I don't think this is true. We had the Bay of Pigs, the 1973 CIA backed coupe in Chile, the Iranian Contras ...
Every administration from the time I was born and from the time my parents were born has been hopelessly corrupt. Obama won a noble prize and then became the first president to spend every day of his term at war (or I guess every day in office in an extended military engagement since America has not technically been at war in a long time because we like changing the names of things to pretend they're not true). That and he predator droned a bunch of people, passed a useless health care act, etc.
I'm not saying the current administration isn't corrupt. It is, and it's not just the puppet on top. It's all the industry that funnels money into legislative and executive branches. Neither Bush nor Obama went after the corrupt housing industry that caused so many people to lose their homes.
Citizens united didn't cause the corruption. Corruption has been legal for decades.
This is unsupported opinion and does not serve to strengthen the rest of your statements: While the act certainly may have been useless to you, it was literally a matter of life-or-death to some Americans--for example those with "pre-existing" conditions. [1]
Furthermore, and of some interest to the Hacker News community, any step to divorce (American) health care from employment is of great importance to startups (small business), those in the gig economy, and should help to improve the overall "liquidity" of the employment market.
If by "useless" you meant that the act did not go nearly far enough, then we would agree. I'm not sure that was due to Obama's corruption but that of his opposition (with ties to the health insurance industry).
(As for the hypothesis that American government has been corrupt for decades, I would also tend to agree. Eisenhower warned of it and I'm sure it was going on decades before him.)
[1] http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-obamac...
https://fightthefuture.org/article/returning-to-america-and-...
I use to work in health care. The ACA is hopeless broken, unless you live in one of the lucky states (like Washington) where it's not. For most people, the deductibles are too high. They don't realize this until they need it.
Also, in 2017, medical debt is still the number one cause of bankruptcy. That's with government mandated private health care. That's after several years of it. No, it is broken, and the ACA is garbage. I downloaded that thing several times in 2008 during the debates. Did I read it? Of course not. It was 1800+ pages. I guarantee you no congressman or senior did either.
You could argue that the wars were started by previous administrations and ending them was harder than starting them.
Far more egregious was his administration's decision to classify all military aged men as combatants at bombing targets, regardless of whether they were combatants or not, so as to reduce civilian casualty counts:
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/05/under-o...
His Nobel peace prize should be revoked.
The Iran-Contra affair did not involve Iranian Contras, it involved American officials making illegal arms sales to Iran and funneling the proceeds illegally to the Nicaraguan Contras.
> Obama won a noble prize
“Nobel”
> and then became the first president to spend every day of his term at war
Not even close. The US involvement in the Vietnam War began in the Eisenhower Administration and ended in the Ford Administration, so all of Kennedy, (Lyndon) Johnson, and Nixon spent every day of their terms in that war.
But even they weren't the first, the US was continuously at war (in an overlapping series of conflicts) from 1855-1875 (nearly exactly 100 years before Vietnam, both start and end; should we be particularly worried about 2055-2075?), with Buchanan, Lincoln, and (Andrew) Johnson spending their entire terms at war.
> since America has not technically been at war in a long time because we like changing the names of things to pretend they're not true
The United States has legally been in a war every time it's been in a Congressionally authorized military conflict (as well as certain other cases, perhaps, resulting from foreign attacks); the Supreme Court has repeatedly recognized that Congress need not use any particular language in exercising it's power to declare war, and that Congressional authorization in any language suffices to create a legal state of war, even if the effect is distinct from that of a formal declaration—this as far back as Bas v. Tingy, 4 U.S. 37 (1800).
(well... maybe Reagan. Iran-contra was shocking, and I'm a little surprised that nobody seems to think it was as big a deal as Watergate. Nixon cracked a safe. Regan... well, I'm not saying that this is what he did... but it sure looked like his deals with Iran delayed the release of US hostages until after the election. (you could also argue that those releases wouldn't have happened at all without those deals... I'm just saying, it looked pretty bad.)
But I agree with you that whataboutism is the wrong response to what's going on now.
> well... maybe Regan
Presumably you mean Ronald Reagan, though Donald Regan was a prominent figure in his Administration.
The people are sensitive to the distinctions in character between illegal and immoral behavior by institutions that seek to advance American geopolitical interests vs the gaudy and self-serving disregard for standards and norms that directly benefit Trump and his kids. Trump's image of corruption is further enhanced by his personal character which has shown him to be superficially dishonest, petulant and vengeful. Although... coups and endless wars sound a lot more morally bankrupt than Trump elevating his daughter and her husband into the ranks of power. So all Trump has to do is get through his presidency without starting a war...