After all, the people in the wedding parties Obama droned were human beings too. So were the people in the hospitals he bombed. So were the people in Libya killed by his NATO bombing campaign. So were the Yemeni adults and children killed by the weapons and support Obama gave Saudi Arabia to wage war against them. So were people in various countries on which he imposed sanctions. So were the Central American refugee kids he callously sent back to danger and death in the countries they fled. But their humanity doesn't begin to balance the sublime beauty of Barack and Michelle, and it's "politics" to remember it.
It would be one thing if Obama's cult acknowledged his murderous record but honestly declared their support for it. It would still be heinous, but it could be engaged with. But accurately describing a politician's (a Democratic politician's, anyway) record is a smear, racist, sexist, whatever. What most appalls me is that they are unaware of his record. Even when the stories were covered in the corporate media, they just slid harmlessly off the teflon brains of Obama loyalists and went down the memory hole.
Noam Chomsky has used the analogy of ants: when he (or anyone) walks down the street, he probably steps on and kills numerous small insects. This isn't because he hates ants; they just aren't important enough to him to impel him to watch out for them. Similarly, my friend and other Obama fans don't hate Afghan wedding parties or hospital patients or Yemeni children: their lives simply don't matter to them. They might care a little more about Yemeni children now that it's Donald Trump helping Saudi Arabia to kill them, but not much more from what I see, and they didn't care at all when Obama was in charge. It's like the "When Clinton Lied Nobody Died" bumper stickers I saw for a few years during the George W. Bush regime: many innocent people died because of Bill Clinton, but they were nobody, and Clinton's defenders easily brush aside any attempt to remind them of what happened to nobody. Another friend was surprised when I recounted Clinton's record to her at length. She didn't remember any of it, though she is my age and was sentient and conscious between 1992 and 2000. I fear she's forgotten it again since then, and we haven't discussed Obama.
Are the lives of nobody "politics"? I'm not sure. I don't think one can or should separate politics, whatever that means, from recently-former Presidents. Now that Dubya himself has been taken under the shelter of the Obamas' wings, his crimes forgiven and forgotten, so that liberal Democrats consider it unfair to bring them up, what are we allowed to remember? I doubt that they'll grant the same amnesty to Trump when he's out of office, however he leaves.
