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Author | Topic: The Awesome Obama Thread II | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
crashfrog Member (Idle past 1467 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
So it's been one of the most successful administrations ever, blameless for any of the ongoing problems and faultless in everything it has done? Blameless? Faultless? I don't see either of those words in my post. And I wasn't aware that perfection was the standard we expected from our entirely-human politicians. Obama's racked up win after win and he's poised to do it again for another four years, in spite of the most determined Republican opposition ever mustered and sustained in my lifetime. I think that counts for quite a bit, given that politics is the art of the deal, and the baseline for judging the outcome of a negotiation - any negotiation - isn't whether you got every single thing you could possibly have wanted; it's what you would have gotten had you not negotiated at all.
Furthermore you think the Obama administration has actually exceeded expectation. Yet deflated expectation and disillusionment persists. Yeah. It's funny, almost as though there's something different about this President compared to all the previous ones that subjects him to a different - you might almost say "double" - standard. I wonder what it could be?
What do you think Obama wanted to do that he couldn't do because he lacked the power to enact it? Close Guantanamo, for starters. Legislation on climate change - that was an Administration priority that went by the wayside simply because there wasn't a consensus for it in Congress. Of course, Obama's been taking what action is available to him on that, like empowering the EPA to regulate CO2 as a pollutant.
Do you rememeber "Obamamania" at all? Do you remember the "Yes we can" speeches? Do you rememeber the sense of inspiration last time? What I remember is "PUMA", aka "Party Unity My Ass", when a bunch of Democrats came together to oppose Obama on the basis that Hillary Clinton had been Nominated By God to inherit the White House from her husband, and who the hell was this upstart kid to come in and take it from her? They campaigned for the DLC convention delegates to thwart the primary process and switch their votes from Obama to Clinton, and when they couldn't restore Clinton as the presumptive nominee, a fair number of them decided to vote for McCain instead. What I remember is Joe Lieberman campaigning for McCain. So what I remember is a Democratic party that's little more than a circular firing squad. Unto this came the presidency of Barack Obama, and look what he's managed to do with a base of support capable of little more than mutual betrayal. I dunno, maybe you have to live here. Liberal disappointment with Obama is nothing more than the traditional Democratic passtime of liberals shooting themselves in the foot.
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1467 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
Gosh darn it, you're right, I should have went straight to the official White House website to get information. No, you should go to verifiable, legitimate sources of news, not right-wing conspiracy sites run by the guy who thinks the Oklahoma City bombing was an "inside job." For another sample of the caliber of InfoWars "information":
quote: http://www.infowars.com/...ma-birth-certificate-is-a-forgery quote: http://www.infowars.com/911-inside-job-ten-years-later/ quote: http://www.infowars.com/seal-team-6-crash-was-an-inside-job/ quote: http://www.infowars.com/...ose-who-mock-conspiracy-theorists Cranks and conspiracy theorists, yet here you are flogging InfoWar's propaganda like it's something we're all supposed to take seriously. You're an idiot, Dronester, and your accusations of "mental illness" are something that would be better served pointed back at you, based on these real verifiable examples I've posted here.
I am guessing your desperate "cranksite-card" will be used no matter where I get Obama war crime news from No, the "crank site" card only gets used when you insist on presenting propaganda from crank sites. For instance:
quote: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z_Communications If your reply is that you have to use ZComm and InfoWars and PrisonPlanet because the rest of the media is in on the conspiracy then you're just proving my point.
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1467 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
So, what? Standing next to Howard Zinn (who doesn't work at ZComm any more) and Noam Chomsky means you can't tell a lie? You can flaunt the qualifications of these luminaries all you like, Dronester, but in point of fact Chomsky, Zinn, and Fisk aren't your sources. "InfoWars" is. And you've decided to completely ignore the fact that InfoWars is a rat's nest of conspiracy theories run by the country's most famous paranoid delusional.
You can talk about my "medications" all you like, but the fact remains that you're the one out of his mind, here.
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1467 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
But that's not what you just recently said. It is just what I recently said, because it's just what you recently did - used InfoWars as a source, then mocked the idea that InfoWars isn't a source to be taken seriously. Then I embarassed you so completely that you had no choice but to retract all your uses of InfoWars propaganda. Well, ok, what are you left with? Chomsky, Zinn, and Fisk? Well, no, since they're not your sources, either.
Remember Crash, your written words are historical records and they can be referenced. As are yours. Can you show where you cited Zinn, Chomsky, or Fisk? Otherwise I don't see the relevance of their qualifications. You really have no idea what you're doing, do you?
By "completely ignore" do you mean the way I acknowleged your complaint by supplying a second source. You didn't, though. You provided a completely different source in support of a completely different claim. You haven't done anything to support your citations from InfoWars or identified your sources for the images you posted or told us why we're supposed to believe that those children were casualties of an Obama-ordered drone strike on a funeral.
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1467 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
Err, it's the exact SAME article, both sources. So, that's how you think corroboration works? That if you post the same article twice, that must mean it's true? One person repeating another's lies doesn't lend them accuracy. Repetition of a falsehood doesn't make it true.
Now, take note, the following photos are not from Obama's funeral attack above, but they DO show Obama's "maximum achievement possible given the circumstances in Congress." So what drone strike are they from, then? When were these images taken? Who took them?
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1467 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
My time on the forum is not limitless Crash. Well, far be it from me to expect you to spend any amount of it finding defensible sources for your assertions.
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1467 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
Drone strikes are attacks of uncertainty - the operator thinks a group of targets may be associated with the enemy. Sometimes the distinction is clear, but often it's not - which is why we wind up with drone strikes that blow up friendly government forces, funerals, and weddings in addition to the occasional Taliban/al Qaeda member. That's hardly unique to the use of drones. The truth is, whether the missile is launched from the desk of an operator in Langley or by a pilot 20,000 feet above the arena of battle, there's just as much ambiguity and just as much need for snap judgement, with all that entails in terms of unintended civilian loss of life. Any time you decide to pull the trigger on military action, that's the kind of thing that happens. I don't think anyone ignores that or minimizes it. And it means that you have to be very sure that the ends justify the means, that military response is warranted. I don't think we can ignore the threat that religious terror organizations pose. And while I favor the "law enforcement" paradigm more than I favor the "invade countries" paradigm, that doesn't always work when we're talking about the lawless reaches of frontier Pakistan. The law enforcement paradigm works for urban terror networks; I don't think it works as a response to wasteland training camps and that sort of thing. I don't think drone attacks are properly understood as "indiscriminate"; they're very precise, in the way that a bullet is precise. But it matters where it is being aimed. I think you make a mistake by portraying drone attacks as indiscriminate bombings - no, that's what al-Qaeda does, and the difference is that the al-Qaeda bomber knows that he's going to take out 40 civilians in an attempt to hit a US target. It's terrible when civilians are killed by our drone strikes, but the standard that demands that Obama say "well, it sure looks like a terrorist training camp, what with it being only men, and the shooting ranges set up with pictures of American soldiers as targets, and the explosives lab and whatnot; but no, we can't strike it because of the one-in-a-hundred chance that it's actually just a very strange kind of wedding."
If France sent an assassin to kill my fiance, I imagine I might hold something of a grudge against France...and suddenly, instead of eliminating one enemy, France has gained another, and likely many of her friends and family as well. Or you might say "well, France sucks, but she was intending to kill about 40 Parisians in a cafe bombing, so maybe I'll just let this one go, especially now that I think back to the time a bunch of her friends killed my uncle coming out of Sunday Mass last year." I don't expect anyone who loses a wife or a child to a US airstrike to muster much forgiveness. But you know, a lot of people in Iraq or Afghanistan or Pakistan blame both sides. I don't think unintended civilian casualties drives as much recruitment as you might think, especially since everybody knows that the other side is killing children, too. The drone strikes aren't useless:
quote: http://abcnews.go.com/...he-terrorist-notches-on-obamas-belt It's not just weddings that the missiles are hitting. It's not even mostly weddings. It's actually one wedding, and three dozen top figures in al-Qaeda.
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1467 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
I think we're in agreement, to a large extent.
I think anybody who thinks they're on the side of the angels about this, or think they've got it all figured out (ahem - Dronester) just doesn't have a clue. I read the core of your post as mostly being "I don't know", and that's a sentiment that I heartily endorse and am always glad to see expressed. Cheers!
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1467 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined:
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Based on your answers in this thread I am starting to think that "perfection" is a suitable description of what has been accomplished......... If you win the winnable battles, and a few that everybody expected you to lose, and lose the ones you could never have won, I doubt you could be described as "blameless", or that you never made a mistake ever, but more importantly why would anyone go looking for your mistakes? Why would anybody be disappointed? Straggler, if you allow yourself to be disappointed every time a politician turns out to be a human being, you're going to go through life getting disappointed a lot. That's not to say I'm never disappointed by our government, either. But I don't think it makes me some kind of apparatchik to look over three years of the Obama administration, add up the "wins" column, and say "you know, a lot of good was done." And why should anyone be disappointed in that? I don't get it.
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1467 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined:
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Then why do so many people feel so disenchanted and disillusioned? What is it that they expected? Well, they expected a pony: Now, did Obama run on a campaign of putting gas in people's cars, paying their mortgages, paying their bills? Did Obama promise that if you elected him, he'd do right by you? Isn't it just a little bit possible, Straggler, that some people's expectations were just a teeny-tiny bit inflated, in part perhaps because of the mocking reference to Obama as the "Messiah" that emerged among conservatives? Or because people, perhaps ignorant of the nature of political power in the US, assumed that the historic election of the nation's first black president meant that black people were in charge of the government, now? If it's your contention that Obama ran on a platform of sweeping symbolism, inspiring ideology, and grand promises to radically remake the American status quo, to make paupers gods and gods paupers, then why haven't you yet provided any evidence to that effect? Maybe I'm just not understanding your point. The disappointment exists because people had completely unreasonable expectations.
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1467 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined:
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But I don't think anyone expected the appearance of a rogue elephant who put political party interests ahead of national interests. I think it's important to understand that Republicans don't think they're doing that; Republicans actually see it very much in the nation's interest to oppose Obama's policies. They're dead wrong about that, but even our most cynical opponents don't go to Washington saying "I'm going to do everything I can to preserve my power for power's sake." The problem, as I keep saying, is systemic. A legislature where action is only possible with the permission of the minority party cannot function sustanably, especially a low-information electorate doesn't give the minority any credit at the polls for compromise. For better or worse, Americans associate the actions of "Congress" entirely with whatever party has the majority. Had Republicans and Democrats come together to pass a truly biparisan health care reform bill, for instance, Americans overwhelmingly would have considered it an Obama victory. Hence Republicans have taken every legal action to deny the President a win. Why shouldn't they, when, for them, political and national interest aligns in doing so? They have no reason not to take every legal option. So, we need to change the laws. We need majority rule in the Senate. We need an end to a single Senator's ability to place any Senate business on indefinite hold. We need an end to the filibuster. We need an end to the enormous number of veto points that give the representatives of 2% of Americans veto power over the wishes of the other 98%. Frankly, I think we need an end to states as a whole; all government in the US should be either municipal or Federal.
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1467 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
What I don't really understand is your position that Obama has met every expectation that anyone who was inspired by his previous election campaign could reasonably have expected. Well, it's pretty simple - "reasonable expectations" have to take into account that domestic policy happens primarily via legislation, and the President is not given power to create law under our Constitution. If your expectation starts "I expect the President to get a law passed that-" then I can stop you right there, because your expectation is unreasonable. The President doesn't "get laws passed." He signs laws that Congress drafts and passes. That's how it works and that's how we want it to work. The President has no power to end the Senate filibuster or reverse a Senate hold, or to overturn votes in the House or Senate, so if any of the 100 Co-Presidents in the Senate decide something isn't going to happen, it doesn't.
False hope which you seem, frankly, in denial about. I do deny that the Obama campaign engendered anything except a strong message that the people's involvement in politics and in their communities didn't end on Election Night. We are the ones we've been waiting for. I don't understand how you take the message of Obama's acceptance speech and turn it completely around into some kind of messianic exultation.
Well because more was expected and hoped for. Yes, but unreasonably. Like the song goes, Obama never promised a rose garden. People who thought that the election of Obama cleared the way for every aspect of their own personal interpretation of the progressive agenda were always going to be disappointed no matter what happened. For that matter, not everybody agrees on what the progressive agenda should be! As we're seeing this week, Catholic Democrats have a much different view about an employer's obligations to provide health coverage to their employees than liberal Dems. Fully two-thirds of registered Democrats wanted Guantanamo Bay to stay open and they supported the efforts of their representatives in Congress to block Obama in that respect. You can't please everybody, not even all liberals.
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1467 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
I don't grant the same concession to the GOP members of Congress. They are not defending and preserving their vision of America, they are defending and preserving their class and its power. I think you'd find, if you were able to ask them, that that is their vision of what is best for America, and that they view it as completely consistent with the Founder's original intent, with the Bible, and with an ethos of service to "We, The People".
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1467 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
Well, look. Thanks for making an incredible case that Obama's critics are completely incoherent, at least: "He doesn't try hard enough to compromise with Republicans. Wait, no, he tries too hard. He's not doing enough to sway public opinion. Wait, no, all he does is make speeches. His agenda is overambitious, Wait, no, it's too conservative. He doesn't defend his positions. Wait, no, he's too defensive. He defers to Congress too much. Wait, no, he's overreaching."
Is this sort of coverage not also reasonably prevalent on your side of the pond? It's completely prevalent, and this is exactly the sort of thing I've been talking about the whole time. These criticisms of the Obama administration are all based on a completely fictitious notion of Presidental power. Obama can't give orders to Congress. They don't have to do what he says. I mean, I don't know if that's hard for someone from a country with a Queen to understand, or what. Congress is a completely different branch of our government, it's almost entirely responsible for the nation's domestic policy, and it doesn't take orders from Obama.
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1467 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
You're right in that he doesn't get a vote on the legislation, but there have been some presidents who very much "[got] laws passed." LBJ was famous for his ability to convince legislators - in any party - to vote for what he wanted. Not even LBJ could get everything he wanted - he failed, for instance, to pass any but the most limited health care reform - and moreover, Johnson enjoyed a Congress with a majority of progressive legislators spread across two parties, moderates in the rest, and since this was prior to the rise of movement conservativism, a small number of conservatives were spread out across two parties and multiple independent issues. (All that and he still lost Democrats the South for two generations.) In other words, the difference between LBJ and Obama isn't that Obama's a slacker, it's Congress. Johnson had a whopping 68 Democrats in Congress; Obama's never had more than 58 and it's impossible - literally impossible given US demographic trends - for him to have ever had more than 63. Cloture in the Senate requires the assent of 60. I don't see how you can just ignore the situation in Congress in favor of the mysterious, unspecified power of the "bully pulpit."
He should be using the one great power of the presidency, the bully pulpit, combined with his natural oratoric skills to push his agenda. But what power to "push the agenda" does that pulpit actually have? Can you imagine any speech Obama could possibly give that would convince people like Buzsaw that he's not, in fact, a Kenyan Muslim? If your answer (as it must assuredly be) is "no" then you've run right up against the limit of the President's speechifying to overcome the 60 vote requirement in the Senate.
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