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BECAUSE HE'S BLACK

fixed that for ya.

teaparty_press_racist.jpg
 
I actually just think that if a Republican said something and a Democrat said the same thing, you'd agree with the Republican and blast the Democrat.
 
Hook, line & sinker. I'll take that as an admission that Irvine and others are race-baiting.




you will never convince me that there isn't a very strong undercurrent of racism. no, not all, but Palin got it going in 2008 with cries of "real" Americans, and with whites set to no longer be in the majority by 2042, how could we not expect a backlash? the GOP has been the home of racists since 1964, and they've wielded racial fear ever since.

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and, believe me, i have met the people form whence said sentiments come.

and every time someone says something not nice about Sarah Palin, it means they hate retards*.



(* said satirically, like how Rush done mean it)
 
you will never convince me that there isn't a very strong undercurrent of racism. no, not all, but Palin got it going in 2008 with cries of "real" Americans, and with whites set to no longer be in the majority by 2042, how could we not expect a backlash? the GOP has been the home of racists since 1964, and they've wielded racial fear ever since.

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and, believe me, i have met the people form whence said sentiments come.

and every time someone says something not nice about Sarah Palin, it means they hate retards*.



(* said satirically, like how Rush done mean it)
It's only satirical if you're not liberal.
 



FOXNews.com - Republicans Object to Biden Taking Credit for Success in Iraq


As senators, Barack Obama and Joe Biden both opposed the troop surge in Iraq -- and Biden even wanted to divide the country into three sections.

But as vice president, Biden is taking credit for success in Iraq.

"I am very optimistic about Iraq," he said. "I mean, this could be one of the great achievements of this administration."


But Republican Sen. Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma, a member of the Armed Services Committee, said you cannot oppose the surge and then claim it for your legacy.

"When Joe Biden was in the Senate and Obama was in the Senate, they authored and were the chief architect of the resolution opposing the surge," he said.

The vice president also took credit for the troop drawdown.
 



FOXNews.com - Republicans Object to Biden Taking Credit for Success in Iraq


As senators, Barack Obama and Joe Biden both opposed the troop surge in Iraq -- and Biden even wanted to divide the country into three sections.

But as vice president, Biden is taking credit for success in Iraq.

"I am very optimistic about Iraq," he said. "I mean, this could be one of the great achievements of this administration."


But Republican Sen. Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma, a member of the Armed Services Committee, said you cannot oppose the surge and then claim it for your legacy.

"When Joe Biden was in the Senate and Obama was in the Senate, they authored and were the chief architect of the resolution opposing the surge," he said.

The vice president also took credit for the troop drawdown.

Come on Biden, be honest and admit Bush was right!
 
wow, that FOXNews really has you guys wrapped around their finger, huh?

"Mission Accomplished"
 
Is Saddam's regime still in power?

How many new terrorists has our adventure in Iraq created?

Nevermind that your premise is dishonest. Removing Saddam from power does not mean the mission was accomplished, and you know it. Unless you would have been perfectly okay with us packing up and heading home the day Bush had his lovely little carrier photo-op.
 
How many new terrorists has our adventure in Iraq created?

Probably about the same number as the "US adventure" in Afghanistan has created.

How many people are alive in the middle east today because Saddam is no longer in power?

Would you like to make an arguement in defense of Saddam and how Iraq, the persian Gulf and the world would be better off if he were still there today?


Nevermind that your premise is dishonest. Removing Saddam from power does not mean the mission was accomplished, and you know it. Unless you would have been perfectly okay with us packing up and heading home the day Bush had his lovely little carrier photo-op.

The issue was what the US military accomplished from March 19 to May 1 in Iraq. Bush was there to congradulate them on what THEY had accomplished.

Its not surprising to see some liberals ignore what the US military did during that space in time or how the mission transitioned after that time from exclusively war fighting to one of development, nation building, and combating crime and insurgents.

The President never said anything about packing up and going home. It was a celebration of what the US military had just accomplished which was very significant.

Naturally though, the so called photo-op for Bush really became a photo-up for the anti-Bush crowd who obviously did not understand or care what the US military had just accomplished.
 



FOXNews.com - Republicans Object to Biden Taking Credit for Success in Iraq


As senators, Barack Obama and Joe Biden both opposed the troop surge in Iraq -- and Biden even wanted to divide the country into three sections.

But as vice president, Biden is taking credit for success in Iraq.

"I am very optimistic about Iraq," he said. "I mean, this could be one of the great achievements of this administration."


But Republican Sen. Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma, a member of the Armed Services Committee, said you cannot oppose the surge and then claim it for your legacy.

"When Joe Biden was in the Senate and Obama was in the Senate, they authored and were the chief architect of the resolution opposing the surge," he said.

The vice president also took credit for the troop drawdown.

1.)Biden's proposal was a federal system, with a weak central government. Not a partition, but federalism. James Inhofe is a certifiable nut who prays for Obama to fail, or for Senators to die so they can't vote on health care. He is widely known as someone who just spouts out things without passing them through his(non existent) brain. He has absolutely no foreign policy credentials whatsoever while Biden's are known the world over. He should refrain from attacking a policy he does not understand. Fox News, if they want to be taken seriously, should not be using people like Sarah Palin and James Inhofe who are loose cannon, religious extremist morons to explain foreign policy. How about Dick Lugar? John Warner just retired, maybe he is looking for a job? Chuck Hagel, ditto. Brent Scowcroft? These are the people a reputable news organization that happens to slant right a bit would be using. This shows Fox for who they are once again.

2.)What has worked in stabilizing Iraq(at least relative to 2004 violence levels) is de facto exactly what Biden's plan sought to do: give local control and assure Sunnis and Kurds that the Shiite majority had no designs on running their affairs from Iran via Baghdad. This was what precipitated the formation of the Sunni awakening council, long before the surge. Our buying them off helped too. We probably paid some of the same people that hung Americans from a bridge in Fallujah in 2004.

3.)The surge was worth about 30,000 troops, a significant amount, but it has been drawn back dramatically while security gains have been maintained. That shows that it was the political process- the decentralization, the local assurances and the elections that ultimately calmed the fears of the Sunnis who made up the insurgency. These people, previously tolerant of Al Qaeda as a buffer against perceived Shiite advancement, then turned on them and kicked them out when they had their assurances of local control. Plus, AQ only made up, at the height of its influence, 5% of the resistance in Iraq. Will this progress lead to sustainable stability? The jury is still out- it is moving in that direction, but lets remember, Iraq has a long way to go. There are still frequent bombings, still not much government capacity to deliver services, etc.

4.)We are the best military in the history of the world. Of course we can build a foundation for security somewhere with 30,000 of our troops on top of 130,000. All the people calling it successful only look at the military side of it, which no opponents ever denied would be successful. If anyone wants to challenge this, I have a long video of Biden talking about this in 2007 before the surge. What the people attacking Obama/Biden's opposition to the surge miss was the STATED GOAL OF THE SURGE AS EXPRESSED BY PRESIDENT BUSH:TO BUY TIME FOR THE IRAQIS TO PURSUE A POLITICAL SOLUTION. That was the stated goal. By that metric, has it worked? Is Iraq as stable as say, Oman or Kuwait or Egypt or Jordan? Absolutely not. Will it be? The jury is very much still out.

5.)No one can say that the surge has worked by the stated goal of its architect, George W Bush, as of yet without committing an absurdity. We'll have to check back in about 5 or 10 years and see if Iraq as a reasonably democratic government is as stable as it was in 2003 before we invaded to answer the question.

6.)Biden is one of the very few people who could take a significant amount of credit for Iraq becoming stable should it materialize, as his outline of decentralization first proposed in 2005 has in fact been implemented by Iraqis and made a great deal of progress. If we use our residual forces to effectively train Iraqis and shift our diplomatic focus toward supporting Iraqi governmental institutions, all while withdrawing our combat troops and not leaving chaos behind, then Obama will have done a much better job than Bush.

7.)I doubt Obama will take credit, but Bush plunged us into a military adventure in a country that posed no threat to us, got 4000plus troops killed in the process(at one of the fastest rates during the surge) and destroyed a country to the point where all governance had to be built up from scratch again. Oh, and he caused a shitload of the deficit that the right blames on Obama by doing this. People defending the war on grounds other than WMD(which Bush/Cheney never did by the way) need to ask themselves: was it worth all of this? Missing Bin Laden? 100K dead Iraqis? A reconstruction we have to fund?

8.)Anyone who uses "Iraq in violation of UN resolutions" as a justification is wrong. Sure, they were in violation of a bunch of general resolutions that every country, Israel included violates. The specific violations, which Bush alleged, were related to WEAPONS IRAQ WAS PROVEN NOT TO HAVE, WEAPONS CONDI RICE AND COLIN POWELL SAID THEY DID NOT HAVE IN 2001 AND WERE ALSO BASED ON FALSE ALLEGATIONS THAT IRAQ WAS NON COMPLIANT WITH THE INSPECTORS. THE EXACT OPPOSITE WAS TRUE, THEY WERE COMPLYING AND ABOUT TO COME UP CLEAN, SO BUSH PULLED THE INSPECTORS AND SAID "LETS GO!" Always remember that Paul Wolfowitz, a deputy secretary of Defense and one of the chief architects of the Iraq war said that they merely settled on weapons of mass destruction for "bureaucratic reasons." There is so much evidence out there it's not even funny attesting to the fact that the people pushing this war knew Saddam had no WMD's in 2003. NONE. No amount of posting on this board will ever change the fact that Iraq was not a threat to the US and not even a regional threat in 2003.
 
How many new terrorists has our adventure in Iraq created?

Nevermind that your premise is dishonest. Removing Saddam from power does not mean the mission was accomplished, and you know it. Unless you would have been perfectly okay with us packing up and heading home the day Bush had his lovely little carrier photo-op.

Yes, but never forget that Obama is the one who is the most arrogant person ever to hold the presidency! I mean not admitting mistakes is just a show of resolve. Landing on an aircraft carrier in a flight suit with the eyes of the whole country on the 6PM news is simply a way of honoring the military, as we all know. It was not done to promote Bush or his image, no way, no how. We all know this to be true. Why bother with those fake acknowledgments of the heroism and sacrifice of our military members, you know, like honoring the dead as they arrive back or not proposing to cut combat pay or better yet being honest to them about why they are fighting or having a strategy for what happens after they take down Saddam? All the above would have done is save their lives and ensure that we give them missions worthy of their sacrifices.

But, Diemen, you and I have to remember that Obama is the most arrogant President ever, and that is simply true because the Republican spin machine tells us so.
 
I'd say "No matter what the cost" better describes the legislative attitude of Obama, Reid & Pelosi. Which is why I hope they fail.

If that were the case, they would have already put through whatever the f they wanted. They have been unable to do this, mostly because the Democratic Party is an ideologically diverse party while the Republicans have become a bunch of sheep.

The other big impediment of course is the GOP filibuster machine. "No matter what the cost" would more accurately describe what Bush-Frist-DeLay did with about 54 votes in the Senate and a much more narrow House majority than the Democrats have now. And you accuse me of being asleep for 8 years of Bush? I don't remember the Democrats filibustering all of Bush's agenda, or even a substantial amount of it at all. One time, the Democrats threatened to use the filibuster in 2005 over court appointments, and what did the Republicans do? They screamed and cried like little babies and tried to employ the "nuclear option" to eliminate the filibuster. Where has Reid proposed anything this extreme? Which would be, by the way, well within his right and would be reasonable given the mindless obstruction of the GOP of 2009-10.

I think it was Bush who did whatever the f he wanted at all costs, pal, and the Democrats largely disagreed but still respected his majorities. We are paying for it now, the countless earmarks in exchange for absolute party loyalty on Iraq, Medicare prescription drug boondoggle, Social Security privatization, the list goes on. Obama actually gets push back from Democrats in Congress, what a novel idea. Reagan got push back from Republicans, Carter from Democrats, etc. So the unprecedented party loyalty used by Bush was truly "at all costs" as there was a clear price in pork for said loyalty.
 
there's little question that Gates has been a superb SecDef.

one wishes Rumsfeld had done the right thing and resigned after Abu Ghraib like any responsible individual would have.

sadly, it took colossal Dem wins in the 2006 elections to convince Bush to finally, finally fire his miserable, failed SecDef, and replace him with the eminently moderate Gates, and for Bush to separate from the Cheney-wing of his WH and listen to the moderates and begin to chart a course for a way for the US to actually get out of Iraq.

Bush did the right thing in 2006 by ignoring Cheney, firing Rumsfeld, and hiring adults like Gates. i will credit him for that.

still, one worries what will happen when the 2.5 million refugees return home to find their homes occupied by Shiites.
 
If that were the case, they would have already put through whatever the f they wanted. They have been unable to do this, mostly because the Democratic Party is an ideologically diverse party while the Republicans have become a bunch of sheep.

The other big impediment of course is the GOP filibuster machine.

The president had a super-majority in the Senate, along with some moderates like my Maine senators who also could have tipped the scales.

The problem was the bills themselves. Cap and Trade was DOA, and we've discussed the health care debacle plenty in here.


I also read your post on Joe Biden's foreign policy expertise. He is well respected for his good work in the Balkans. Less so for the Middle East. He voted against the Gulf War, voted for George W's Iraq War, and then strongly opposed the surge.
 
The president had a super-majority in the Senate, along with some moderates like my Maine senators who also could have tipped the scales.




like the media, you're giving the GOP far too much of a free pass. their behavior -- and the GOP "purity test" -- has rendered government incapable of actually addressing the serious issues the country is currently facing.
 
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