DISAPPOINTMENTS AND REALITY

So Obama has deeply disappointed me with some things he's done, like signing that bill that seems to protect Monsanto from legal actions against its Frankenstein-ian experiments with our food.

But I look at it this way. The people I admire most for their ideals or their style or their accomplishments or their contributions etc. have always also been flawed and nothing like perfect. The ones who seem in nostalgic hindsight to be some sort of uniquely above the fray souls are usually the ones whose lives were cut short. JFK, RFK, Martin Luther King (who should have been our first African-American president but probably would have had to make compromises or just bad choices that would have left his image flawed too in ways beyond J Edgar's attempts to smear him, or picture Marilyn Monroe or James Dean blowing up like Marlon Brando did and becoming as strange), etc.

The way I see Obama is that he has made more decisions that help the world be a better place and our country be a better country than he has ones that hinder that. As opposed to say the Bushes, or Reagan, or what I'm betting would have occurred under a McCain or Romney administration.

That doesn't mean we shouldn't hold Obama accountable for the bad choices he's made, like continuing the dominance of secret government agencies on foreign military and diplomatic policies or intrusions into our own privacy by the same (especially considering that our intelligence agencies have been getting it wrong for as long as they've been in existence, saying that if Viet Nam fell the entire region would go Communist, or that the Soviets were reaching the capability of annihilating us instead of seeing that that whole system was about to collapse, or that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction Saddam was ready to use on us, or not seeing the Arab Spring coming or events in Libya or Syria etc.) or the concessions to the rightwing Republicans who make every compromise turn out better for their positions than ours, etc.

No, we have to continue to pressure him and everyone in the Congress about these and other crucial issues, but we have to do it from the realistic position that Obama isn't perfect from any of our perspectives (and as in most things in life, our individual perspectives most likely clash most of the time anyway) but he has been pretty good on most of the most important issues of our time.