That one was the celebrity-hungry Norwegian Nobel Committee's fault. They award the peace prize.
First not being Bush wrote a lot of checks he couldn't cash. People believed for some reason that he was leftist, and later discovered how much to the right, American "left" is. And American media also distorted a bit what was actually happening. Neither democratic nor republican media would show their beloved leaders(you can guess which media support which president) in bad light.
What nonsense. That US Democratic Party politics often leans more right than many popular European parties on the left is not some modern post-Obama discovery, and was widely understood long before Obama's presidency. Literally read any political memoir or history by a left-leaning European politician who interacted with the US and Democratic party leadership prior to Obama and you will pick up a sense of this.
I can accept arguments Obama may have been treated with much more interest and excitement than perhaps he warranted in European media at that time, but I see little evidence this was because his politics were misunderstood - Obama's policy positions were generally easy to articulate. I think a simpler explanation might well lie in the obvious historic nature of the event; he was the first black man to hold the office, and the first Democratic president after two terms of Bush. These facts alone are "newsworthy" by the standards of modern media.
"leftist" is an absolutely terrible classification to use in any debate about politics, given its generally only ever used reductively and is almost devoid of any actual meaning.
The UK had to leave the entire thing to try and get immigration under control and have still totally failed - they can't even deport illegal immigrants because the EU Court of Human Rights decided that deportation is against human rights. So now maybe the UK has to leave that too except, ah ha, supporters of that system wrote membership into various other agreements and so on. Same way it's always done in Europe. Everything is made to depend on everything else as a way to disempower the electorate.
Brexit is the headliner of populism fest, of course the whole thing is sponsored by Dunning-Kruger. everyone with more than a fistful of minimally calibrated brain cells have saw through the "wages are bad because immigrants, EU bad, must leave EU"
> Everything is made to depend on everything else as a way to disempower the electorate.
Yes, the electorate. The famously well represented electorate. In the so well empowered UK elections.
Please.
There are plenty of completely valid and important problems of integration of various migrant groups, similarly there is a literal endless list of problems with the EU, as it's big complex and there's always going to be problems. And it's true of borders, inequality, elections and so on.
By gesturing at the problems and then loudly proclaiming the UK has to leave the ECHR, and that it can't really, and that everything is forced on the poor powerless groups "same way it's always done in Europe" is silly and just muddies the waters.
The UK and any other groups can as sovereign states can exit those agreements. Maybe other states will be disappointed, as no one welcomes complexity and paperwork, but those exact states are the ones that are going to respect the sovereignty that makes this possible.
And just as a small datapoint for anyone else reading. The EU typically goes very great lengths to make sure all members are represented, their needs heard, and as possible taken care of. Usually it's a shitshow, because how do you make a fair judgement between two members? Usually you don't, but make sure the weaker, smaller ones are not trampled by the bigger ones, and hope for the best. But then look at the border issue between Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. The EU put its foot down because it's the whole point that there cannot be a border between its members. So the UK wanted out, they had to give. It's the same thing with those pesky agreements and courts and rights.