MATT VESPA: JD Vance Absolutely Wrecked an Anti-Trump Commentator Over This Trump White House Post.
Vance responded and drove over Kristol with a tank:
As a general rule, I’m fine with people telling jokes and not fine with people starting stupid wars that kill thousands of my countrymen.
Kristol was one of the leading voices supporting the Iraq War when neoconservatives dominated the foreign policy thinking of the GOP, which led to a $1 trillion disaster in Iraq, a brutalization of the GOP in the 2006 midterms, and a humbling moment that exposed the limits of American power vis-à-vis importing the American Revolution into the Middle East.
Other reactions were either laughably inauthentic, eye-roll-worthy, or outright hypocritical.
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Liberal America and the media called Obama the Second Coming. Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer mocked the sacrament of communion.
Spare us the lectures, libs. You don’t know what you’re talking about.
Even in 2025, typing “Obama halo photos” into Google Image Search brings up these vintage results; wire service photographers absolutely loved framing Obama in front of his campaign’s logo in 2008 and the presidential seal in 2012 to create the symbolism of a halo:
In 2008, a San Francisco Chronicle columnist anointed Obama as “the Lightworker:”
Here’s where it gets gooey. Many spiritually advanced people I know (not coweringly religious, mind you, but deeply spiritual) identify Obama as a Lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being who has the ability to lead us not merely to new foreign policies or health care plans or whatnot, but who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet, of relating and connecting and engaging with this bizarre earthly experiment. These kinds of people actually help us evolve. They are philosophers and peacemakers of a very high order, and they speak not just to reason or emotion, but to the soul.
The unusual thing is, true Lightworkers almost never appear on such a brutal, spiritually demeaning stage as national politics. This is why Obama is so rare. And this why he is so often compared to Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., to those leaders in our culture whose stirring vibrations still resonate throughout our short history.
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But there simply is no denying that extra kick. As one reader put it to me, in a way, it’s not even about Obama, per se. There’s a vast amount of positive energy swirling about that’s been held back by the armies of BushCo darkness, and this energy has now found a conduit, a lightning rod, is now effortlessly self-organizing around Obama’s candidacy. People and emotions and ideas of high and positive vibration are automatically draw to him. It’s exactly like how Bush was a magnet for the low vibrational energies of fear and war and oppression and aggression, but, you know, completely reversed. And different. And far, far better.
The following year, Newsweek’s Evan Thomas declared Obama Is ‘Sort of God:’
Newsweek editor Evan Thomas brought adulation over President Obama’s Cairo speech to a whole new level on Friday, declaring on MSNBC: “I mean in a way Obama’s standing above the country, above – above the world, he’s sort of God.”
Thomas, appearing on Hardball with Chris Matthews, was reacting to a preceding monologue in which Matthews praised Obama’s speech: “I think the President’s speech yesterday was the reason we Americans elected him. It was grand. It was positive. Hopeful…But what I liked about the President’s speech in Cairo was that it showed a complete humility…The question now is whether the President we elected and spoke for us so grandly yesterday can carry out the great vision he gave us and to the world.”
At the beginning of 2013, Thomas doubled down on this theme:
Branching out a bit in the interim, in 2010, a Newsweek cover declared Obama “God of All Things:”Newsweek Depiction of Obama as Lord Shiva Upsets Some Indian-Americans:
Newsweek’s depiction of President Obama on its latest cover has irked some Indian Americans who, fresh off Obama’s visit to the world’s largest democracy, are not happy with the image of the U.S. president as the Hindu deity, Lord Shiva.
The Newsweek cover shows Obama with several arms carrying policy issues while balancing on one leg. The headline reads: “God of All Things” with a subtitle, “Why the Modern Presidency May be too Much for One Person to Handle.”
Shiva, who is one of three pre-eminent gods in the Hindu religion along with Brahma and Vishnu, is considered the destroyer of the world, which must end, metaphorically speaking, in order to be reborn as a more universalistic place. However, the god’s purpose is not to foretell an apocalyptic ending.
Of course, for many on the left, the post-Obama years have been “Apocalypse Now,” to coin a phrase.
More here: Obama Lackey Tries Outraging MAGA With Obama Pope Pic and It Does Not Go the Way He Planned … At All.