One of my guilty pleasures is reading stuff off the Huffington Post. While a lot of their in-house stuff is awful, they do bring together a lot of interesting articles from a variety of sources on topics of interest to me -- especially religion. Reading this interesting article on African/black popes (and I encourage you to read it), I came upon this particularly inappropriate comment from an individual who was clearly trolling.

they'll probably learn from the obama failure. electing someone because of the color of their skin usually isn't a good thing.

Frankly, someone should have flagged it as inappropriate -- such a comment really didn't belong on the article. Instead, someone decided to respond to it.

What "obama failure"? Have you compared how this country is doing compared with 2008? Obama's been a roaring success in comparison. Speaking of voting based on skin color, I wonder how many white folks voted against Obama because of his skin color.

This isn't the first time I've seen this standard used to declare Obama a success -- "He's better than Bush!" But consider what this is really saying. The Left considers Bush to be a nutter failure -- the worst president ever, or at least the worst in the better part of a century (probably not an accurate assessment, but that's irrelevant to what follows). So Obama is a success, they claim, because he is better than what they deem to be utter failure. How low a standard can you set?

If the Left had any respect for Barack Obama and considered him to be a successful president, they wouldn't make George W. Bush the standard. They would instead take the measure of the man by a standard that they consider to be successful -- Bill Clinton, if they want someone recent, FDR if they wanted to use the man deemed to be the most successful Democrat to hold the office. Why not choose one of those presidents? The answer is obvious -- they know Barack Obama doesn't measure up to either of those two Democrat heroes, and any comparison will show him to be (as the original commenter asserts) an utter failure as president. But if they measure Obama against the man they deem to be a failure, they can argue (albeit I'd say not successfully) that Barack Obama has somehow been a success.

So the next time you run into a liberal who wants to telly you that Obama isn't a failure because he has somehow not been as bad as George W. Bush, ask that individual why their standard is so low, and why they don't use a successful president as their yardstick. I'm sure you'll set them stuttering -- until they call you a racist.