Obama criticizes Trump. By what right?

Today, Barack Obama and George W. Bush both offered criticisms of Trumpism without actually naming Trump. In both cases, the criticisms are well-founded. Yet in both cases, I must ask: Do these former presidents have the right to say what they say?

In this post, I'm going to concentrate on Obama:

“But here’s one thing I know: if you have to win a campaign by dividing people, you’re not going to be able to govern them. You won’t be able to unite them later if that’s how you start.”

But that's how you started, Mr. Obama. I will never forget and never forgive what you did to Hillary in 2008.

Trump won using the Obama playbook. Bots and paid trolls commandeered the comments sections of every website, making it impossible for Hillary supporters to speak up online. Whenever anyone said one word in defense of Hillary, the pile-on was brutal. Obama forces relied on the incessant use of conspiracy theories: How many times, in that period, did liberal sites publish phrases like "the Bush-Clinton crime family" and "Vince Foster! Vince Foster! Vince Foster!"? Keith Olbermann, to his later regret, openly called for Hillary Clinton's murder on the air.

In 2008, anyone who offered even the mildest critique of Obama's tactics became the target of weird accusations and absurd conspiracy theories. In that topsy-turvy year, progressives decided that Paul Krugman (who offered a cautious critique of the Obama campaign) was a worse-than-Cheney ultra-conservative monster, while Arianna Huffington, Andrew Sullivan and Markos Moulitsas were all hailed as lifelong lefties. History and common sense were turned upside-down. It was insanity. 

The Daily Kos printed an incessant stream of viciously sexist insults, paranoid accusations and outright lies. Here's just the smallest sample of the kind of bullshit flung at our eyeballs every second of every minute of every hour of every day during the 2008 primary campaign:

Just slit her throat, lock her in a car boot, and drive the car into river in West Virginia. Ain’t gonna let no whore screw with the man

The heinous Hillary hag with a bullseye on her forehead is reason enough to vote for Obama

And a Drive-By Won't Be Out of the Question. What goes around, comes around. The stupid fucking bitch !!

Talk About WHITE TRASH that bitch better keep looking over her shoulder.

The Vince Foster Issue Should Be Investigated Again. Clintons just showed that their ambitions know no limit.

The Clinton death list The following is a partial list of deaths of persons connected to President Clinton during his tenure as Governor of Arkansas and/or while President of the United States and thereafter. Read the list and judge for yourself...

That, times a billion, is what we got without surcease on Huffpo, Kos, TPM and DU -- progressive sites. The Obot attacks were every bit as brutal as anything that happened in 2016. Do you remember those insulting dolls of Hillary in dominatrix costume? If you think that they were created for the right-wing market, you're kidding yourself. The sexism displayed on "liberal" sites throughout 2008 was far more blatant and unashamed than is the racism seen on Brietbart -- or, hell, even Stormfront.

Speaking of racism: Remember the darkened video smear leveled against Hillary -- a smear which was every bit as scurrilous and ginned-up as the email pseudoscandal? When I pointed out the absurdity of this charge, I was called a racist -- even though no-one could mount a technical counter-argument.

Obama won because he gamed the caucuses and flagrantly lied about a number of issues, not least among them being his alleged opposition to NAFTA. The Obots screamed "RACIST!" at anyone who dared to mention that Obama lied about his ties to Tony Rezko, at anyone who dared to point out that Obama often received money from the same shady sources who "donated" to Blagojevich, at anyone who dared to question St. Barack in any way.

I have often voted for black candidates, from Tom Bradley to Jesse Jackson -- in fact, I had favored Obama himself before I learned about his penchant for lying and graft. Nevertheless, I was called racist racist racist every day. I was reminded of a French police siren: RAY-cist RAY-cist RAY-cist RAY-cist. Eventually, one learns to tune out the sound. (You really don't want to live in a country where that alarm is heard so often one learns to tune it out.)

In fact, the "people" sounding those sirens were really bots. On this humble blog, the hate messages came in every damned hour of every damned day. We're talking about literally hundreds of pieces of hate mail every day, including outright death threats -- and most of them emanated from one IP address in Chicago.

Whenever I looked at the stats in the morning, I would smile and say "Mr. CHIGILL has been at it again;" CHIGILL (Chicago, Illinois) was how my IP tracker identified that address. It seemed bizarre for a C-level blog like mine to attract such attention. I later heard from bloggers with much smaller audiences who got hit by a similar tidal wave. When the hate-messages outnumber the actual readers, it's pretty obvious that something funny is going on -- and by "funny," I mean automated.

Mr. CHIGILL, I eventually discovered, was David Axelrod.

Obama's campaign attack dog, David Axelrod, runs a little-known company called ASK, which -- surprise, surprise -- manipulates public opinion through the creation of astroturf (fake grassroots support for a policy, company or candidate). "Persona software" was created for the purpose of astroturfing. You know damned well that a cutting-edge firm like ASK has a copy of that software.

We have discussed ASK in a previous post. One of Axelrod's campaigns involved spreading a completely false revisionist history of the California energy crisis; he did this in order to help a public utility drum up support for a rate hike.

Not only that. In previous posts, I've spoken about the fake communication I received from someone claiming to be Evelyn Pringle, the investigative reporter who did such excellent work on Obama's pattern of corruption in Illinois. I had pushed her work in these cyber-pages, and I had also corresponded with her briefly. The pseudo-Pringle message existed for the purpose of planting malware on my system, forcing me to do a thorough reformat of my C drive.

Only someone in Axelrod's shop would have cared about Pringle enough to use her name in a scheme of this sort.

So please explain to me: By what right does Obama now complain about the 2016 Trump campaign? Exactly how did the Trump 2016 campaign differ from the Obama 2008 campaign?

I guess there's one major difference: Trump had help from St. Petersburg. A glaze of treason makes Trump's crime look extra slimy. But we must then ask the next obvious question: Who was in charge of the United States intelligence community throughout 2016? Whose responsibility was it to reveal foreign interference in our election? Who held onto the intercepts which would have proven the crime?

I have a right to criticize what Team Trump did in 2016, and so do you. But Barack Obama does not.