What these 8 years have taught me about America, is that it's willing to deny its own potential…

…If a black man gets credit for making things better.

The old curse is still with us, updated for the 21st Century.

America disappointingly looks like a country that will go with the worst idea first and only goes to the better idea at the last possible moment. Arms twisted and with every other alternative exhausted. Collectively, we've always based our decisions on fucked up priorities, prejudices, fears and anger and then promoted ourselves by assigning noble motives to them. That's our reckless nature, which has endeared us to much of the rest of the world. It also makes us look like crazy fools.

So when something like the issue of race is at the very core of who sits in the Oval Office and which is woven deep into the fabric of America, only the blind and delusional will deny the impact it has had over these last seven years. We have a black man in the position of the most powerful person on the planet and whether they liked it or not, it's a fact that they can never avoid.

To many, he never deserved that power… They couldn't identify with him. And to them, his term in office presented the potential of empowering the very people, whom they've always wanted to deny, an equal share of the pie. That struggle is ongoing and doesn't look as if it'll be resolved any time soon.

But between you and me, Obama's term of office is a proven lesson that we should never take white, right wing America at its word… Never, under any circumstance at all.

Just take the very people who cry about Obama's "inability to lead," when we all know that they themselves NEVER had any intention to follow in the first place. For these same people, cooperation meant a loss of power and influence in their own identity. The power and influence handed to them by systemic white supremacy. The unearned power of white privilege, based on a system which they've chosen to protect, by playing identity politics since day one.

When that system failed to automatically place them at the center of power and used a black man to project any standard of power, they then revolted. The only way that they could regain any power was by being a gaggle of irrational obstructionists. They denied that it was about his race, but there was no way of avoiding the fact that it was about his race. So, why couldn't we question the motives of these people? If they've wanted to destroy the black man in the Oval Office, rather than build, even if he gets the credit for it, then why can't we call them on their willingness to burn down the entire country instead?

Time and time again, it was proven to everyone that they're were more than willing to go back on their own word, reject their own ideas, hurt as many people as possible and tear down the entire country in order to harm the one man sitting in the White House who was trying to do good by everyone. And they did this because they felt it was better to burn down the entire country, rather than admitting to any responsibility for all the harm they've cause to America before Obama took office.

They have no ideas, except for failed ones.

They deny the harm created by their own incompetence and promote it as a viable "alternative" to things that work.

They are contrarians against reality.

President Obama could only take the country so far alone and on his back. Unfortunately, this thankless country won't have his strength, intellect, integrity and moral fortitude to depend upon in the coming years. America was built on the backs of black bodies… It's forgotten that fact before and I'm quite sure that it's going to do its best to forget it again when it comes to Obama's labors.

Will we go forward, or fall back… I really have no idea. I can't predict the future. But, if we do go forward, it's ONLY going happen because this country, as a whole, wills it to happen and works to make it happen. It's going to have to reject the fucked up priorities, prejudices, fears and angers borne from centuries of systemic white supremacy. But most of all, the American people are going have to hold all of our so-called leaders, especially incompetent white, right wingers, responsible for their failures and stop excusing their incompetences. Basically, stop giving them the benefit of the doubt, which is at the core of systemic white privilege. Americans are going to have to start being empathetic about other Americans who don't look like themselves. They're going to have to give up the zero-sum game of right wing identity politics. They're going have to realize that America is no longer theirs to "take back." America belongs to all of us, no matter what we look like.

They're going to have to want to be led, and find it better to move towards our collective potential, rather than be willing to listen to the demagogues who irresponsibility obstruct it… No matter if the leadership falls to another black person, a woman or someone who isn't even a Christian.

This country is going to have to work very hard to convince me that it wants to get better. We've had our best chance in a long time in the form of Barack Obama… And then we squandered much of it. If we have a second chance with another, I'm not so sure at all that we'll do any better in any near future.

But, despite that, it would be nice to be proven wrong about that feeling.

Great speech by the President... Now comes the fun part

C'mon, Nikki, don't let us down

Someone's gonna win a billion dollars cash

And it ain't gonna be me.

The Rams are going back to LA

St. Louis is having a sad right now.

I'm going to check out the SOTU on C-Span, as I usually do…

I can't wait to leave the talking heads behind.

Right wingers hate President Obama, and they're willing to use our service people to hurt him

They've always held him in contempt and they're positively giddy about the fact that the Iranians have detained our sailors who, for some inexplicable reason, have strayed close to an Iranian Revolutionary Guard military installation located in the middle of the gawd damned Persian Gulf.

Fuck these people.

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