President Obama Not Attending The French Anti-Terror Unity March: A Sign of Respect?

Is U.S. President Barack Obama not attending the French Anti-Terror Unity March / Parade his own way of showing respect to the victims of the tragedy?

By: Ringo Bones 

Statistically, the more than 1-million people attending the French Ant-Terror Unity Parade / March back in Sunday, January 11, 2015 is a historic event mainly because more people attended the event in comparison to the total who greeted the Allies during the Liberation of Paris back in 1944, not to mention the 40 heads-of-state showing their unity against radical Islamism. Many criticize the President Obama and the U.S. government not sending a high-level official (higher than U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder?) during the French Anti-Terror Unity Parade / March as a “missed opportunity” for the Obama administration. But is this just a way that President Obama sympathize with the oft ignored demographic of this tragic event – as in the moderate Muslims who are also for all intents and purposes victimized by the murder of Charlie Hebdo cartoonists and the Kosher supermarket shoppers by radical Islamists? 

Given that he spent a significant portion of his childhood in Muslim societies – i.e. in Indonesia, President Obama has a “unique perspective” on how to interact with the Muslim world that is sadly lacking in a majority of Western statesmen and captains-of-industry. President Obama could be, in a way, meeting halfway moderate Muslims with a conservative leaning outlook who are deeply offended by cheap, hackneyed renderings of the Prophet Mohammad. Even though the Paris-based political satire magazine Charlie Hebdo remains largely unknown outside of France, never mind the rest of the Francophone world, the radical Islamists who murdered those cartoonists may just have been doing their cause a disservice by inadvertently raising the satirical Parisian cartoonists to “martyrdom”. 

Is President Obama A Closeted Conservative?

Despite being criticized by the U.S. Republican Party for being a left-leaning radical liberal, is President Obama, in truth, is actually a closeted conservative?

By: Ringo Bones

Maybe we should be thanking Bruce Bartlett – that former domestic policy advisor for both former U.S. Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush - for raising such a premise that the incumbent U.S. President Barack Obama is actually a “closeted conservative” – as in President Obama’s policies are more akin to Ronald Reagan’s than of any other U.S. Democratic Party president of the last 50 years. If there’s a kernel of truth on Bruce Bartlett’s premise, the only difference between President Barack Obama and former U.S. President Ronald Reagan is that Ronald Reagan was the only one who was rumoured to have starred in his very own porno movie. But is there any truth to this? 

According to Bruce Bartlett, President Obama didn’t govern further towards the right in comparison to the way President Reagan did back in the 1980s. The way I see it, Obamacare is basically a U.S. Republican Party based idea and even Bartlett agrees that Obamacare is not that much different to the universal healthcare first proposed by President Eisenhower near the end of the 1950s. 

As a conservative leaning economist, Bruce Bartlett’s assessment of President Obama being a Reagan-era conservative might apply to the way Obama handled the 2008 Credit Crunch – as in bailing out the “too big to fail” banks and other Wall Street financial institutions reminiscent of Bartlett’s advice to then President Reagan about the merits of “supply-side economics”. But compared to “radical right” U.S. Republican Party politicians that run riot during the 2012 U.S. Presidential Elections that ran on the platform of legalizing rape and banning pornography in America – like Missouri Republican Congressman Todd Akin, Wisconsin Republican Congressman Paul Ryan and Pennsylvania Republican state Senator Rick Santorum – President Barack Obama’s alleged conservatism is much saner in comparison to the G.O.P. stalwarts recently mentioned.

President Barack Obama: Latest U.S. Presidential Superlative?

Even if he had lost to former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, did you know that President Barack Obama can still achieve some U.S. Presidential firsts and superlatives?

By: Ringo Bones

Aside from the fact that U.S. President Barack Obama is America’s first African-American president ever elected – whether he won or lost the 2012 US Presidential Elections to his opponent, former governor of the state of Massachusetts Mitt Romney – Obama did managed to earn other well-deserved first and other superlatives in the U.S. Presidency. If he failed to become reelected, President Obama could have become the second youngest U.S. ex president at 51. Though the title of youngest U.S. ex president belongs to Theodore Roosevelt who was only 50 years of age when he finished serving his two terms in office.

Fortunately, President Obama got reelected, and with this, managed to earn other U.S. Presidential firsts and superlatives. Given that the last two U.S. presidents where two-termers – i.e. Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush – the last time America got a trio of two-term presidents was back during the terms of Presidents Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and James Monroe. And during the time when Thomas Jefferson was elected President of the United States of America back in 1801, the country was only 25 years old! And by the end of the term of this first trio of two-term U.S. Presidents, almost all of the veterans of the American Revolutionary Wars probably lived long enough to witness that particularly rare political event.

Another first to have happened in the U.S. political landscape of President Obama’s reelection is that America now has 20 women senators – the most in any other time in America’s political history. Given that President Obama is the first black / African-American U.S. president to be elected in office, is his administration paving the way for other ethnicities / genders to be another notch closer to be voted into the U.S. presidency? Who knows, historians could probably write that President Barack Obama was the one who paved for women to be elected into the U.S. presidency. Paging Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren!