Come 2016, the defining story of the previous 8 years will not be the massively coordinated effort to centralize corporate power through the use of brazenly undemocratic, underhanded methods, huge though that is. It will be the concerted, unflagging, coordinated efforts to denigrate the presidency of Barack Obama and give a face to the underlying core of racial hatred that lies at the heart of his opposition.
In fact, there can be no sound analysis of the nation's economic state or sociopolitical environment of those 8 years without an acknowledgment of the audacious, concerted misuse of ethics and the organized perversion of democratic legislative processes in the pursuit of that race-based aim.
The effort, of course, is led and funded by vastly wealthy corporate entities whose mission, it seems, is to profit from the despair of the people whose interests they profess to serve. By having spent the last 30+ years seeding government and business with similarly disposed ideologues, the fruit harvested has been the destruction of the middle class, the corrosion of the political process, the reduction of environment -- and health-saving regulations and the disenfranchisement of tens of millions of people.
And the sheer waste of time and opportunity which their strategy yielded will have, by 2016, far outweighed the tactical advantages theorized by the neo-corporate-cons bent on such cynical, selfish ends.
But most telling, the history of this period will clearly show that much of the animus against Obama and his policies was indeed race based, the shrill tenor of the invective possessing little in the way of sensible policy critique, especially since it had been repeatedly (and frustratingly by those on the left) shown how Obama had governed along lines which many political opponents themselves found ideological concurrence. The spate of inane aspersions cast about his patriotism, country of origin, etc., along with the verbal assaults on his wife launched by the de facto mouthpieces of the right-wing (Limbaugh, Levin, Hannity, etc.) also illustrate the underlying though glaringly apparent motivation.
Obama's grasp of issues and his management style alone would have been deemed outstanding by any measure if he were a white man rather than black and any assertion to the contrary is disingenuous to say the least. Most dismissals by his opponents as to the veracity of this assumption have always bordered on the febrile and the pathetic and only further indicate an utter absence of sincerity to engage in a sane discussion on the sociopolitical path this nation has been placed on by those corporate forces.
And the sense that those involved in the perpetuation of these sad circumstances are conscious of their activities being anything but legal, moral or constructive is clear in their embrace of the patently hypocritical positions they take, many in knee-jerk opposition to positions Obama himself has taken, like a game of checkers in which a lone piece is pursued into a corner: "If you move there, I'll move HERE!". The right-wing is that lone piece.
So, each day's events fill the news cycle (rather, events are regurgitated endlessly to fill it) and with each moment comes the analysis; with each analysis comes the implied justification for the employment of whatever pundit is dispensing whatever meme passes as commentary. But after all the shallow scrutiny evaporates into the next manufactured news cycle, time will allow history to tell the story of those 8 years truthfully. The neo-corporate-cons don't want you to know that truth now; they don't want you to ponder, to taste, to think, to act, to vote. They want you to buy what they're selling.
What a waste.