Politicus… touch meine monkey!

Does Medicare Part D cover that?

Sometimes I’m concerned that I might be slipping into partisanship myself. Oh well, I’m trying to quit before I “tip my hand.”

And Madeline Albright thinks 500,000 dead Iraqi children as a result of Bill Clinton’s policies is “worth it” check out her words:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbIX1CP9qr4&feature=player_embedded

I’m surprised HE didn’t win a Nobel for that one.

Another Inconvenient Truth for Democrats.

Silly me. I was thinking of FDR or Truman.

In any event, grousing around in moments of more indulgent history just muddies the water concerning what Obama faces. If the W’s wet dream of being a “war time President” — even if that didn’t actually involve WINNING any wars — Obama will do well enough if he becomes the best “garbage collector President” by mapping an “on-the-ground,” actual solution to this train wreck.

That will begin by not making things any worse than they are, a concept not necessarily inconsistent with a troop build up. I am amazed at the number of otherwise rather enlightened pundits who are prepared to throw Barack Obama under the bus based on adolescent “talking point/bumper sticker” reasoning, devoid of much troublesome in-depth understanding.

We elected him because he is frighteningly clever and intelligent. The fact is, although all these talking heads are saying that he has already taken too long to solve absolutely everything in keeping with their whimsical perfection fantasies, he hasn’t done bad at all in his first year in office.

My compliments to the President. I will trust him to the hilt until something better comes along.

It does not matter which president would do it best because we have this president for another 3 years so we’ll give him a shot and see how it goes.

Maybe it will help to remember that Democratic Presidents have a pretty good record of winning such conflicts.

The rest of you guys should get a soapbox.

Toss in a near traitor who is friends with the ben Laden family, willing to veto a potentially successful military action at Tora Bora on a whim, and the odds start getting more and more even.

They will make us pay in blood for every inch of beautiful Afghanistan we intend to occupy. The only advantage our H-bombs enjoy is that they are already paid for.

Leave it to a neo-con to carefully select techno-genocide as the path to victory after he’s decided that all the other possibilities aren’t macho enough.

Yup. Yup.

I thought that the whole idea behind the creation of the United States was more along the lines of justice, democracy, human rights and so forth rather than aggression, torture and destruction…

As Americans, we have already had our now famous Guantanemo interrogation practices “thrown in our faces” by petty thugs internationally. Just think, we dared to criticise the way they were tearing people’s arms and legs off by comparing their bad habits to our own — clearly superior and much more civilized — “shining city on the hill” approach!

Rats. What now? Maybe if we wait long enough everyone will just forget about it.

Hm-m-m-m. Waiting …

btw, it’s time for an update to the best story ever blogged
“Neocons on Parade” – the Bomb Reality show with NO END in sight.

that’s the ONLY Real mission of afghanistan.

they could hire the folks from FOX Reality Channel to help them spin it, since they are so effective at it already.
(ie: glenn beck show, RHOA; RHOOC; RHODC- coming soon)

honestly if they wanted the war in afghanistan to end, all they need is to go to the warehouse in dc where they keep the leftover vietnam era chemicals, and do a flyby dump. trust us, the vietnamese taught us a very important lesson -
pay attention to who is on the supplyside of the war economy and Invest Like a Drunken Sailor. We hate war but we love money so why not make everybody rich, by proclaiming Agent Orange the Saviour of the Day.

Whooo Ha ! I’m sure you see that this is a better fantasy than that stuff you are discussing above.

By the way, I am certainly not blaming Obama for getting us into Afghanistan, or Iraq. Quite the contrary. He did indeed inherit those wars from the neocons. Also, it is sometimes harder to disentangle oneself from a war, than to get involved in one and we cannot expect instant results. At the same time, since we are involved and since we are probably about to get involved further, could somebody provide us and the troops as well with a reasonably clearly-stated mission statement for Afghanistan?

I will not even bother to request one for Iraq, as that one was such a total and complete failure of logic, decency, intellect and competence, that defining a mission statement in Iraq’s case would be akin to trying to believe in the great “leadership” and “patriotism” of the Bush 43 clique.

All of these comments have a very reasonable basis, and all bear directly on the questions faced by the President. However, all these comments also lack much evidence of a careful consideration of the nuances of the situation. Obama cannot make any headway with overly simplistic sorts of topical decisions. The war is much more sophisticated than that. Some choices which might seem relevant in an environment of over simplification don’t really exist in the reality of what’s going on right now.

There is no “on/off” switch once a few billion dollars worth of stuff has been inserted in theatre, 100,000 troops from six or eight countries have been committed to combat there, and all the “enemy combatants” have been royally pissed off by terrible decisions made in the past.

We probably shouldn’t stay and we probably shouldn’t leave, and Obama had nothing to do with creating this disaster. We will just have to grow up enough to take one more of the continuing bashings of the W’s cynical willingness to sacrifice absolutely anything to his throne of domestic propaganda.

It seems that there are simply not enough hill billies and bigots left willing to join up to fight yet another desperate, ridiculous hang over of W’s War on Terror.

Harrison should trot out a name of someone he thinks might do a better job of being President. It’s very classy to simply not like anyone — not Reagan (highest tax increase ever), Bush Sr. (no new taxes, uh…), Clinton (national debt descended to less than $50 billion after Reagan and Bush Sr.) or Bush Jr. (national debt ascended to ten trillion) or Obama, trying to make sense out of it.

I’m not impressed.

And I fully agree with Zabihullah Mujahid. It would be a lunatic idea, because the idea is to speak to the Taliban, not what our bureaucrats define as “moderate Taliban”. Would they even know who is who among the Taliban, if most of them don’t know which end is up?

Besides, that story and that offer are from April. Since then the Taliban have made quite a few gains and we still don’t know what our mission in Afghanistan is.

“This matter was also raised in the past,” said Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid, referring to comments last month by Obama, who spoke of reaching out to moderate Taliban.

“They have to go and find the moderate Taliban, their leader and speak to them. This is a lunatic idea,” Mujahid said by telephone from an unknown location.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1166477/U-S-peace-offer-Afghanistan-lunatic-idea-says-Taliban.html

The reality seems to be that unless they are given a role in the government, they will keep on fighting. Is that the goal?

Well since the Taliban don’t believe in a coalition governmnet or any government besides one run 100% by them I don’t see how this could be a “mistake” as you say.