>>147421>five more new warsDidn't happen. The US didn't invade any more countries on that scale during Obama. If you're just counting any time the US underhandedly backed some dissidents somewhere as the US entering a country in war, the number would probably be higher than "five" during both Bush & Obama's respective presidencies. The only full-on wars the US military had going on during Obama were in Iraq and Afghanistan.
>repealing habeas corpus,The attacks on habeas corpus were Bush era. If you recall, the indefinite-detention-without-due-process thing was something Obama campaigned
against in 2008 - he was straight up talking about closing Gitmo. Fwiw he didn't do this, it was bullshit, though he issued an executive order declaring that the Gitmo prisoners "have the constitutional privilege of the writ of habeas corpus," though how effective that was is extremely questionable. He also didn't "repeal habeas corpus." Habeas corpus was merc'd during the war on terror, although it's never technically been repealed, all the legwork was done circa Bush.
>going after whistleblowers with the Espionage ActOver videos of mass murder filmed in 2007. Fwiw, Bush went after anti-war protestors with Patriot Act surveillance powers and also used the Espionage Act against journalists. Anything you can say about Obama on this front was Bush-lite.
>Romney's fascist mandatory-private-health-insurance bill, etcUnironically an improvement over what we had before. Wildly inadequate, a shitty "compromise," but it extended healthcare coverage to tons of people who didn't have it before. It's ludicrous to even include it in this list, because of that reform I was able to go to the doctor for
years longer than I would have been able to otherwise.
>but it was Obama who normalized it under a cloud of respectability after Bush.It was already "normalized." The country during Bush was near completely insane. All of the meaningful strides were made in that time, Obama just inherited it and barely walked any of it back. I think it's funny to say a president "normalized" something which the previous president, the state, had already done - it's like when people talked about "platforming" Trump, "normalizing" Trump… like he'd been in the country's highest office for years, he was a millionaire TV host before that, that ship's sailed by that point. The backlash to Bush finally metabolizing during the last couple years of his presidency didn't un-normalize stuff the state had been doing that entire time.