π₯ Cheney is ace, shot his friend in the face
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Really.
What did we do in 2001-2008.
Invade Iraq.
Invade Afghanistan.
Grant amnesty.What did we do in 2009-2015
Invade Libya.
Invade Syria.
Grant amnesty.What would have changed had McCain been elected?
No war in the middle east?
He would probably had let AHA get through...
Net Neutrality?
LOLOLOL...
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Have "we" invaded Syria? Did I blink and miss that?
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You're not helping any so-called point that you're trying to make here to counter what I said. That's my [new] point.
I'll grant you that Obama would have done what he could to lose all those wars, irregardless of what Bush did.
What would have changed had McCain been elected?
Nothing related to my point?
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The real mistake was overplaying the concerns about WMD and downplaying the other reasons for going to war.
There is no way, no rhetoric, no outcome, that wouldn't have resulted in the media criticizing Bush.
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There is no way, no rhetoric, no outcome, that wouldn't have resulted in the media criticizing Bush.
I don't disagree.
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I don't know why,
She swallowed a fly.
I guess she'll die.
I guess she'll die.
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Obama would have done what he could to lose all those wars
Obama is totally inept at any military action.
Even if he wanted to win, he'd still lose.
I wish he'd just openly support ISIS, so they'd lose too. He practically let ISIS take over the rebellion.
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I understand and accept that all this stuff is going to look completely different to the one-eyed Republican fanboi brigade.
Says the "fire can't melt steel" guy.
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The real mistake was overplaying the concerns about WMD and downplaying the other reasons for going to war.
Yes. Fabulists like @flabdablet forget--possibly deliberately--that the AUMF or whatever it was called included about 15 reasons, including "has violated multiple UN resolutions he'd agreed to abide by".
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Obama is totally inept at any military action.
Even if he wanted to win, he'd still lose.
If winning means taking out, then you can assume he already has won more than any president, much cheaper. He won Libya war, Egypt war, Sudan war, and Ukraine war. He finished what Bush could not, captured Bin laden and stopped Iran from becoming nuclear.
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"has violated multiple UN resolutions he'd agreed to abide by".
Well, obviously the correct strategy would be for the UN to mail Iraq fluffy pink sheep until they were so inspired to change their hearts.
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@FrostCat said:
"has violated multiple UN resolutions he'd agreed to abide by".
Well, obviously the correct strategy would be for the UN to mail Iraq fluffy pink sheep until they were so inspired to change their hearts.
Has this ever been tried? If not, why not?
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@Lorne_Kates said:
Has this ever been tried?
Yes, it's long-established US policy for dealing with Israel.
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We should airdrop them.
What you actually should be airdropping is $1 bills to the value of the munitions you're currently airdropping.
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He won Libya war, Egypt war, Sudan war, and Ukraine war.
Oh yes win.
It should be remembered that while the Muslim Brotherhood was in charge in Egypt, Obama showered them with praise and provided billions of dollars in aid, arms, tanks and planes. Egypt hasnβt forgotten the support offered to the Muslim Brotherhood by Obama, and has now charged Obama and Hillary Clinton for conspiring and collaborating with them and their terrorist activities. (H/T Western Journalism)
In two separate criminal complaints, Egyptian lawmakers have charged Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton with conspiring with the Muslim Brotherhood.
President Obama has been named as an accessory to crimes committed by the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, with the charge reading that Obama ββ¦cooperated, incited, and assisted the armed elements of the Muslim Brotherhood in the commission of crimesβ¦β..
Sudan
Oh, yes... sanctions.... because those work.
Ukraine
I think you're just starting to imagine military action now....
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@xaade said:
We should airdrop them.
What you actually should be airdropping is $1 bills to the value of the munitions you're currently airdropping.
If you did that all at once-- a $1 bill has the weight of a gram. A quick and non-authoritive Google pegs the war at $1.7 trillion.
That's 1.7 billion KG. That's about the same mass as Haley's Comet, or one of various moons of Saturn.
Depending on the height you airdropped from, that might end the war completely.
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@Lorne_Kates said:
Depending on the height you airdropped from, that might end the war completely.
And we can pretend we didn't know it would do.... kinda like we did with Japan.
What you actually should be airdropping is $1 bills to the value of the munitions you're currently airdropping.
Oh, yes.... because throwing money at people, solves everything.
I mean... TIL we ended poverty 50 years ago.
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@FrostCat said:
the "fire can't melt steel" guy
cite please
It's a proxy. The kind of loon who thinks, in spite of all evidence, that all the world's major spy agencies, not to mention basically everyone in the US government, weren't convinced Saddam had WMDs before the invasion tends to be the same kind of loon who thinks 9/11 was a controlled implosion.
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that all the world's major spy agencies
and all the king's men
couldn't put the Middle East back together again.
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invasion tends to be the same kind of loon who thinks 9/11 was a controlled implosion.
My imagination says a plane can't do that.
Therefore the government is a part of a conspiracy, and everyone that saw the planes were hallucinating, and all the people on the planes didn't exist.
A technological marvel that would take billions to implement, is more believable than a plane flying into a building that only took a razor blade to implement.
Because my imagination says it's impossible.
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cite please
Do some research for yourself. There's a youtube video that's a collection of clips of all kinds of politicians talking about it.
But I'll give you this one: http://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/tom-blumer/2010/10/24/imagine-wikileaks-docs-show-there-were-wmds-iraq
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Well of course.
Now they claim that we always knew there were WMDs, but Bush said there were ones we didn't know about. As if the extra ones broke extra special sanctions.
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My imagination says a plane can't do that.
I knew years before that "fire can't melt steel" is a red herring by the gullible and/or stupid. I used to work for a guy, about 1998, who had a really old house, the kind that used balloon frame construction instead of modern stick-built. He was doing repairs on it and i asked him why he didn't replace a wood 6x6 corner post with a steel beam, and he said that the wood beam would take hours to burn and collapse, but if a steel beam could get hot enough from a wood fire that it would lose the majority of its structural strength and fail, without ever melting as such.
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I knew years before that "fire can't melt steel" is a red herring by the gullible and/or stupid.
It's easier than that to dismiss.
You're right Rosie, those steel beams.... we dug them up that way.
Excavated out of limestone. Predrilled holes and everything.
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It's easier than that to dismiss.
You're right Rosie, those steel beams.... we dug them up that way.
Excavated out of limestone. Predrilled holes and everything.
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If steel can't melt, how is it manufactured?
At best you'd have to believe that they found a chunk of steel in a long enough block, like a tree trunk, and shaved it down by cutting it.
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If steel can't melt, how is it manufactured?
At best you'd have to believe that they found a chunk of steel in a long enough block, like a tree trunk, and shaved it down by cutting it.
Ah, I see. Lost me for a moment and I couldn't pick up the thread.
Yes, steel is molten when manufactured. The point that the video was trying to make is that it doesn't have to melt; it loses most of its strength well before melting. If that weren't the case, the blacksmith profession wouldn't exist.
"Cherry-red" hot steel can be hammered to shape quite easily, and the bending of the white-hot steel demonstrated in the film matches my own experience. Fact is, if he'd stuck the end of the rod horizontally into a hole of some kind, then released it, it probably would have bent under its own weight; it hardly needed a pinky finger.
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Dwarf Fortress steel is stronger than real life steel. It doesn't get weak until it's completely melted.
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Do some research for yourself. There's a youtube video that's a collection of clips of all kinds of politicians talking about it.
I was 40 years old at the time these events were current news, and already quite accustomed to paying attention. And what I remember distinctly is the increasing disconnect between what the inspectors actually on the ground in Iraq were saying (that Iraq was in fact co-operating with them, though grudgingly, and that they should be allowed more time to finish their job) and what the politicians of the day were egging each other on to do (invade Iraq on any flimsy pretext).
Given the amount of weaponry supplied by the US to its former ally Saddam Hussein before the first Gulf War, it would have been completely astonishing to learn that the Iraqi government (a) knew where all that shit had ended up and (b) had managed to hide or destroy all of it. But Bush, and Blair, and our own local weasel Howard just never stopped banging the drum about Saddam having an active WMD program serious enough to pose an existential threat to the West - a program so potent and fearsome that no course short of immediate invasion could be relied upon to unmake it. That was bullshit, and widely known to be bullshit.
The most astonishingly brazen line of bullshit, though, was the line that Saddam Hussein was in some way providing support for Al Qaeda. Saddam was a secular dictator who loathed Islamists; the idea that he and OBL were somehow best buds was farcical on its face, and there was certainly never any reliable evidence to suggest that it was actually true. Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11 and this fact was also widely understood at the time, despite the best efforts of the Republican noise machine to distract attention from it.
The regime change forced by the US invasion created a power vacuum in the Sunni areas of that country. Without such a vacuum, Daesh could never have got established. And if long-lost caches of Nineties-era chem and bio weapons do end up being dug out by Daesh and used against civilians, that is a direct consequence of the US invasion.
Saddam Hussein was nineteen different kinds of prick, but he was never Hitler.
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everyone in the world thought Iraq had WMDs at the time the US invaded.
That is a prime example of a lie. Many people were convinced they didn't. Blair and Bush knew they didn't. Read the papers.
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If winning means taking out, then you can assume he already has won more than any president, much cheaper. He won Libya war, Egypt war, Sudan war, and Ukraine war. He finished what Bush could not, captured Bin laden and stopped Iran from becoming nuclear.
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But Bush, and Blair, and our own local weasel Howard just never stopped banging the drum about Saddam having an active WMD program serious enough to pose an existential threat to the West - a program so potent and fearsome that no course short of immediate invasion could be relied upon to unmake it.
See, @xaade, another one convinced that the war was all about the WMD, instead of an aggravating factor.
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And we can pretend we didn't know it would do.... kinda like we did with Japan.
dafuq? I'm pretty sure everyone knew very fucking well what dropping a nuke on Japan would do. They'd be test firing those things for a while. Big kaboom followed by radiation.
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@Lorne_Kates said:
I'm pretty sure everyone knew very fucking well what dropping a nuke on Japan would do. They'd be test firing those things for a while.
Yes, I think they knew, more or less. But there was just a single test prior to dropping them for reals.
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I was 40 years old at the time these events were current news
Hey, guess what, there were like 17 points on the list. Even if the WMD one was wrong, and it wasn't, because it's been documented in the years since there were, in fact, WMDs, there were still 16 other reasons, including "he violated a bunch of UN resolutions" which you still have not addressed.
No matter how desperately you want to hate Bushitler, it must kill you inside that he didn't have no valid reason to invade, but you'll never admit that so I'm done here.
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Even if the WMD one was wrong, and it wasn't, because it's been documented in the years since there were, in fact, WMDs
You'll just get the of "not serious enough for war, you guise!" I recommend Tommy Frank's1 book to get a picture of how awful the Iraq situation was.
1: CINCCENTCOM 2000 - 2003.
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But no one understands how being a world power means you have to have a world presence.
The average citizen imagines that isolationism is a valid and working solution.
So you have to have a visible threat that will convince people.
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Yeah, I don't get how anyone can praise Obama...
ISIS spread from a local threat to a world threat.
Libya is back into civil war like it never happened.
Egypt is pissed at Obama.
And Sudan and Ukraine.... apparently Obama wins a war by making a single comment?
To Sudan "Hey guys.... please get along"
To America "I won Sudan's war.... cause I'm Obama".
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Yeah, I don't get how anyone can praise Obama...
Yeah, I have no idea why anyone would praise someone who fought (and won) to get better healthcare, LGBT rights, and end the recession.
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fought (and won) to get better healthcare
Well, I guess it's technically true if by better healthcare you mean being forced to go bankrupt to pay for insurance that doesn't pay anything until you've gone bankrupt a second time. I am super lucky I had an HSA from before the ObamaCare days to pay for surgery to remove a benign tumor that was getting close to severing my jawbone on one side because insurance didn't want anything to do with it. Unfortunately even my HSA has been crippled by the new rules so it'll take me forever to build that back up. I hope I don't get sick before that happens.
LGBT rights
He mostly stayed out of that fight and only took credit after the fact.
and end the recession.
Unemployment numbers don't include people who have quit looking for jobs. From what I can tell at work, hiring people is damn near impossible right now because nobody's looking. Plus, if you're unemployed you don't have to go bankrupt to buy terrible health insurance because the government pays for it instead.
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Yeah, I don't get how anyone can praise Obama...
I'd expand that to include congress and at least the last 4 presidents.... and end the recession.
These quotes always amuse me. Recessions occur for a number of reasons. IMHO this last one was caused by the government in the first place - the very government that Obama wants to grow to make our lives "better".
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hiring people is damn near impossible right now because nobody's looking
This does not match my experience. I've been looking for months, and I guess enough other people are looking (in my field, at least) that employers can afford to be picky about having the exact skill set they're looking for.
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These quotes always amuse me.
I recall someone around here posting somewhere about how one of Obama's successes was reducing gas prices. But he didn't, to my knowledge, have much to do with the price going down, and has stated in the past that the price should be much higher, as did at least one of his Energy Secretaries. And it seems to me that his actions at least the sorts of supply issues that would fairly directly affect the price would have had an upward pressure on the price.
Ain't no :goalpost: like a .
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No matter how desperately you want to hate Bushitler, it must kill you inside that he didn't have no valid reason to invade, but you'll never admit that so I'm done here.
I don't "want to hate" Bush. I don't even hate Bush. I regard the whole PNAC democracy-by-jackboot neocon fantasist echo chamber of which Bush was a prominent figurehead with deep contempt, but hate? No. None of them could help being the utter dickheads they were. I remain quite convinced that all of them truly believed in American exceptionalism, and that PNAC was not merely a pretext to sell more arms to more people.
I was opposed to the invasion of Iraq because, as anybody but a self-deluding neocon knew at the time and still knows today, the US invading Iraq could never possibly have had any result other than making a shittily mis-governed region even worse than it was already.
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IMHO this last one was caused by the government in the first place
Cause? I think you overstate it. The banks (and the rest of the finance system) were not forced into doing what they did. They lobbied very hard for it, and did their damnedest to make out like bandits while the going was very good for them in the bubble years. The government should not have regulated the way they did, but they were strongly encouraged to do so. The financiers should not have acted the way they did with it, but they profited a lot from it for a while and were quite free with their βcampaign donationsβ. Plus it was quite a long time (longer than a professional lifetime) since the last time a finance-led boom-and-crash had happened, and they're the @mikeTheLiarβ¦
When government and high finance are too close, problems arise.
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Now, I ain't no big city money scientist like some of y'all folks-- just a simple country bumpkin with a mattress and some funny colored bills--
but ain't it true that, contrary to those who run around like a chicken with it's head cut off, that a recession ain't always that bad? I mean, if the economy just kept inflating forever, well, we'd be in a might bit of Zimbby-way zillion dollar trouble, wouldn't we?