Obama Beclowns Himself By Comparing Trump To Authoritarian Dictators

Jeff Charles reporting for RedState

Former President Barack Obama had a pot-and-kettle moment during his interview with CBS’ “60 Minutes” when discussing the conflict over the 2020 presidential election. In the conversation, Obama likened President Trump to an authoritarian dictator who believes he can attack members of the press and even use his power to kill without a second thought.

Can’t these people come up with anything new? One would think they’d get tired of the old Trump-is-Hitler routine. 

When host Scott Pelley asked Obama to weigh in on Trump’s claims of voter fraud in key battleground states, the former president began his usual holier-than-thou lecture about what America is and isn’t. “It is one more step in delegitimizing not just the incoming Biden administration, but democracy generally. And that’s a dangerous path,” he opined.

He continued: “There’s been this sense over the last several years that literally anything goes and is justified in order to get power.”

The former president proceeded to tell Pelley that this supposed feeling is “not unique to the United States” because there are “strong men and dictators around the world” who feel that they can “do anything to stay in power. I can kill people. I can throw them in jail. I can run phony elections. I can suppress journalists.” 

He concluded the lecture by saying, “But that’s not who we’re supposed to be. And of the signals I think that Joe Biden needs to send to the world is that ‘No, those values that we preached, and we believed in, and subscribed in—we still believe.”

These remarks were very interesting coming from Obama when those of us old enough to remember how he treated journalists can easily see that he’s completely full of it. But for those who do not recall the former president’s abuses of the press, Fox News gives us a lovely reminder:

“Yet Obama’s time in office was by no means the paragon of a presidency bound by the rules of a liberal democratic republic. Court documents released in early 2013 showed that the Obama administration secretly monitored Fox News’ James Rosen – whom the FBI dubbed a “criminal co-conspirator,” despite never being charged with a crime.

The Justice Department also seized Rosen’s emails by evoking the World War I-era Espionage Act, one of the United States’ most serious wartime laws. The same law was used in 1953 to charge and execute Julius and Ethel Rosenberg – two American communists – for allegedly passing secret information to the Soviet Union.”

Apparently, Rosen’s offense was publishing information leaked by a government adviser regarding North Korea’s plan to carry out a nuclear test in response to U.N. sanctions. 

Fox News also pointed out that “though Trump has been forceful in his denunciation of the press, the Obama administration arguably went further, evoking the Espionage Act to prosecute more people under the law for leaking sensitive information than all previous administrations combined.”

But it goes even further than that. The Obama administration “obtained the records of 20 Associated Press office phone lines and reports’ home and cell phones,” according to Fox. 

Obama’s remarks regarding dictators who “kill people” without consequences were equally hypocritical given the fact that he authorized over 500 drone attacks in Africa, the Middles East, and Asia that killed more than 300 civilians. Among those that the drone strikes killed was al Qaeda leader Anwar al-Awlaki, who became the first American ever to be placed on the “kill or capture list.” Yep, that was Obama’s doing too. 

When one knows the facts, they can easily see that Obama’s remarks on Trump were nothing more than pure projection. The worst thing that Trump ever did to the press was to expose them for what they are: left-wing activists poorly-disguised as journalists.