The Republican Thread

[southsider2k5]

And the costs have gone down so much with the government involved in things like education and defense...

[lostfan]

Its not a great secret that the greatest outlays we have are security and social programs.

Defense (at one point the budget was a few times more than all of the other countries in the world combined, defense is a cult), Social Security (which has its own problems but at least there's a tax for it), and Medicare (good luck trying to get rid of THAT) is about 2/3 of the budget, and I haven't counted the wars or the various tax cuts. The usual stuff people snipe about aren't really fixes for anything, or even necessarily problems, they're just a convenient way to get people to rally and send in campaign contributions.

 

My point being, fixing the budget takes total unity of effort across the board, something which nobody in power or nobody even talking about wanting to be in power is willing to do right now.

[Y2HH]

My point being, fixing the budget takes total unity of effort across the board, something which nobody in power or nobody even talking about wanting to be in power is willing to do right now.

 

Quoted for truth. I 100% agree.

 

They're continuing to play the same game as always -- they show you something expensive with their left hand and hide something just as expensive with their right. Right now we're blaming our nations budget woes on health care and wars, because it's convenient and fresh in the medias spotlight, and mark my words, even if we fix health care 100%, flawlessly, the budget woes will continue on almost every level because everything they saved will simply get wasted on other over budget programs.

 

I'd actually like to see a list of under budget government programs. I bet there are none.

[southsider2k5]

Quoted for truth. I 100% agree.

 

They're continuing to play the same game as always -- they show you something expensive with their left hand and hide something just as expensive with their right. Right now we're blaming our nations budget woes on health care and wars, because it's convenient and fresh in the medias spotlight, and mark my words, even if we fix health care 100%, flawlessly, the budget woes will continue on almost every level because everything they saved will simply get wasted on other over budget programs.

 

I'd actually like to see a list of under budget government programs. I bet there are none.

 

It won't ever happen. It's just easier to borrow and leave it up to the next guy.

[southsider2k5]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405...hp_mostpop_read

 

The Arabs Have Stopped Applauding Obama

A foreign policy of penance has won America no friends.

 

By FOUAD AJAMI

 

'He talks too much," a Saudi academic in Jeddah, who had once been smitten with Barack Obama, recently observed to me of America's 44th president. He has wearied of Mr. Obama and now does not bother with the Obama oratory.

 

He is hardly alone, this academic. In the endless chatter of this region, and in the commentaries offered by the press, the theme is one of disappointment. In the Arab-Islamic world, Barack Obama has come down to earth.

 

He has not made the world anew, history did not bend to his will, the Indians and Pakistanis have been told that the matter of Kashmir is theirs to resolve, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the same intractable clash of two irreconcilable nationalisms, and the theocrats in Iran have not "unclenched their fist," nor have they abandoned their nuclear quest.

 

There is little Mr. Obama can do about this disenchantment. He can't journey to Turkey to tell its Islamist leaders and political class that a decade of anti-American scapegoating is all forgiven and was the product of American policies—he has already done that. He can't journey to Cairo to tell the fabled "Arab street" that the Iraq war was a wasted war of choice, and that America earned the malice that came its way from Arab lands—he has already done that as well. He can't tell Muslims that America is not at war with Islam—he, like his predecessor, has said that time and again.

 

It was the norm for American liberalism during the Bush years to brandish the Pew Global Attitudes survey that told of America's decline in the eyes of foreign nations. Foreigners were saying what the liberals wanted said.

 

Now those surveys of 2009 bring findings from the world of Islam that confirm that the animus toward America has not been radically changed by the ascendancy of Mr. Obama. In the Palestinian territories, 15% have a favorable view of the U.S. while 82% have an unfavorable view. The Obama speech in Ankara didn't seem to help in Turkey, where the favorables are 14% and those unreconciled, 69%. In Egypt, a country that's reaped nearly 40 years of American aid, things stayed roughly the same: 27% have a favorable view of the U.S. while 70% do not. In Pakistan, a place of great consequence for American power, our standing has deteriorated: The unfavorables rose from 63% in 2008 to 68% this year.

 

Mr. Obama's election has not drained the swamps of anti-Americanism. That anti-Americanism is endemic to this region, an alibi and a scapegoat for nations, and their rulers, unwilling to break out of the grip of political autocracy and economic failure. It predated the presidency of George W. Bush and rages on during the Obama presidency.

 

We had once taken to the foreign world that quintessential American difference—the belief in liberty, a needed innocence to play off against the settled and complacent ways of older nations. The Obama approach is different.

 

Steeped in an overarching idea of American guilt, Mr. Obama and his lieutenants offered nothing less than a doctrine, and a policy, of American penance. No one told Mr. Obama that the Islamic world, where American power is engaged and so dangerously exposed, it is considered bad form, nay a great moral lapse, to speak ill of one's own tribe when in the midst, and in the lands, of others.

 

The crowd may have applauded the cavalier way the new steward of American power referred to his predecessor, but in the privacy of their own language they doubtless wondered about his character and his fidelity. "My brother and I against my cousin, my cousin and I against the stranger," goes one of the Arab world's most honored maxims. The stranger who came into their midst and spoke badly of his own was destined to become an object of suspicion.

 

Mr. Obama could not make up his mind: He was at one with "the people" and with the rulers who held them in subjugation. The people of Iran who took to the streets this past summer were betrayed by this hapless diplomacy—Mr. Obama was out to "engage" the terrible rulers that millions of Iranians were determined to be rid of.

 

On Nov. 4, on the 30th anniversary of the seizure of the American embassy in Tehran, the embattled reformers, again in the streets, posed an embarrassing dilemma for American diplomacy: "Obama, Obama, you are either with us or with them," they chanted. By not responding to these cries and continuing to "engage" Tehran's murderous regime, his choice was made clear. It wasn't one of American diplomacy's finest moments.

 

Mr. Obama has himself to blame for the disarray of his foreign policy. American arms had won a decent outcome in Iraq, but Mr. Obama would not claim it—it was his predecessor's war. Vigilance had kept the American homeland safe from terrorist attacks for seven long years under his predecessors, but he could never grant Bush policies the honor and credit they deserved. He had declared Afghanistan a war of necessity, but he seems to have his eye on the road out even as he is set to announce a troop increase in an address to be delivered tomorrow.

 

He was quick to assert, in the course of his exuberant campaign for president last year, that his diplomacy in South Asia would start with the standoff in Kashmir. In truth India had no interest in an international adjudication of Kashmir. What was settled during the partition in 1947 was there to stay. In recent days, Mr. Obama walked away from earlier ambitions. "Obviously, there are historic conflicts between India and Pakistan," he said. "It's not the place of the United States to try to, from the outside, resolve those conflicts."

 

Nor was he swayed by the fate of so many "peace plans" that have been floated over so many decades to resolve the fight between Arab and Jew over the land between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean. Where George W. Bush offered the Palestinians the gift of clarity—statehood but only after the renunciation of terror and the break with maximalism—Mr. Obama signaled a return to the dead ways of the past: a peace process where America itself is broker and arbiter.

 

The Obama diplomacy had made a settlement freeze its starting point, when this was precisely the wrong place to begin. Israel has given up settlements before at the altar of peace—recall the historical accommodation with Egypt a quarter century ago. The right course would have set the question of settlements aside as it took up the broader challenge of radicalism in the region—the menace and swagger of Iran, the arsenal of Hamas and Hezbollah, the refusal of the Arab order of power to embrace in broad daylight the cause of peace with Israel.

 

The laws of gravity, the weight of history and of precedent, have caught up with the Obama presidency. We are beyond stirring speeches. The novelty of the Obama approach, and the Obama persona, has worn off. There is a whole American diplomatic tradition to draw upon—engagements made, wisdom acquired in the course of decades, and, yes, accounts to be settled with rogues and tyrannies. They might yet help this administration find its way out of a labyrinth of its own making.

 

Mr. Ajami, a professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, is the author of "The Foreigner's Gift" (Free Press, 2007).

[southsider2k5]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405...21125:b29133706

 

John Kerry's Tora Bora Campaign

The Senator is now in favor of more troops after he was against them.

 

President Obama unveils his new Afghanistan strategy today, and in the nick of time Senator John Kerry has arrived with a report claiming that none of this would be necessary if former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had only deployed more troops eight years ago. Yes, he really said more troops.

 

In a 43-page report issued yesterday by his Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Mr. Kerry says bin Laden and deputy Ayman Zawahiri were poised for capture at the Tora Bora cave complex in late 2001. But because of the "unwillingness" of Mr. Rumsfeld and his generals "to deploy the troops required to take advantage of solid intelligence and unique circumstances to kill or capture bin Laden," the al Qaeda leaders escaped.

 

This in turn "paved the way for exactly what we had hoped to avoid—a protracted insurgency that has cost more lives than anyone estimates would have been lost in a full-blown assault on Tora Bora."

 

The timing of the report's release suggests that Mr. Kerry intends this as political cover for Mr. Obama and Democrats, and some in the press corps have even taken it seriously. But coming from Mr. Kerry, of all people, this criticism is nothing short of astonishing.

 

In 2001, readers may recall, the Washington establishment that included Mr. Kerry was fretting about the danger in Afghanistan from committing too many troops. The New York Times made the "quagmire" point explicitly in a famous page-one analysis, and Seymour Hersh fed the cliche at The New Yorker.

 

On CNN with Larry King on Dec. 15, 2001, a viewer called in to say the U.S. should "smoke [bin Laden] out" of the Tora Bora caves. Mr. Kerry responded: "For the moment what we are doing, I think, is having its impact and it is the best way to protect our troops and sort of minimalize the proximity, if you will. I think we have been doing this pretty effectively and we should continue to do it that way." The Rumsfeld-General Tommy Franks troop strategy may have missed bin Laden, but it reflected domestic political doubts about an extended Afghan campaign.

 

Remarkably, Mr. Kerry is now repeating those same doubts about Mr. Obama's troop decision, saying that the "Afghans must do the heavy lifting" and that he supports additional troops only for "limited purposes" and wants the U.S. out within "four to five years." Adapting his legendary 2004 campaign locution, Mr. Kerry is now in favor of more troops after he was against them, but in any case not for very long.

[lostfan]

The reason for that has everything to do with Israel, the article kind of glosses over/ignores that completely.

[Rex Kickass]

The reason for that has everything to do with Israel, the article kind of glosses over/ignores that completely.

 

The article also assumes change happens overnight. It doesn't. And it also assumes that everybody suddenly has to be "friendly." They don't.

 

There's a rule in politics that I think applies in foreign relations. You can appeal to a group of people who don't support you and it can be of great value. They probably won't support you after your appeal, but they might have their passion damped down enough to make a difference.

[Cknolls]

http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=Y...WM5OGU5OTg1MDA=

 

Stay classy, Matthews!

[BigSqwert]

Matthews is an idiot.

[southsider2k5]

http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=Y...WM5OGU5OTg1MDA=

 

Stay classy, Matthews!

 

He'd better watch it. With all of that hate speech about the military he is going to inspire some wakko's to start shooting at military people...

[lostfan]

Matthews is an idiot.

 

[southsider2k5]

Ladies and Gentlemen, the Vice President of the United States of America,

 

http://newsbusters.org/blogs/scott-whitloc...ate-afghanistan

 

BIDEN: My view all along has been less important what the number is than what the strategy is. And the President laid out the strategy in the following order. Our number one enemy concern is the existential threat, al Qaeda. Number two is the stability of a nuclear state called Afghanistan, under siege by radicals. And number three, prevent the president government, while it’s gaining its sea legs to be able to be toppled or fundamentally altered by the Taliban. They- All three of those things are in place. The President's got the priorities right. The number of troops is much less important than that narrowed, clear strategy. And the expectation that we expect both the Pakistanis to step up. We expect the Afghanis to, in fact, have better governance and train up better. And we're going to be relentless in our continued pursuit, which we are doing and are succeeding in, in going after al Qaeda in Pakistan, where they are.

[mr_genius]

He'd better watch it. With all of that hate speech about the military he is going to inspire some wakko's to start shooting at military people...

 

^^^

 

[lostfan]

Ladies and Gentlemen, the Vice President of the United States of America,

 

http://newsbusters.org/blogs/scott-whitloc...ate-afghanistan

lol, Jesus Christ he's all over the place.

[EvilMonkey]

Ladies and Gentlemen, the Vice President of the United States of America,

 

http://newsbusters.org/blogs/scott-whitloc...ate-afghanistan

"And the expectation that we expect both the Pakistanis to step up. " I think he needs more than 2 of them to step up.

[southsider2k5]

http://blog.american.com/?p=7572

 

A friend sends along the following chart from a J.P. Morgan research report. It examines the prior private sector experience of the cabinet officials since 1900 that one might expect a president to turn to in seeking advice about helping the economy. It includes secretaries of State, Commerce, Treasury, Agriculture, Interior, Labor, Transportation, Energy, and Housing & Urban Development, and excludes Postmaster General, Navy, War, Health, Education & Welfare, Veterans Affairs, and Homeland Security—432 cabinet members in all.

 

When one considers that public sector employment has ranged since the 1950s at between 15 percent and 19 percent of the population, the makeup of the current cabinet—over 90 percent of its prior experience was in the public sector—is remarkable.

 

[Cknolls]

http://blog.american.com/?p=7572

 

 

 

 

 

THIS is who will create jobs?

[southsider2k5]

THIS is who will create jobs?

 

And true to form, the private sector is getting crushed, and the government is hiring at a pace not seen since the Great Depression.

[Balta1701]

Can someone demonstrate any correlation between that metric and economic performance? Hell, the Bush Admin. shows a ton of private sector experience and virtually zero job growth, that almost argues for a negative correlation.

[kapkomet]

Can someone demonstrate any correlation between that metric and economic performance? Hell, the Bush Admin. shows a ton of private sector experience and virtually zero job growth, that almost argues for a negative correlation.

Yes, we know, Bush sucketh, Obama superhero. Positive correletion.

[BigSqwert]

Yes, we know, Bush sucketh, Obama superhero. Positive correletion.

Way to avoid the question. *rolls eyes*

[mr_genius]

Can someone demonstrate any correlation between that metric and economic performance? Hell, the Bush Admin. shows a ton of private sector experience and virtually zero job growth, that almost argues for a negative correlation.

 

haha not really. Obama job growth and deficit? quick! delete the data!

 

but you are right GW sold out the country on the economy, but your lord and savior (barackus the great) hasn't done s*** except burn 1.5 trillion in 1 year and lose what 5 million jobs?

Edited December 5, 2009 by mr_genius

[Balta1701]

haha not really. count in the Obama job growth and deficit. quick! delete the data!

Ok, so you're saying there's no correlation, and hence y'all are just ranting for no reason?

[mr_genius]

Ok, so you're saying there's no correlation, and hence y'all are just ranting for no reason?

 

no, i'm saying your guy, Obama has been a complete failure. even worse the GW Bush if you take in time in office + deficit + job losses.

Edited December 5, 2009 by mr_genius