guys, stick to talking about javascript. You're ruining this site.
Let's find some common denominator. I agree with you that there are 20 year olds on this site. That was about as much as I could find.
Now if you leave out the indirect reference to "spoiled rotten" people frequenting your site, we'd even have more room for agreement, because I do disagree with you on either of them. I know, I might smell a bit rotten if I didn't have time for showers on a 2 week death march, but I'm not showing any necrosis yet. I'm pretty sure the sour taste in my mouth doesn't stem from me being spoiled either, but rather from your chunky oratory.
But on a more serious point, what is spoiled is to expect that this entire site caters to you.
You want javascript? I'm sure there are half a dozen posts on the front page, with another dozen on the second page ("I have to scroll? But I don't want to scroll").
You know what I think is rotten?
Telling other people that politics, things which concern them directly and indirectly, shouldn't be discussed by them. Ironically, there's a reference to the GeStaPo on the article we're discussing. They kinda had a knack for that as well.