"Elections have consequences."
We just went from the guy who spent a ridiculous amount of effort trying to be more transparent and had no major scandals to speak of. Instead of rewarding that behavior by continuing to reward Democrats, our electorate voted in someone whose scandals and lack of transparency dwarfs anything we could imagine previously. This stuff literally does not fucking matter to the moderate voters nor does it matter to the right wing voters. The only people it apparently matters to are the hardcore left, and you know what that means? They'll be less likely to actually vote someone in because they want some pure angel.
It matters to me, and I spent the last year defending Hillary. It matters to Josh Barro and he was literally a Republican for half of last year until he reregistered because of his disgust with the party nominating Trump. It matters to Matt Yglesias and literally if you look in the dictionary his face is in there next to "neoliberal shill."
I think you're coming to this with predetermined assumptions about who cares about this and letting those assumptions guide your response rather than the actual arguments and the actual people putting them forward.
Should Obama have agreed to this speech? I dunno, maybe not. Should those of us trying to logically and realistically get this country on track spend even one remote iota of a second bitching about this when we have someone else in the White House laughing his way to the bank every week from his private golf course? Nope. We shouldn't.
I mean, you spent a few minutes writing this response. That was a pretty huge waste of time by this argument!
It turns out humans can do multiple things and think about a variety of different topics. There's no priority queue that prevents us from ever talking about things Obama is doing wrong if we want to also oppose Trump.
In fact, holding our leaders to a high standard is part of opposing Trump effectively.
The president touches almost every area of world life. Should we ban them from making money doing anything after their presidency? Seriously question. Should we? Because if not, then there are going to be "conflicts" no matter what. You could shit on him for doing a commencement speech for the same reason.
I mean, we could, to be honest. He has an enormous pension. Maybe we should just keep future presidents as wards of the state for their devoted service to our country!
I'm kidding, of course, and in fact Obama is allowed to do absolutely anything he wants to in order to make money. That doesn't mean all of his choices are good ideas or ideas that will help his political beliefs succeed.
