Projecting and crop dusting...quite the little multi tasker aren't ya?
Ponderable
- Thread starter Bruddah IZ
- Start date
Sheriff Joe
DA
Sounds like you aren't putting America first with that comment, criticizing a post that suggests we should.
Wez
DA
Is it "American" to be World Police and hawkish? The answer is no.
North Korea is a totalitarian dictatorship run by a madman, who starves his own people, threatens world peace, kidnaps foreign nationals and is threat to us and our allies.
The world is less stable after eight years of Obama than anytime since the Cuban Missile crisis.
Next Rodman goes to visit you should tag along as his ball boy...
Wez
DA
The meme is a joke, meant to remind people we are not without sin. Of course N. Korea is the worst.
The world became less stable after Bush's invasion of Iraq, period, end of story.
Krauthammer as soothsayer.......
The stillborn legacy of Barack Obama
By Charles Krauthammer October 6, 2016
Only amid the most bizarre, most tawdry, most addictive election campaign in memory could the real story of 2016 be so effectively obliterated, namely, that with just four months left in the Obama presidency, its two central pillars are collapsing before our eyes: domestically, its radical reform of American health care, a.k.a. Obamacare; and abroad, its radical reorientation of American foreign policy — disengagement marked by diplomacy and multilateralism.
Obamacare.
On Monday, Bill Clinton called it “the craziest thing in the world.” And he was only talking about one crazy aspect of it — the impact on the consumer. Clinton pointed out that small business and hardworking employees (“out there busting it, sometimes 60 hours a week”) are “getting whacked . . . their premiums doubled and their coverage cut in half.”
This, as the program’s entire economic foundation is crumbling. More than half its nonprofit “co-ops” have gone bankrupt. Major health insurers like Aetna and UnitedHealthcare, having lost millions of dollars, are withdrawing from the exchanges. In one-third of the U.S., exchanges will have only one insurance provider. Premiums and deductibles are exploding. Even the New York Times blares “Ailing Obama Health Care Act May Have to Change to Survive.”
Young people, refusing to pay disproportionately to subsidize older and sicker patients, are not signing up. As the risk pool becomes increasingly unbalanced, the death spiral accelerates. And the only way to save the system is with massive infusions of tax money.
What to do? The Democrats will eventually push to junk Obamacare for a full-fledged, government-run, single-payer system. Republicans will seek to junk it for a more market-based pre-Obamacare-like alternative. Either way, the singular domestic achievement of this presidency dies.
The Obama Doctrine.
At the same time, Obama’s radically reoriented foreign policy is in ruins. His vision was to move away from a world where stability and “the success of liberty” (JFK, inaugural address) were anchored by American power and move toward a world ruled by universal norms, mutual obligation, international law and multilateral institutions. No more cowboy adventures, no more unilateralism, no more Guantanamo. We would ascend to the higher moral plane of diplomacy. Clean hands, clear conscience, “smart power.”
This blessed vision has just died a terrible death in Aleppo. Its unraveling was predicted and predictable, though it took fully two terms to unfold. This policy of pristine — and preening — disengagement from the grubby imperatives of realpolitik yielded Crimea, the South China Sea, the rise of the Islamic State, the return of Iran. And now the horror and the shame of Aleppo.
After endless concessions to Russian demands meant to protect and preserve the genocidal regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, last month we finally capitulated to a deal in which we essentially joined Russia in that objective. But such is Vladimir Putin’s contempt for our president that he wouldn’t stop there.
He blatantly violated his own cease-fire with an air campaign of such spectacular savagery — targeting hospitals, water-pumping stations and a humanitarian aid convoy — that even Barack Obama and John Kerry could no longer deny that Putin is seeking not compromise but conquest. And is prepared to kill everyone in rebel-held Aleppo to achieve it. Obama, left with no options — and astonishingly, having prepared none — looks on.
At the outset of the war, we could have bombed Assad’s airfields and destroyed his aircraft, eliminating the regime’s major strategic advantage — control of the air.
Five years later, we can’t. Russia is there. Putin has just installed S-300 antiaircraft missiles near Tartus. Yet, none of the rebels have any air assets. This is a warning and deterrent to the only power that could do something — the United States.
Obama did nothing before. He will surely do nothing now. For Americans, the shame is palpable. Russia’s annexation of Crimea may be an abstraction, but that stunned, injured little boy in Aleppo is not.
“What is Aleppo?” famously asked Gary Johnson. Answer: the burial ground of the Obama fantasy of benign disengagement.
What’s left of the Obama legacy? Even Democrats are running away from Obamacare. And who will defend his foreign policy of lofty speech and cynical abdication?
In 2014, Obama said, “Make no mistake: [My] policies are on the ballot.” Democrats were crushed in that midterm election.
This time around, Obama says, “My legacy’s on the ballot.” If the 2016 campaign hadn’t turned into a referendum on character — a battle fully personalized and ad hominem — the collapse of the Obama legacy would indeed be right now on the ballot. And his party would be 20 points behind.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opin...c1bfe943b66_story.html?utm_term=.4befaa7b20b7
The stillborn legacy of Barack Obama
By Charles Krauthammer October 6, 2016
Only amid the most bizarre, most tawdry, most addictive election campaign in memory could the real story of 2016 be so effectively obliterated, namely, that with just four months left in the Obama presidency, its two central pillars are collapsing before our eyes: domestically, its radical reform of American health care, a.k.a. Obamacare; and abroad, its radical reorientation of American foreign policy — disengagement marked by diplomacy and multilateralism.
Obamacare.
On Monday, Bill Clinton called it “the craziest thing in the world.” And he was only talking about one crazy aspect of it — the impact on the consumer. Clinton pointed out that small business and hardworking employees (“out there busting it, sometimes 60 hours a week”) are “getting whacked . . . their premiums doubled and their coverage cut in half.”
This, as the program’s entire economic foundation is crumbling. More than half its nonprofit “co-ops” have gone bankrupt. Major health insurers like Aetna and UnitedHealthcare, having lost millions of dollars, are withdrawing from the exchanges. In one-third of the U.S., exchanges will have only one insurance provider. Premiums and deductibles are exploding. Even the New York Times blares “Ailing Obama Health Care Act May Have to Change to Survive.”
Young people, refusing to pay disproportionately to subsidize older and sicker patients, are not signing up. As the risk pool becomes increasingly unbalanced, the death spiral accelerates. And the only way to save the system is with massive infusions of tax money.
What to do? The Democrats will eventually push to junk Obamacare for a full-fledged, government-run, single-payer system. Republicans will seek to junk it for a more market-based pre-Obamacare-like alternative. Either way, the singular domestic achievement of this presidency dies.
The Obama Doctrine.
At the same time, Obama’s radically reoriented foreign policy is in ruins. His vision was to move away from a world where stability and “the success of liberty” (JFK, inaugural address) were anchored by American power and move toward a world ruled by universal norms, mutual obligation, international law and multilateral institutions. No more cowboy adventures, no more unilateralism, no more Guantanamo. We would ascend to the higher moral plane of diplomacy. Clean hands, clear conscience, “smart power.”
This blessed vision has just died a terrible death in Aleppo. Its unraveling was predicted and predictable, though it took fully two terms to unfold. This policy of pristine — and preening — disengagement from the grubby imperatives of realpolitik yielded Crimea, the South China Sea, the rise of the Islamic State, the return of Iran. And now the horror and the shame of Aleppo.
After endless concessions to Russian demands meant to protect and preserve the genocidal regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, last month we finally capitulated to a deal in which we essentially joined Russia in that objective. But such is Vladimir Putin’s contempt for our president that he wouldn’t stop there.
He blatantly violated his own cease-fire with an air campaign of such spectacular savagery — targeting hospitals, water-pumping stations and a humanitarian aid convoy — that even Barack Obama and John Kerry could no longer deny that Putin is seeking not compromise but conquest. And is prepared to kill everyone in rebel-held Aleppo to achieve it. Obama, left with no options — and astonishingly, having prepared none — looks on.
At the outset of the war, we could have bombed Assad’s airfields and destroyed his aircraft, eliminating the regime’s major strategic advantage — control of the air.
Five years later, we can’t. Russia is there. Putin has just installed S-300 antiaircraft missiles near Tartus. Yet, none of the rebels have any air assets. This is a warning and deterrent to the only power that could do something — the United States.
Obama did nothing before. He will surely do nothing now. For Americans, the shame is palpable. Russia’s annexation of Crimea may be an abstraction, but that stunned, injured little boy in Aleppo is not.
“What is Aleppo?” famously asked Gary Johnson. Answer: the burial ground of the Obama fantasy of benign disengagement.
What’s left of the Obama legacy? Even Democrats are running away from Obamacare. And who will defend his foreign policy of lofty speech and cynical abdication?
In 2014, Obama said, “Make no mistake: [My] policies are on the ballot.” Democrats were crushed in that midterm election.
This time around, Obama says, “My legacy’s on the ballot.” If the 2016 campaign hadn’t turned into a referendum on character — a battle fully personalized and ad hominem — the collapse of the Obama legacy would indeed be right now on the ballot. And his party would be 20 points behind.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opin...c1bfe943b66_story.html?utm_term=.4befaa7b20b7
Wez
DA
Why would I care what you think is funny?
Sheriff Joe
DA
No, lets just wait till it crosses our borders.
EXCLUSIVE: Cartel Violence Spills into Texas as Gunmen Storm Past U.S. Border Security
PIEDRAS NEGRAS, Coahuila — Two cartel gunmen fleeing from a raging gun battle with Mexican authorities ran through U.S. border security measures twice as they crossed into Texas and back; using their vehicle to ram barriers
Tell that to Europe, you dumb fuck.
Wez
DA
/about/north-korean-rocket-launch-58b8f52f3df78c353c45e7aa.png)
JEFF JACOBY
The Obama Doctrine has made the world more dangerous
FIVE YEARS AGO, President Obama hailed the military campaign in Libya that toppled Moammar Khadafy as one of the foreign policy triumphs of his presidency. Today he calls Libya his worst mistake. But though he may have changed his grade from an A to an F, his commitment to “leading from behind” — a euphemism for American passivity and abdication — hasn’t budged.
On the day Khadafy was killed, in October 2011, Obama took a victory lap. “Our brave pilots have flown in Libya’s skies, our sailors have provided support off Libya’s shores, and our leadership at NATO has helped guide our coalition,” he declared. “Without putting a single US service member on the ground, we achieved our objectives.”
He was wrong. Libya soon imploded into chaos and violence. It became a terrorist badlands, where more than 10,000 people have been murdered — including US Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three of his colleagues, killed by Islamists in Benghazi just 11 months after Obama’s “mission accomplished” moment in the Rose Garden.
The president acknowledges now that his policy in Libya ended in disaster. In a Fox News interview last week, he confessed his negligence in “failing to plan for the day after” the dictator was overthrown.
In other interviews, Obama has pinned the blame for the Libya debacle less on his own lack of preparation for a post-Khadafy transition than on Europe’s failure to stay engaged. “When I go back, and I ask myself what went wrong, there’s room for criticism,” he recently told The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, “because I had more faith in the Europeans, given Libya’s proximity, being invested in the follow-up.” But when the United States heads for the exits, its allies are apt to follow suit. And Obama, who had agreed only reluctantly to intervene in Libya in the first place, had no interest in sticking around.
concluded The New York Times in a lengthy review of the Libyan fiasco earlier this year. The administration imposed “fierce limits” on any US role in Libya’s metamorphosis — conditions so strict that America in effect washed its hands of responsibility for the country’s fate. Not surprisingly, that fate has been ghastly.
It may seem astonishing that Obama, who so harshly condemned his predecessor’s blunders in Iraq, would wind up repeating the gravest of those blunders in Libya — namely, not being ready for the instability and insurgency that would follow Western intervention. As military historian Max Boot remarks, by 2011 “it was not exactly a secret that bad things happen if the United States and its allies overthrow a strongman without having a plan for what comes next.”
But Obama is better at deploring other people’s foreign policy messes than at learning from them. The lesson he takes away from the Iraq war was that the United States has no business intervening militarily in the Middle East — and that the greater the intervention, the greater the resulting fiasco. The facts haven’t borne out that conclusion. But Obama won’t be budged.
When George W. Bush announced in January 2007 that he intended to “surge” additional troops to Iraq and implement a new counterinsurgency strategy, then-Senator Obama was scornful: “I am not persuaded that 20,000 additional troops in Iraq are going to solve the sectarian violence there,” he said. “In fact, I think it will do the reverse.” In the event, of course, Bush’s surge proved a remarkable success. By the time Obama took office, Al Qaeda in Iraq was crippled, attacks were down 90 percent, and Iraq was being governed by democratically elected politicians. The new commander in chief was happy to take political credit for victory in Iraq, which Vice President Biden trumpeted early on as “one of the great achievements” of the Obama administration.
But none of that led Obama to question the wisdom of pulling all US forces out of Iraq, or to heed warnings that the swift disappearance of tens of thousands of American peacekeepers would leave a catastrophic vacuum that the region’s deadliest forces would rush to exploit. Obama’s determined disengagement wrecked what had so painstakingly been won in Iraq. Without America’s restraining presence, Nouri al-Maliki’s Shiite-dominated government grew ruthlessly authoritarian, Iran’s influence intensified, and ISIS began its horrific reign of terror.
More “leading from behind” followed in Syria. Obama issued tough threats of chemical weapons “red lines” and demanded Bashar al-Assad resign, but the bristling words were never backed up with deeds. As America’s credibility diminished, predictable consequences ensued: soaring death tolls, vast refugee floods, and the emboldening of antidemocratic regimes from Moscow to Beijing.
Yet even now, Obama cannot see that a doctrine premised on avoiding American involvement in the world’s conflicts is bound to fail. A policy built around US disengagement only intensifies global disorder. The president concedes that he should have had a better “day-after” plan in Libya — but still maintains that the calamity his approach caused shows he was right all along.
In Goldberg’s words, “Libya proved to [Obama] that the Middle East was best avoided.” It reinforced his subsequent decision to do nothing about Syria. He has no regrets about abandoning his red line — he says now that he is “very proud” he decided not to stop Assad’s horror show. To this day, Obama has not altered the mindset he started with: that American power cannot fix what ails the planet’s bad neighborhoods, and will likely make them worse.
But Obama’s foreign policy stewardship teaches a very different lesson. Since 2009, America’s credibility has been badly eroded and the world has become far more dangerous and unstable. The price of American retreat has been terrible, made all the worse by a president too rigid to change his mind.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion...e-dangerous/T4POP5pZtQBI2dXziK5JtM/story.html
The Obama Doctrine has made the world more dangerous
FIVE YEARS AGO, President Obama hailed the military campaign in Libya that toppled Moammar Khadafy as one of the foreign policy triumphs of his presidency. Today he calls Libya his worst mistake. But though he may have changed his grade from an A to an F, his commitment to “leading from behind” — a euphemism for American passivity and abdication — hasn’t budged.
On the day Khadafy was killed, in October 2011, Obama took a victory lap. “Our brave pilots have flown in Libya’s skies, our sailors have provided support off Libya’s shores, and our leadership at NATO has helped guide our coalition,” he declared. “Without putting a single US service member on the ground, we achieved our objectives.”
He was wrong. Libya soon imploded into chaos and violence. It became a terrorist badlands, where more than 10,000 people have been murdered — including US Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three of his colleagues, killed by Islamists in Benghazi just 11 months after Obama’s “mission accomplished” moment in the Rose Garden.
The president acknowledges now that his policy in Libya ended in disaster. In a Fox News interview last week, he confessed his negligence in “failing to plan for the day after” the dictator was overthrown.
In other interviews, Obama has pinned the blame for the Libya debacle less on his own lack of preparation for a post-Khadafy transition than on Europe’s failure to stay engaged. “When I go back, and I ask myself what went wrong, there’s room for criticism,” he recently told The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, “because I had more faith in the Europeans, given Libya’s proximity, being invested in the follow-up.” But when the United States heads for the exits, its allies are apt to follow suit. And Obama, who had agreed only reluctantly to intervene in Libya in the first place, had no interest in sticking around.
concluded The New York Times in a lengthy review of the Libyan fiasco earlier this year. The administration imposed “fierce limits” on any US role in Libya’s metamorphosis — conditions so strict that America in effect washed its hands of responsibility for the country’s fate. Not surprisingly, that fate has been ghastly.
It may seem astonishing that Obama, who so harshly condemned his predecessor’s blunders in Iraq, would wind up repeating the gravest of those blunders in Libya — namely, not being ready for the instability and insurgency that would follow Western intervention. As military historian Max Boot remarks, by 2011 “it was not exactly a secret that bad things happen if the United States and its allies overthrow a strongman without having a plan for what comes next.”
But Obama is better at deploring other people’s foreign policy messes than at learning from them. The lesson he takes away from the Iraq war was that the United States has no business intervening militarily in the Middle East — and that the greater the intervention, the greater the resulting fiasco. The facts haven’t borne out that conclusion. But Obama won’t be budged.
When George W. Bush announced in January 2007 that he intended to “surge” additional troops to Iraq and implement a new counterinsurgency strategy, then-Senator Obama was scornful: “I am not persuaded that 20,000 additional troops in Iraq are going to solve the sectarian violence there,” he said. “In fact, I think it will do the reverse.” In the event, of course, Bush’s surge proved a remarkable success. By the time Obama took office, Al Qaeda in Iraq was crippled, attacks were down 90 percent, and Iraq was being governed by democratically elected politicians. The new commander in chief was happy to take political credit for victory in Iraq, which Vice President Biden trumpeted early on as “one of the great achievements” of the Obama administration.
But none of that led Obama to question the wisdom of pulling all US forces out of Iraq, or to heed warnings that the swift disappearance of tens of thousands of American peacekeepers would leave a catastrophic vacuum that the region’s deadliest forces would rush to exploit. Obama’s determined disengagement wrecked what had so painstakingly been won in Iraq. Without America’s restraining presence, Nouri al-Maliki’s Shiite-dominated government grew ruthlessly authoritarian, Iran’s influence intensified, and ISIS began its horrific reign of terror.
More “leading from behind” followed in Syria. Obama issued tough threats of chemical weapons “red lines” and demanded Bashar al-Assad resign, but the bristling words were never backed up with deeds. As America’s credibility diminished, predictable consequences ensued: soaring death tolls, vast refugee floods, and the emboldening of antidemocratic regimes from Moscow to Beijing.
Yet even now, Obama cannot see that a doctrine premised on avoiding American involvement in the world’s conflicts is bound to fail. A policy built around US disengagement only intensifies global disorder. The president concedes that he should have had a better “day-after” plan in Libya — but still maintains that the calamity his approach caused shows he was right all along.
In Goldberg’s words, “Libya proved to [Obama] that the Middle East was best avoided.” It reinforced his subsequent decision to do nothing about Syria. He has no regrets about abandoning his red line — he says now that he is “very proud” he decided not to stop Assad’s horror show. To this day, Obama has not altered the mindset he started with: that American power cannot fix what ails the planet’s bad neighborhoods, and will likely make them worse.
But Obama’s foreign policy stewardship teaches a very different lesson. Since 2009, America’s credibility has been badly eroded and the world has become far more dangerous and unstable. The price of American retreat has been terrible, made all the worse by a president too rigid to change his mind.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion...e-dangerous/T4POP5pZtQBI2dXziK5JtM/story.html
Hüsker Dü
DA
North Korea also isn't everything it has been built up to be either, not much is. Saddam, no nukes, dead. Kadhafi, no nukes, dead. If you were a small country dictator what would you do to protect yourself?
Hüsker Dü
DA
No bias there . . . LOL!