Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by DRAOBE 3179 days ago
Independence and ineptitude.
1 comments

Ignorance is why you are being down voted, the man spent his entire time in office at war if that is deserving of a peace prize I'm not sure what you'd have to do to not deserve one.
The military, Wall Street, healthcare financial services, and government (size, reach of power), win after every single election.

I don't think Obama is a particularly good or bad man, I think he's just a good politician who went in there and did "what he was supposed to do." Stupid and evil wars existed before and after him. He didn't do anything to fix it, but he didn't start it either. The President doesn't have as much power as we may believe.

>The President doesn't have as much power as we may believe.

With these "wars" in particular he actually does have a great deal of power. They aren't actually wars but "military actions" for the most part. The commander in chief can unilaterally order the armed forced to withdraw if he so wished. Instead Obama ordered drone strike after drone strike, bombing after bombing (so many in fact that there was serious concerns that we would run out of bombs[0]). His merits as a president can be debated, his merits as a peace prize winner cannot. He simply did very little to promote peace and much to prevent it (see Syria).

[0]http://www.cnn.com/2015/12/04/politics/air-force-20000-bombs...

I completely agree. But what do you think they would have done to him had he refused to go along with it?
I don't have the information required to tell you specifically what would happen, but I will note the media was very friendly with the Obama administration. Those media organizations are held by parent companies that also often own weapons manufacturers. Obama was a man who was very concerned with his legacy and thus by the transitive property media portrayals of himself. Is it possible that he traded the lives of innocents for his personal vanity? Maybe, but the truth is we will probably never know why he did what he did. The only thing that I can say for certain is he didn't deserve any award with peace in the title.