Obama did it. Not only can he command the use of Air Force One, he has the power to humble a commanding general. He is the man. Obama is reinvigorated, cocked headed, jaw stiffened, kick assed locked and loaded and looking for fresh meat to take down.
All of his past indignities will be healed as the electrifying surge of power pulses through his veins. Who is next?
Oh, I know this guy. Just watch.
________________
Kicking the general's ass
The McChrystal affair has revived doubts about Barack Obama's qualities as a war president
I'm so tired of politics and my wife is too we are just waiting for November but she has taken up using my camera and she took some beautiful pictures of the phlox in the countryside of which there are many varieties but here they are white and purple interspersed, just lovely, my favorite flower, though they don't last long. Obama can go suck gas, hopefully in November we'll at least have a deadlock.
ReplyDeleteI go back to my old theme that the guy isn't even constitutionally eligible to be President, his father being a Kenyan, but we can't get a court to rule on it, maybe in November with a different Congress we'll see a little meaningful action.
ReplyDeleteI honestly don't have any idea what to do about Afghanistan, except use the B-52s. That would wake them up, and save American lives. McChrystal or Petreaus, I don't see it makes much difference, we need a General Grant, to put an end to it.
ReplyDeleteAs for President Grant, his experiences in the Mexican War solidified his feelings towards the US use of force, against weak opponents. He detested the very idea of the US exploiting its' military strength on those unable to defend themselves from it.
ReplyDeleteHow he'd feel, about bombing a civilian population from 50,000 feet, because of what some foreign element, a decade prior, did in their country. Those foreign elements now having been long departed the AO.
As he wrote in his memoirs:
. . . For myself, I was bitterly opposed to the measure, and to this day regard the war [with Mexico] which resulted as one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation. It was an instance of a republic following the bad example of European monarchies, ...
Before long, however, the same people -- who with permission of Mexico had colonized Texas, and afterwards set up slavery there, and then seceded as soon as they felt strong enough to do so -- offered themselves and the State to the United States, and in 1845 their offer was accepted. The occupation, separation and annexation were, from the inception of the movement to its final consummation, a conspiracy to acquire territory out of which slave states might be formed for the American Union.
...
It is to the credit of the American nation, however, that after conquering Mexico, and while practically holding the country in our possession, so that we could have retained the whole of it, or made any terms we chose, we paid a round sum for the additional territory taken; more than it was worth, or was likely to be, to Mexico. To us it was an empire and of incalculable value; but it might have been obtained by other means. The Southern rebellion was largely the outgrowth of the Mexican war. Nations, like individuals, are punished for their transgressions. We got our punishment in the most sanguinary and expensive war of modern times.
He'd leave Afghanistan to the Afghani.
He was a smart and honorable man, that U.S. Grant.
SOURCE: U. S. Grant, Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant (New York, 1885), pages 22-24.
ReplyDelete"He'd leave Afghanistan to the..."
ReplyDelete...Taliban.
Let's at least be honest about the consequences, hm?
Well ok maybe Grant wasn't the best choice.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand living is a lot better in the US than it is in Mexico.
desert rat said...
ReplyDeleteNot once have I even surfed to the Daily Kos, let alone read it, wouldn't know it if I saw it.
Don't read the "Oil Drum" either.
I avoid extremest propaganda, when ever possible.
Just a note of correction...
Rat lies, distorts and screams extremest propaganda whenever possible..
I personally do not trust ONE thing he states.
He is a jew baiting liar.
have a nice day...
Doug's link, previous thread:
ReplyDelete"The priority of the Biden-Bacevich approach is on destroying Al Qaeda, not the Taliban and its affiliated insurgent groups. It is a counterterrorism approach that would require at most 30,000 troops, not the current nation-building strategy which necessitates six times that many."
Uh huh.
Problem is that we've passed the point at which this is a truly viable option. A few years ago? Sure. Now?
You'd be staging 30K troops out of a few bases in a shattered state rapidly devolving into one big narco-terror theme park with a more or less free flow of AQ into Taliban-held territory. And that's assuming that Kabul held and whatever central authority resides there still welcomes us to sit in Bagram and Kandahar and Asadabad.
And Joe Fucking Biden was added to the Democrat ticket for his foreign and defense policy credentials.
ReplyDeleteGotta love it.
From the NYTimes:
ReplyDeleteThe White House certainly has an enormous interest in portraying Mr. Obama as a president who has grown comfortable with his powers and is unafraid to exercise them. They conceded that Mr. Obama had no legal basis to force BP to create the $20 billion fund; they said he was making a moral argument, and used the jawboning power of the presidential pulpit to push the company.
“I think we used this week or so not only for a reassertion of executive authority, but as an demonstration that, when presidential power is judiciously applied, you can get a lot done,” said Rahm Emanuel, the president’s chief of staff, who argued for a more confrontational approach to BP and for General McChrystal’s ouster. He described financial reform legislation as one of five pillars of “a new foundation” for the economy, after the stimulus package, the health care overhaul and the re-engineering of college aid. (The fifth, an energy bill, may prove the hardest.)
ReplyDeleteThe five pillars, huh?
But those aQ elements are already operating, with a lot of freedom, in Pakistan.
ReplyDeleteSo the idea that by occupying Afghanistan we are putting a damper on aQ operations, highly debatable.
That we are giving them a more local target thereby securing our own homeland, with the Afghan operation, true enough.
But we could still be an irritation that aQ had to deal with, on a much smaller footprint.
The Goal is to not allow for aQ attacks upon our country, with our forward deployments acting as both a magnet for their terror and a hammer to smite them with.
As for "misdirection" he is the one that continually brings up religion, and baiting.
ReplyDeleteNot me.
I'll continue to speak to the policies that Israel maintains that are contrary to the national interests of the United States, but to conflate Israel with Judaism, that's purely Eurotrash propaganda.
I have no idea what to do about Afghanistan. It's a bitch, stay, go or blow the fucker up. I just don't want to see our people bleed anymore, so I dream of B-52s.
ReplyDelete"So the idea that by occupying Afghanistan we are putting a damper on aQ operations, highly debatable."
ReplyDeleteCome again? In what goddamned parallel universe do AQ and elements of the Afghan Taliban have no relationship?
In what parallel universe do they confine themselves to Pakistan alone?
In what parallel universe is AQ uninterested in seeing a Taliban (re)takeover in Afghanistan?
And you know, that worked out so well for us the last time around.
"But we could still be an irritation that aQ had to deal with..."
ReplyDeleteAn irritation.
Good God.
I give up.
Besides, I have an equally unenjoyable day ahead running around the city.
You have fun, Rat.
O b.s.---to be anti-Israel IS to be anti-Semitic today---and Israel IS, or should be, our best friend over there, and our national interests should be tied to those of Israel.
ReplyDeleteFOR G-Ds SAKE THEY ARE THE ONLY SANE COUNTRY IN THE WHOLE AREA
THEY haven't used their nuclear arsenal to bomb the hell out of everyone else.
THEY have been very responsible.
IMAGINE WHAT THE IRANIANS OR SYRIANS OR EGYPTIANS MIGHT HAVE DONE!!
Best to you, Trish.
ReplyDeleteRemember to put that seat belt on.
Most accidents happen only a few miles from home.
Andy McCarthy writing at NRO:
ReplyDeleteI got in some hot water here last year for arguing that Gen. McChrystal, for all his undeniable valor, is a progressive big-thinker who has been conducting a sociology experiment in Islamic nation-building. It's a flawed experiment that assumes Afghan Muslims will side with us — i.e., the Westerners their clerical authorities tell them are infidel invaders and occupiers — against their fellow Afghan Muslims.
Nothing in the ensuing months changes my mind. To the contrary, what I've seen lately indicates that, while our troops are imperiled under strait-jacketing rules of engagement imposed by Gen. McChrystal to avoid offending Afghans, Christian missionaries have been suspended for preaching (proselytism for any belief-system other than Islam is illegal in Afghanistan). I've seen Asia News's report that Afghan converts to Christianity have been sentenced to death for apostasy. All this, moreover, is happening under the new constitution we helped write, which (as the State Department bragged in 2004) enshrines sharia as Afghanistan's fundamental law. That is, the Afghan Muslim population our troops are fighting and dying to protect has institutionalized the persecution of other populations (when the said Muslims are not otherwise busy killing each other).
In the Examiner, Byron points to Rolling Stone's account of a frustrated American soldier, lamenting the death of a fellow soldier killed because of the rules of engagement. "You sit and ask yourself," says the soldier, "What are we doing here?" I don't know, but whatever it is, it is not what Americans thought they were sending our military to Afghanistan to do.
I did not say to give them "Free Rein", trish, but to lessen our footprint, there.
ReplyDeleteNot at all the same thing.
Exfoliate the opium, instead of protecting it.
That's the first change in policy, if we are fighting the independent funding of the Taliban.
We could still protect those fields that remain loyal to our proxy government, in Kabul. But any fields not paying the Kabul Government the appropriate tax, we defoliate, from the air.
No need to bomb the women and children, just make them economically dependent upon our good graces.
While cutting the funding of the insurrectionists.
desert rat said...
ReplyDeleteAs for "misdirection" he is the one that continually brings up religion, and baiting.
Not me.
You are so full of shit your shoes make squishing sounds when you walk..
You lie, you Jew bait, you distort, you invent, you are an all around toad of a human.
But let me not mince words...
You are scum..
No matter that you can cut and paste like a bunny...
Your words are suspect..
Your bias is known...
and if it were legal?
I have you hung....
have a nice day jackass...
(unlike you, I do not murder)
And the connection is cultural. Our story, and it's all story, that's what culture really is, goes so deep, we even have a prophet here in America, his name is MOSES, if we haven't forgotten, what with our tv's, radios and what not, as I've tried to point out on several occasions. When I go to church, as I do once in a while, we read what we call the "Old Testiment" then we read what we call "The New". We have a process of reading that takes about 3 years, the whole cycle, I think it is, and we read the high points of the whole thing. Our whole culture is based on those writings, and we wouldn't be the people we are without those writings. It is the basics of our whole society, such as it is, and therefore, we should support Israel, and the Jewish people, it is in our national security interests, our deepest ones, because there is more to life than oil.
ReplyDeleteWhat does McCarthy have to say about Stan's replacement and his shared COIN policies?
ReplyDeleteI think a lot of people take a badly mistaken, shorthand view of this as two Generals in opposing camps and I think some of this is driven by a weird and equally mistaken notion of Obama's General v. Bush's General. (There is also the lingering suspicion and dislike of the unconventional and clandestine crowd, and the comfort factor with traditional soldiers. I thought we'd gotten over that.)
Well, again, no one has Stan to kick around anymore and Dave is left to own...whatever success we can wring out of this.
God bless him.
All right, that's it. I really am going.
ReplyDeleteGuarding the Poppies. How low have we fallen?
ReplyDeleteThe U.S. of A. Just another Thug running a "Protection Racket." Al Capone would be proud.
90,000 of our Best Young People, trudging around in a foreign purgatory, waiting to die.
Led by Charlatons, and Idiots.
Asking, "Why?"
Vietnam, Redux.
We should ALL go to Hell for this.
Palin says, "Drill, Baby, Drill."
ReplyDeleteNewt says, "Build Roads in Afghanistan - $100B/yr."
God help me, if Ron Paul runs I'll vote for him.
Poor misdirection, he did not have the will to stay away, nor the self-discipline to stay on any suitable topic, other than to hurl continued personal insults, without any gain to be had, by anyone.
ReplyDeleteExemplifying, once again, the intellectual vacuum he operates in.
And I would sincerely appreciate it if, before the day is over, someone would agree with absolutely everything I've said.
ReplyDeleteAh, hell, I'll agree with everything you've said, just buckle up!
ReplyDeleteAfter a thorough rereading of her remarks, I can truthfully say that, "I am in one hundred percent agreement with what Trish said"
ReplyDelete:)
I agree with Trish in all the instances in which she agreed with Ron Paul.
ReplyDeletetrish wrote:
ReplyDelete"In what parallel universe is AQ uninterested in seeing a Taliban (re)takeover in Afghanistan?
And you know, that worked out so well for us the last time around."
If heroin is a worry at least they kept the industry at bay.
What was so bad about last time for US? The AQ camp? If you did a cost/benefit analysis between 'then' and 'now', you know, add some figures to the proposition do you really think, on balance, we are better off 'now' as opposed to 'then'? Are we that much better defended? Karzai and cronies really worth the blood and treasure? Have we really given Pakistan a good leg up?
Trish seems to have a hell of a lot of support.
ReplyDeletePity Red left. She was getting into the only practical thing to do and that of course is to start from where we are, not where we would like.
ReplyDeleteI believed at the time that our response to 911 should have been focused militarily at Afghanistan specifically the AQ camps and their support structure with no regard to borders with Warziristan.
Personally I favored the iconic value of two mushroom clouds going up over each camp to compliment and juxtapose the two towers coming down.
It should have been breathtaking disproportionate with zero concern for collateral damage. It should have lasted a few weeks to a month, with no additional follow-up except a credible promise for a round two for anyone that had the stomach to try it.
The Saudis and Pakistanis would have been punished in different ways that would have hurt them and in the Saudi case in a way that would have threatened the seizure of their oil fields, a reverse Aramco de-nationalization, if the Saudis even hinted about withholding their oil and did not concede to every American demand. The Princes of Saud would have gone through the bowing to a deep sincere and lengthy genuflection.
That was then. Reality is now.
The obsession with these wars of cultural reformation should be halted. No lengthy winding downs.
They should be replaced with a focused attack on AQ, Taliban belligerents and support groups and including the drug infrastructure in Afghanistan and the supporting distribution anywhere and at anytime.
If the Taliban in a particular area was hostile to the domestic security of the US and were interwoven into a village then the entire village would be sufficiently small a focus for US retaliation.
Forget defoliation of drug fields. Destroy the entire farm, the inhabitants and workers in the field. Kill the agents of distribution wherever they are, the closer to the source the better.
This is the only thing that that has a chance at working.
Establish a policy of non-intervention but violent broad retaliation for attacks against the US.
Remove hardened US bases from as many foreign countries as is possible.
Focus on the use of economic power which includes a national priority that treats economic power on a parallel with military might.
In other words, "Go Roman."
ReplyDeletePoor misdirection, he did not have the will to stay away, nor the self-discipline to stay on any suitable topic, other than to hurl continued personal insults, without any gain to be had, by anyone.
ReplyDeleteChrist, you've called me so many names, and attacked my wife, my family, my back ground, without reason, you living piece of shit.
I add to clarify, that I distinguish between what the Taliban do to themselves and their people and what they do to support attacks against the US on US soil.
ReplyDeleteWhat they do to themselves and their reluctant supporters or unfortunate victims is a pity but we have not demonstrated an ability to do much about it at an acceptable cost.
I don't have to read Trish's comments to agree with her, she's a woman....nuff said. But I did read them just as I read about Hitler's dream in a book, cause, I do read things other than the back of a hair color box.
ReplyDeleteAnd I'm really sick of the unnecessary name calling in this place.
Destroy the Drug Trade? Do you have any idea how many jobs of the "Elites" that would end? How much of our "economy" is devoted to fighting the "war" on drugs?
ReplyDeleteWay better, 10,000 times better to have the "war" than to have victory.
The only thing that makes any sense, NOW, it to bring the troops home, and concentrate on reviving our economy.
Screen passengers from Afghanistan, and Saudi F'n Arabia.
Remember, the only way 9-11 happened was absolutely pathetic, horrible enforcement by our own customs, and FBI.
Ride out of town on a rail ANY idiot General that tries to pretend that nonsensical piddling around in Afghanistan could have Any positive effect, whatsoever, on our long-term goals of "Security," and "Global Respect."
Bob...
ReplyDeleteThe Rodent LIVES on chaos..
He is the perfect Rules for Radicals practitioner..
He points fingers and accuses others of the very things he does....
There is no actual POINT to debate with a serial liar like the Rodent.
His area of expert knowledge is that of throwing firebombs...
I never stated I was leaving
I never left.
I just dont debate the Rodent anymore..
He is a lowlife scum sucker...
I merely point that fact out to any and all that may visit..
Desert Rat is scum
That's is the message of the day...
MeLoDy said...
ReplyDeleteI don't have to read Trish's comments to agree with her, she's a woman....nuff said.
Come on..
Just cause someone doesnt give them inside knowledge of the secrets of the universe...
There are numerous women in the world that i wouldnt wipe my ass with their writings..
As for Trish?
Dont care about her gender, I care that she has a decent brain
I went ahead and put up a post that was in the queue from yesterday What are you do now Mr. President?
ReplyDeleteWhere the fuck is that sarcasm font? Good Lord.
ReplyDeleteHey Mel, how's it going?
ReplyDeleteI don't care what bobal hayseed says, I like your feet, polish and all.
Whit, didn't see it...sent it top-side.
ReplyDeleteThanks Whit, you're so kind.
ReplyDelete...but don't think those brownie points are gonna get that picture any higher than those feet. ; )
I got reprimanded for my comment yesterday by she who must be obeyed so like Jack Falstaff and discretion being the better part of valor, I abstain.
ReplyDeletebobal hayseed
ReplyDeleteheh--you may like her feet, but I LOVE them, I'd suck her toes--I just thought there was a little too much polish, and besides I'm not supposed to be 'obsessing' anymore, so I got to find something wrong.
Darn!
ReplyDelete"She who must be obeyed" should have reprimanded you...
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteSorry, I guess that was a little to bold for the bar. I'll behave....
ReplyDeleteI missed that comment deleted, but as a long time lover of red toes, I'd sure like to see it.
ReplyDeleteHmmm, this thread seems headed in a good direction. I'll add that Melody's feet are so highly suggestive that they engender an overwhelming desire to head north!
ReplyDeleteAnd, I throw in 100% with everything Trish said, as well ad Deuce, especially the twin "shroom" clouds!
Last but not least, WIO seems to have a pretty good handle on DR. Never seen anyone else who seems to thrive so much on antagonism and doing all possible to NOT get along. Best strategy for dealing with him is to NEVER take him seriously, ignore/don't read him most of the time and when you screw up and do read something he wrote, call him out on his most egregious errors in logic or truthfulness. He is basically nothing but a troll, so treat him as such.
I should have been reprimanded.
ReplyDeleteI gotta disagree with Mel on this one I've never toyed with the hearts of the boys in my life I may be a slut but if I turn 'em on they will get a ride I always give 'em that satisfaction.
ReplyDeleteI am curious just what Mary can do about this :P
ReplyDelete