The new old Obama

In his latest incarnation as president emeritus and corporate multimillionaire community activist, we are reminded of the earlier Barack Obama of “get in their face,” “take a gun to a knife fight,” and “punish our enemies” vintage. From time to time, Obama ventures from his hilltop, seaside, $12 million “you didn’t build that” Martha’s Vineyard Estate or his tony Washington, D.C. $8 million “spread the wealth” mansion to lecture the nation on all of its racist sins, past and present.

In these outings, he seeks to advise lesser folk on how we can still find redemption (make Puerto Rico a state?), given that his own eight years as president apparently proved that the United States remains hopelessly captive to the spirit of Bull Connor and that a president such as himself—starting out with complete control of the Congress—had no power to change much.

His latest weaponization of the funeral of John Lewis revealed all the Obama signature characteristics.

Obama knows that the Trump Administration’s use of federal marshals to protect a federal courthouse in Portland from nonstop street efforts to burn it down, along with its occupants, is not analogous to the Democratic Alabama Governor George Wallace, an honored speaker at the 1972 McGovern-run Democratic convention: “[Wallace] may be gone, but we can witness our federal government sending agents to use tear gas and batons against peaceful demonstrators.”

He knows that such protesters in our major cities loot, burn, blind, maim, and occasionally kill people and are hardly “peaceful.”