If Hillary Clinton had won the Electoral College, in addition to winning the popular vote, how long would it have taken former President Barack Obama to criticize one of her decisions?
Clinton is a reasonable person, with an understanding of how things are done in the White House by presidents of either party. So maybe more than 30 days would have passed without a word from Obama.
Donald Trump is a pile of garbage and an inhuman monster, but for the Wall Street Journal, when Obama spoke out against a Trump executive order that could kill a little girl, it was still an opportunity for the Journal to slime Obama:
If you had 11 days and the “over,” you lost. We’re referring to the bet on how long it would take Barack Obama to criticize his presidential successor. For the record our wager was 30 days, but then we always expected more from the former President than he delivered.
What is your major malfunction, Wall Street Journal? As president, Obama carefully considered all his decisions and acted in a thoughtful manner, but that’s still not good enough for the Journal.
Trump has been doing things that demand criticism from the very day of his inauguration, starting with an inauguration speech that might as well have included Nazi terms and slogans.
Bernie Sanders called on Trump to uphold his campaign promise regarding Social Security, but Obama was silent. Trump talked about repealing and supposedly replacing the Affordable Care Act ("Obamacare”), but Obama was silent.
Then Trump signs an executive order that endangers our troops, insults our allies and desecrates the First Amendment, and Obama issues a statement through a spokesperson.
What self-control! If I was Obama, I would have spoken out sooner. Actually, if I was Obama, I would have tried to get Trump committed to the looney bin before he could be sworn in. Of course that would have been fodder to call me a dictator.
To be fair to the Wall Street Journal, the op-ed does cite some numbers, namely, the number of Syrian refugees that have come to the United States per year since 2011. It wasn’t until 2014 that the number spiked past a hundred, and 2015 that it went past a thousand. Numbers for last year are not available yet.
Right-wing nutjob blogs have taken their cue from the Journal. One of them, which I won’t dignify with a link, criticizes the “smallness of Obama,” ignoring Trump’s pettiness.
And supposedly the countries targeted by Trump’s Muslim ban are the same countries that Obama singled out as sources of terrorism. The nutjob blog of course neglects to mention that Trump has business interests in Saudi Arabia and other countries that were conspicuously left out of the executive order.
Of course I expect more from the Wall Street Journal than I expect from neo-Nazi blogs, but I’m still disappointed in the Journal. The Journal needs to understand: Trump doesn’t care about the wealthy, he only cares about his own short-sighted interests.