Critics often make for strange bedfellows. Louis Farrakhan and Cornell West are examples. Both argue that Barack Obama was not ready for prime time. For Farrakhan, Obama failed on race and social issues. For West, the 44th president was a sell-out to a capitalist establishment. Overall, both say the Obamas didn't do much for blacks in particular and social justice in general. For brothers like Farrakhan and West, the last eight years were a wasted opportunity.

There will be a black president one day – maybe not for decades, thanks to the outgoing regime. Obama had little time for pragmatism and too much to do with special pleading; identity politics; and feckless, if not sanguinary, foreign policy.

Be it race or religion, Obama's tragic flaw was policy marked by timidity and moral ambiguity – both underwritten by the belief that he could be a racial, religious, or policy shape-shifter as the occasion demanded. Having parents on both sides of racial and religious divides allowed Obama to play race and religious cards often, yet seldom well.

As team Obama heads for the exits, the race joker is again in play. White working-class Americans and any flavor of Russians are the new bogymen for bad losers, right and left, across the land.

In the twilight of a checkered political career, Obama's only claim to legacy might be "first black," a dubious attribute that can never be more than a half-truth. Half- truths might be a fitting coda to an era that may go down in history as a tipping point, a juncture where "fake news" became the real news. Factual ambiguity is now viral and that cultural meme is a precedent that Obama owns.



Image via Fox News.

As a young hipster in exclusive white schools, he was "Barry," not Barack Hussein. As a Chicago politician, Obama self-identified as a black man, although that identity was more expedient than real. As a presidential candidate, Obama often ignored his African and Muslim antecedents while celebrating his heroic American white grandparents.

In mid-career, with a media assist, he jettisoned the "Hussein" moniker. Clearly, it wasn't politically expedient to self-identify as black and Muslim, even in Farrakhan's Chicago.

Barack's father was an unfortunate stereotype, a deadbeat dad who abandoned his son and fled to a life of substance abuse in Africa. Obama's mother seemed to be a white flower child with a taste for exotic, if not constant, mates. Ultimately, Obama spent his formative years in the custody of white privilege and grandparents in Hawaii. To this day, the black and Muslim sides of family Obama languish in Kenyan and Indonesian poverty and obscurity.

In the main, the president's personal career path was consistent snowflake: prep school, Ivy League college, prestigious law school, and then politics. At the curb level, Barack Obama probably cared as much about black culture in America as does Chris Matthews.

After 20 January, the Obamas plan to remain in Washington so that their daughter can remain in a pricey, majority-white private secondary school. Self-segregating public schools in Washington, D.C. are a function of entrenched double standards among elite black liberals like the Obamas. Arguably, the District of Columbia has the worst public schools in America.

Withal, you could argue that the "great black hope" was neither. In life and theater, the last act is often like the first – bookends, if you will.

The Obama Bookends

Obama leaves the Oval Office as did the Clintons, trashing the White House. Since the election, both families have done their level best to poison domestic and foreign policy wells. First, there is challenging the legitimacy of the 2016 election at home and then blaming the Trump victory on white fright or Russian meddling abroad.

Sour grapes do not capture the stench of such 11th-hour hypocrisy. And "sore loser" does not begin to describe the perfidy of American intelligence collaboration in the partisan challenges to the legitimacy of the 2016 election.

Eight years of Obama torpor had nothing to do with the Clinton defeat?

If the Kremlin hacked the DNC attempt to hijack the Democrat primaries, such enterprise is a tribute to an efficient FSB or GRU. Worse still, if there was a hack, and subsequent desinformatsiya campaign in America, any Kremlin scam is a testament to the manifest incompetence of the DNC and General Clapper's bloated American intelligence megaplex.

The truth about the intelligence profession today is alarming. The grand illusion in Congress about 16 U.S. intelligence agencies is the belief that spending is somehow related to performance. Since 9/11, the business of the I.C. is clearly business, not efficiency, effectiveness, or improved national security.

The intelligence community took sides in the recent election because it anticipated a Clinton win. Trump is a clear threat to business as usual at DOD and a clear threat to an obese and out-of-control intelligence behemoth.

When the media speaks of weaponized cyber-attacks, the American sponsored "Stuxnet" assault on Iran's nuclear infrastructure is seldom mentioned. U.S. intelligence fired the first salvo of the 21st-century internet wars as early as January 2010. Any hack of the DNC is small potatoes compared to the Obama-Clapper idiocy of playing nuclear chicken in a dicey neighborhood like the Levant.

Bottom line: A Shia bomb is still waiting in the wings.

Beginning with the Sunni attack on Manhattan, intelligence community funding has been inversely proportionate to national security performance. Indeed, regime change chickens have now come home to roost inside the Beltway.

Opposition to Trump in D.C. is now flirting with sedition.

The latest "Russian" hysteria has all the earmarks of xenophobia, vindictive remorse, or political vendetta. General Clapper's empire bet on Obama and the Clintons. Trump won in spite of Washington fixers. Real change is a bitter pill for losers and elites alike.

The best revenge is often blowback. Barack Obama and Jim Clapper have managed to turn Julian Assange, WikiLeaks, and Edward Snowden into global cyber-heroes.

Clapper and his agency vassals might now displace both Benedict Arnold and Rube Goldberg on the partisan political walk of shame. If Russian intelligence is more effective than American intelligence, Putin might indeed take a bow, but surely Donald Trump is not the culprit, nor the beneficiary.

Obama leaves the Oval Office as he entered, festooned with garlands from sycophants. The president got the Nobel "Peace" Prize at the start of his run when he had done nothing. Now he gets the "Defense" Distinguished Service Medal after accomplishing little. Both awards are bookends for wishful thinking. Eight years of Obama were neither distinguished nor a service.

Obama probably killed, with Islamic allies, more Muslims than Charles Martel. Mister Obama also leaves his successor at least five hot wars in the ummah and one cold war in Europe. No fair analyst can possibly argue that America and the world are better, or safer, places after the Obama years.

Nearly a decade ago, Obama ran on a theme of "hope and change" as if he had a program for either. Recent events in Chicago are a microcosm of domestic failure on both counts. We could start with the Black Lives Matter hustle, a coalition of greedy lawyers, hip-hop, rap, and anti-cop punk activists.

Apologists might argue that Chicago is not Obama's problem, but if urban punk pathology is a national problem, then that buck stops on Obama's desk.

Chicago is Obama country – his nascent political constituency, if you will. The Windy City is a burg where lives do not matter, especially black lives. Chicago is the murder capital of America, a city where victims are usually black, and perps are almost always black, too.

In any given year, nearly five thousand of Mr. Obama's Illinois constituents will be maimed by criminals and a fifth of those usually end up dead. Black mayhem is routine in every American city, most of which are one-party towns like Chicago and Washington, D.C., hostages to a smug and complacent Democratic Party.

Chronic, now generational, violence in the United States is a phenomenon of the urban American Left. Obama and his Party own that demographic.



The Chicago four.

The most recent racial atrocity in Chicago featured four punks who kidnapped a mentally challenged white man for two days of racial abuse and ritual torture. The ordeal was live-streamed on YouTube. The only difference between this incident and everyday city mayhem is that this victim was white.

Social pathology in places like Chicago is of a piece with Islamic necrosis abroad, a product of indulgence. Tolerating aberrant behavior anywhere makes more of it possible everywhere.

Culture is behavior. Behavior is culture.

Maybe it is too early to suggest that Barack Hussein Obama is America's first affirmative action president. Buyer's remorse is the ugly side of affirmative action. If facts and performance matter, Obama had eight years of golden opportunity to address domestic and foreign policy civility. Alas, he did little or nothing on both accounts. Both landscapes now are literally littered with body bags and the human detritus of civic incontinence.

Barack Obama was never varsity material.

Indeed, he doubled down on failure. Obama never used his bully pulpit to demand a better moral standard for his core urban constituency at home or those perfidious Muslim "partners" he sought to appease abroad.

Obama's tenure is not without merit. He looks good in a suit. Just ask CNN or MSNBC. He seems to have a nice family, too. And Barack's rap is nonpareil.

Indeed, Obama sounds like a park bench preacher. He's arrogant enough to tell a crowd to go to hell, and most marks would get in line for the trip. The Obama aura for folks who work for a living; however, people in flyover country is something very different. If you ask about Obama in Deer Lick, the response would be "all hat, no cowboy."

The black vote in America may continue to be a "blue wall," a racial monolith – or maybe now with Keith Ellison, just another round of domestic jihad. Yet for the rest of America, any future appeals to melanin as an asset, religion as an excuse, or affirmative action as a remedy may be dead letters.

Team Obama out! Let the requiems begin.

G. Murphy Donovan writes about the politics of national security.