President Selfie Is Actually Trying to Claim These 5 Absurd ‘Achievements’
With just weeks left in the White House, President Obama is trying especially hard to sell a favorable legacy. In a collection called “The Record,” WhiteHouse.gov outlines five briefs that President Obama can tout as “achievements” the past eight years. We’ve broken them down here — the most ridiculous, the most arrogant, and the downright false:
1. Ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan
According to “The Record,” Obama responsibly “ended the U.S. combat missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, bringing home 90 percent of the nearly 180,000 American troops deployed in those countries when President Obama took office.”
U.S. armed forces are still very much in Iraq and Afghanistan, even if the fight there doesn’t look the same as it did in 2003. There’s no mention that President Obama signed a 10-year Bilateral Security Agreement with the president of Afghanistan to keep thousands of American troops in Afghanistan until at least 2024. President Obama also put boots on the ground to intervene in the Syrian civil war — despite repeatedly saying he would not put boots on the ground there.
2. Taking credit for legalizing gay marriage
President Obama is also touting an achievement for having ended “the government’s defense of the Defense of Marriage Act, leading to the Supreme Court’s landmark decisions holding the Act unconstitutional.”
Yes. You can thank President Obama — who once was against gay marriage and argued that “the term marriage itself has strong religious roots and a strong tradition that means something special to people in this country” — for the legalization of gay marriage, after he “evolved” on the issue in 2012. Just as Obama’s moral evolution on marriage was for the sake of political expediency, so is this last attempt to claim the legalization of gay marriage as an achievement of his administration.
3. Transgender military
According to “The Record,” Obama promoted “diversity and inclusion as an indispensable asset and strategic imperative in the United States’ national security workforce of more than three million dedicated military and civilian personnel.”
While Obama’s work on diversity and inclusion in the military may have impacted the non-gender conformative, it didn’t help people like Monifa Sterling, who was court-martialed as a Marine for putting up Bible verses at her work station.
4. Seizing millions of acres of land from the American people
Obama is credited for creating “the largest marine monument in the world, which is completely off-limits to commercial resource extraction” — but that’s not anything to be proud of. President Obama has unilaterally seized more land and sea for the federal government than any other president. Since taking office, Obama has claimed more than 548 million acres of land and water under the 1906 Antiquities Act. That’s 548 million acres of U.S. bountiful land and water that you, reader, will not be able to access or use in your own country.
5. Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)
Obama is proud to have “Concluded the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a high-standard trade agreement that, if passed by Congress, would boost Made-in-America exports and American jobs, while setting strong rules of the road on labor and the environment across the fast-growing Asia-Pacific region.”
But according to President-elect Trump, TPP will be one of the first things to go at the start of his administration. That would mean that one of Obama’s signature achievements, something he’s worked on for years, will be washed away like a footprint during high tide.
And America would be better off if many other Obama “achievements” washed away along with TPP. (For more from the author of “President Selfie Is Actually Trying to Claim These 5 Absurd ‘Achievements'” please click HERE)
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