They aren't. Nathan J. Robinson (author of this article) is. Here's the full quote from the Obama speech.
> I face this challenge with profound humility and knowledge of my own limitations, but I also face it with limitless faith in the capacity of the American people. Because if we are willing to work for it, and fight for it, and believe in it, then I am absolutely certain that generations from now we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs for the jobless. This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.
You can read this charitably (a passionate person who's excited about the collective project being embarked upon) or uncharitably (not very humble to connect your own presidency to the salvation of humanity). But it's total bullshit to read that as:
> a man who manipulated people’s emotions with stirring messianic rhetoric about how his election would mean the oceans would stop rising and change would come to the land, then delivered eight years of milquetoast centrism
If this is manipulating people, then literally every politician (not to mention every football coach) to ever have existed has manipulated people, and the core argument of the article shrinks to nothingness.
Also, it's a plain lie. Obama never said he would solve these problems -- much the opposite, he conditioned the solutions on the people being willing to work for it.
Funnily enough, if anything this irony bolsters the author's point that bullshit can be found anywhere. Even articles about bullshitters are themselves full of bullshit.
This article is almost The Onion worthy.
That really soured me on the author’s credibility — there’s no mention of opposition, and no matter what party you’re in you should agree that 6 of the 8 years he was in office were intensely adversarial.
Dude, if you want to blatantly lie HN is not a good place for you.
> all the Iraq war protests during bush
Now read up on what that meant politically: was the Congress more or less supportive of his initiatives? Did those supporters find popular support or opposition? Were millions of dollars spent astroturfing them into a movement like the Tea Party or did Democrats largely dismiss them as a fringe?
For a minute I wondered if the piece was about to become self-referential; gradually slipping into complete bullshit in order to illustrate how it’s done. (Much like the film “Adaptation” changed toward the end as the protagonist changed his writing.)
Alas, it was just sloppy thinking and poor writing.
I agree that the most extreme cases of post-truth celebrity liars, while perhaps not a new phenomenon, may be parts, symptoms, or mechanisms of some new phenomenon that really deserves to be thoughtfully explored. But this article ain't that.
The Trump and Musk cases are fairly obvious, IMO. Even many of their proponents would agree both have a propensity for "bullshit" at times.
Obama is already a bit more murky: I certainly share the author's disappointment in how the Obama presidency turned out, but it's not clear to me if he really was "bullshitting" or if he started out with genuine intentions and just overestimated the difficulties he would run in to – even if we assume Obama was bulshitting to some degree, this is no doubt a huge factor (I used to joke that the GOP could be replaced by an extremely advanced AI which consists of "if proposed_by('obama') then oppose() endif").
I haven't followed Pinker's more recent work very closely (I read two of his older books), but the article that's linked to prove the point (by the same author) does not make a convincing case. Maybe he can come off as a bit arrogant at times, which is a fair enough criticism, but that does not make one a "bullshitter". He cites “Many social critics have expressed nostalgia for the era of factories, mines, and mills, probably because they never worked in one.” as the first example of "utterly irrational swipes at those to the left of him"? Seriously? My feelings about some of the other citation are a bit more mixed, but none of them seem "bullshitting" to me: just a guy voicing his opinion that you may or may not agree with in a way that you may or may not like.
In short, this is the umpteenth attempt to make "I don't like it" somehow sound more authoritative. Which sounds like ... ehm, bulshitting to me.