Oliver Stone rips Obama http://www.usatoday.com

Oliver Stone rips Obama

http://www.usatoday.com/story/theoval/2012/10...k/1665707/

10:21AM EDT October 29. 2012 - President Obama isn't just getting ripped by conservatives -- he's also taking heat from the left.

Filmmaker Oliver Stone and historian Peter Kuznick criticize Obama's presidency in a forthcoming book called The Untold History of the United States , saying he has too often mimicked Republican predecessor George W. Bush.

"The country Obama inherited was indeed in shambles, but Obama took a bad situation and, in certain ways, made it worse," write Stone and Kuznick, reports Politico . "Rather than repudiating the policies of Bush and his predecessors, Obama has perpetuated them."

The book hits stores on Tuesday.

Stone has directed films on the presidencies of Bush, Richard Nixon, and John F. Kennedy.

Politico cites some of the critiques of Obama made by Stone and Kuznick:

On Wall Street reform: "The biggest winner under Obama was Wall Street."

On health care: "Obama's failure to articulate a progressive vision was also apparent in the fight over health reform, which was to have been his signature initiative…Obama's health care reform effort, marked by the inability to even refute Republican charges of death panels, was so unpopular that it became an albatross around the necks of Democrats in the 2010 election."

On a troop surge in Afghanistan: "When it finally came down to decision time, Obama didn't have the courage or integrity of a post-Cuban Missile Crisis John F. Kennedy. He settled on a 30,000-troop increase, giving the military leaders almost everything they wanted and more than they expected."

On civil liberties: "Among the greatest disappointments to his followers was Obama's refusal to roll back the expanding national security state that so egregiously encroached on American civil liberties."

On 'imperialism': "[He] was not offering a decisive break with over a century of imperial conquest. His was a centrist approach to better managing the American empire rather than advancing a positive role for the United States in a rapidly evolving world."

On defense spending: "While cutting defense spending, pulling combat forces out of Iraq and beginning the drawdown in Afghanistan represented a welcome retreat from they hypermilitarism of the Bush-Cheney years, they did not represent the sharp and definitive break with empire that the world needed to see from the United States."