Like a lot of liberals, I used to believe that President Obama was a slightly better-than-average president who would have done a lot better if he’d followed President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s playbook rather than that of the Democrat Leadership Conference. But the guys at Fox News have convinced me that he must be the greatest president in all of history.
Why? Because of time travel. After all, who wouldn’t want a president who could travel back and forth through time?
Some right-wing talking heads recently reminded me of President Obama’s amazing time-travel skills when they blamed the Great Recession on him. Only the Great Recession began in 2007, and Obama took office in January 2009. The only answer is that Obama took a time machine back to the mid-2000s and talked then-President George Bush Jr. into all the deregulation that led to opaque derivatives that crashed the economy.
But there’s more.
In 2016, Trump spokeswoman Katrina Pierson blamed Marine Captain Humayun Khan’s death on President Obama. Only Captain Khan died in 2004, more than four years before President Obama took office. So how could President Obama be responsible? Clearly, he must have gotten into his time machine, gone back in time to 2001, and talked President George W. Bush into launching an unwinnable war.
But there’s so much more!
Let’s begin with Barack Hussein Obama’s birth. Realizing that he wanted to be president, Obama went back in time and placed advertisements in both Honolulu newspapers to disguise the fact that his mother, despite having a valid U.S. passport, had gone off to Kenya without one. Having totally gone off the deep end, Ann Obama decided to bear her child in a backward African village instead of in a state-of-the-art Honolulu hospital. While Barack Obama was at it, he bribed everyone at the hospital to keep quiet and told the delivering doctor to tell several people the joke that “Stanley had a baby.” (Mrs. Obama’s given name was actually Stanley Ann.) He also pulled strings so that his mother could sneak herself and his baby self back into the country again, inexplicably without using her valid U.S. passport.
Then there’s this episode of time travel, pointed out by Fox News’ resident crackpot, Dr. Keith Ablow, in which he blamed President Obama for the World Cup distracting Americans from #Benghazi!™. Right! President Obama went back in time, invented soccer (or as the rest of the planet calls it, “football”) in 1848, then got millions of fans to love it, then invented the World Cup in 1930, and finally kick-started the American interest in soccer in the 1990s. And he did this all to distract Americans from #Benghazi!™ – which, thanks to time travel, he knew was coming up! Talk about subtle political thinking and such incredibly complete forward planning! Who couldn’t admire that? One-time Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, the prince of realpolitik, couldn’t claim as much!
President Obama’s most long-reaching time-travel effort was, of course, when he went back in time and persuaded several young lawyers to pretend to be conservatives — some even joining the ultra-right-wing Federalist Society — to fool President George W. Bush into appointing them to the federal bench. That’s how come you have Bush-appointed federal judges striking down same-sex marriage bans, Muslim travel bans, draconian voter suppression laws, forced prayer and religiosity measures, anti-Islamic legislation, abortion restrictions, and upholding ObamaCare and commonsense gun-control measures.
President Obama, who — unlike “real” Americans — harbors an inexplicable hatred of cowboys, went back in time to visit President Reagan and persuade his Bureau of Land Management to deny Cliven Bundy’s request to transfer his dad’s federal grazing permit to himself. Granted, the BLM had an excellent excuse because “like father, like son.” Mr. Bundy Senior was also a deadbeat, so the BLM denied the permit because the Bundys were delinquent on fines. Obama also prevailed on George Bush the First to list the desert tortoise as threatened and to try to negotiate with Bundy – although to no avail. (Timeline here.) Which explains why that whole Cliven Bundy thing was President Obama’s fault.
Now President Obama, light-bulb hater that he is, naturally traveled back in time to persuade President George W. Bush to sign the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, knowing that it would go into effect after Bush left office and that he would get all of the credit. That obliging Dubya! Always willing to help out a future prez! President Obama even traveled back in time to set the stage for Bush by getting President Ronald Reagan to set the appliance efficiency standards. No accomplishment is too slight for our hard-working, time-traveling president!
Now, wanting to give every poor person a telephone so as to “buy” the 2012 election, President Obama again used his time-travel powers. Not only did he convince the ever-accommodating George W. Bush to authorize the use of SafeLink cellphones, but he went back further in time to get FDR to pass the first telecommunications act and to get President Woodrow Wilson to come up with the first telecommunications agreement. What a savvy negotiator that President Obama is!
There are, of course, many other examples of President Obama’s time travel: going back in time to persuade Mitt Romney to oppose the auto bailout, dooming Romney’s chances in Michigan; traveling back in time to persuade George the Second to slash FEMA funds to the bone and appoint as chief Michael “Heckuva Job” Brown, which is why 29 percent of Louisiana Republicans blame President Obama for the 2005 Katrina disaster; and Obama’s seeking to extend government dependency in many languages by traveling back in time to get his predecessor to create a partnership with Mexico in 2004 to provide information on Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) at Mexican consulates – although the SNAP assistance can only go to legal immigrants who’ve been in the United States five years or longer. That wily Obama, preying on Dubya’s desire to boost Mexican turnout in 2004 before the Latino vote had turned so reliably Democratic due to immigrant bashing!
So there you are! Time travel is the reason that President Obama is the greatest president ever. Surely, the greatest world leader ever. I mean, could Alexander the Great, Napoleon Bonaparte, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, King Frederick the Great of Prussia, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, or Queen Elizabeth I travel through time? I don’t think so!
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