The Obamausoleum opens

A fitting tribute to an unfit man

The Obamas opened his presidential center (not library because that would require reading) on Thursday.

The duo gave speeches, which were really lectures. Mister Obama drones less than Al Gore but he is just as sophomoric in his mannerism and sophist in his reasoning. Both men received Nobel Peace Prizes. Two decades after Gore’s, the inconvenient truth is he lied to make money and remain relevant.

The Obama building is a thing of ugly. Oliver Wainwright of the Guardian wrote, “Behold the $850 million Obamalisk—or, as it sometimes feels morbidly like, the Obamausoleum.”

He also wrote:

“We had the idea of a beacon,” says architect Billie Tsien, whose practice, Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, won the design competition for the Obama Presidential Center in 2016, on the eve of the first Trump presidency. “We thought of four hands coming together,” she adds, holding her cupped hands up against a colleague’s, as if protecting a flame from the wind.

Above us, sheer walls of granite erupt from the ground at a steep angle, before tapering to form a chiseled 70-metre-high monolith. It looks hewn and cleft, towering over the 19-acre campus like a stocky, truncated obelisk. Rising above the low-rise, low-income neighborhood, the building has an ominous presence, its mostly windowless heft recalling a menacing sci-fi headquarters, with small chamfered openings suggesting portals from where drones might be launched, or lasers fired. Some have compared it to a flak tower, others to a “Klingon prison”. If it is a beacon of hope, it seems to be one that has been fortified at all costs against the present regime, a defensive bunker to protect its fragile values from siege.

That is from the left.

Over at Fox, early-night comedian Jessie Watters said:

Obama has really unified the country: Everyone agrees he has bad taste. These critics are vicious and these are from the left. It looks like a refrigerator that dropped off the Death Star. Completely out of context, it’s as if it was placed there by aliens.

[It’s] an upright slab that makes you feel physically uneasy, but wait till you get inside. It gets worse! Packed with items that would otherwise be in the junk drawer or the landfill. Unique items of historical interest so few you could easily fit them in an average suburban living room.

Spencer Pratt called this communist architecture “Slopitecture.” LA blew its chance to become normal.

All of the critics are correct, but the Obama Presidential Center is perfect. I cannot think of a more fitting tribute to the man elected president because of the color of his skin and not the content of his character.

The center began 10 years ago as a $300 million project to be opened in 2021. It came in five years late and cost nearly three times the estimate.

Bush 43’s presidential center was the same size. It was built on time (2013 opening) and under budget ($250 million). It looks ptesidential.

The Biden library is going slower than a turtle riding a snail through a school zone. The plan is to raise $200 million to $300 million. So far they raised $4 million by rolling leftover funds from his 2021 inauguration into the fund. Maybe he can make it a mobile library.

Presidential libraries are a good grift.

Valerie Jarrett received $740,000 in 2024 as the head of the project.

The Obama Foundation’s total executive payroll and benefits grew significantly from ~$18.5 million in 2018 to $43.7 million in 2024.

Now you know why Gavin Newsom wants to be president. He has lots of family and friends to support. Think of a presidential center as a laundering machine.

Jarrett gave a little speech in which she leaned on the left’s relatively new way to de-legitimatize the nation by saying we live on stolen land, saying, “We honor the Anishinaabe, the Council of Three Fires, the Ojibwe, the Odawa, and the Potawatomi Nations.”

But not the Blackhawks because they won a Stanley Cup.

I would love to have Trump build a presidential library in New York City, just to hear Stephen Miller say, “We live on land stolen from the Bonanno Family, the Colombo Family, the Gambino Family, the Genovese Family and the Lucchese Family.”

That pretty much is the same thing Jarrett said.

I hope this is the last we ever see or hear of Obama. He used his little speech to dump on the Declaration of Independence during its 250th anniversary.

He said, “The founders fell terribly short of the Declaration’s promise.”

The 56 signers of the Declaration pledged their lives, fortunes and sacred honor. Obama wasted 8 years as president trying to divide the nation and the world.

His granite Dumpster in Chicago suits his legacy well.