lenny unencumbered

… instead I had a political awakening halfway through reading Barack Obama’s 2020 presidential memoir A Promised Land.

The awakening did not come from reading the book. It came from elsewhere – many corroborating sources. I was devastatingly disappointed to learn at the time, that Obama was yet another U.S. president who played nice domestically, but sustained America’s imperialist foreign policy with ferocious determination.

Obama carried out more than double the deportations of foreign nationals during his 8-year presidency than Trump did. He also ordered more than 540 drone strikes outside of major war zones that killed an estimated 3800 people, many of whom were civilians. That’s more than Trump has done so far, but he’s apparently only just warming up.

Before picking up his memoir I was shamefully ignorant of Obama’s warmongering proclivity. I had bought the liberal nice-guy image of him that was sold to the world. No more!

His hardcover memoir now sits half-read collecting dust on the bottom most shelf, it’s usefulness as a doorstop, hardly worth considering.