[...]  Let’s analyze this! Obama thinks that if the health-care bill passes, the Democrats will be re-elected forever, regardless of how many of us disagree with him now. We can only conclude that Democrats feel that the ‘victim’ classes will outnumber the working class by 2012 if the health-care bill passes before 2010. There is one problem with that! If the Dems lose in 2010 because the health-care bill fails to pass, the whole health-care bill will fail forever and Obama will be defeated in 2012 as he should be. Obama wants to throw his party under the bus for his personal gain. It’s all or nothing! No wonder he wants to get the bill passed right now! I can just see the arms being twisted right now, (Chicago Style), in the back rooms during the middle of the night. Maybe a little intimidation here and there? Maybe digging up dirt on fellow Democrats by using Hustler’s Larry Flynt like Bill Clinton did? I wonder what Bill Ayers would do? We already know what Andrew Stern is already doing!  http://www.floppingaces.net/2009/10/30/white-house-visitor-list-reveals-ayers-other-terrorists-and-r... [...]

Like or Dislike: 0  0

@Jerry Bowles:

This dummy shows up three days after that conversation ended and wants to know why we are still discussing it, man, that’s kind of like making a mistake. Poor old Jerry must be getting rather thin on his diet of crow. Any relation to B-Rob, Jerry?

Click the little red names, Jerry:

@Missy:

In case you missed this one, Obama-fluffer.

@Patvann:

Like or Dislike: 0  0

@Jerry Bowles: How many times did George Soros visit?

How many times did Andy Stern, of the radical union SEIU visit?

How many times did NOW’s head visit?

How about the NARAL Chick?

Seems to me YOU are the one who was punked here.

Like or Dislike: 0  0

I can’t believe you folks are still flogging this discredited story. If you look at the original list, as the nice people at The Corner did, it tells you in a simple code who the person named came to see at the White House. There are several hundred people who work there and, of course, hundreds of visitors every day. Most of them never see Obama (or whoever has the big office). Not even Rush or the seriously deranged Glenn Beck or even the famous closet job Matt Drudge are talking about this because they were NOT THE SAME PEOPLE YOU THOUGHT THEY WERE. The Michael Jordan, for example, is a former GE honcho. Give it up…you were punked.

Like or Dislike: 0  0

@Missy:

Word, this morning I was reading through some of ChrisG’s Afghanistan posts,

Yeah….I was thinking of Chris, too, as I read through B-Rob’s comments, as though he were speaking on behalf of soldiers like Chris.

If our military shared B-Rob’s opinion, you’d think the majority military vote would have been cast for Obama in ’08 and Kerry in ’04.

Like or Dislike: 0  0

As of October 30th, Obama has had a total of 20 hours with his Afghanistan team.

My son pointed out that he got about 20 hours of “free-time” while in-country for the past 6 months.

Like or Dislike: 0  0

Word, this morning I was reading through some of ChrisG’s Afghanistan posts, this one in particular stood out to me because he was talking about the condition Afghanistan was in immediately after the election.

Halfway down the post is when he mentions it:

http://www.floppingaces.net/2008/11/28/greetings-from-afghanistan/

Since then we find out prisoners are being mirandized, which would put the hurt on actionable intelligence, the general and ROEs have been changed, and Obama and team had been briefed from November on and were handed an indepth report to work with.

And, Obama is still “dithering.”

Like or Dislike: 0  0

@B-Rob #56:

in 2001, prior to the invasion of Afghanistan, we had a well equipped standing army. We were flush with cash and flush with troops. THAT was the time to hit Afghanistan with everyuthing we had. But that did not happen. Why? Because Bush and Co. decided to invade Iraq. That took troops, equipment and translators, out of the Afghanistan arena and put them into Iraq.

Only a partisan hack could skew history so….partisanly.

When did the Iraq invasion take place, again……? Troop levels in Afghanistan didn’t drop because of the planning for the invasion of Iraq in mid-2002. The only military unit “diverted” from Afghanistan to Iraq when we invaded was the 5th Special Forces Group; sent to fight al Qaeda in northern Iraq (yes, there was an al Qaeda footprint already in Iraq, prior to 2003).

And really? We diverted translators? I wasn’t aware that majority Iraqis spoke Persian Dari or Pashto.

bin Laden was already said to be out of Afghanistan by December of ‘01. We won there with minimal casualties and a light invasion force. It was brilliant. The difficulties lay in the post-war stage, and would be difficult regardless of Iraq. You know that. Bush knew that, going in. April 2002: “[T]he history of military conflict in Afghanistan….[has] been one of initial success, followed by long years of floundering and ultimate failure.”-President Bush.

Rumsfeld didn’t even believe in “nation-building” and thought “reconstruction” to be an inappropriate term, when our aid was consisting of building things up from scratch.

What else was happening that put a logjam on the wheels of progress (difficult no matter what)? The handover of the reigns to Afghanistan under NATO supervision.

Now here is where the con silliness on Obama “dithering” gets exposed for lunacy. First, what was the con response from 2005 through 2008, when the Taliban resurged in Afghanistan and we did not have enough men in that arena to put it down? Silent. What was Bush’s strategy in Afghanistan? Uh, nothin’.

As MataHarley put it:

these troops were requested back in late 2006. The call has gone out repeatedly to our NATO membership to step up to the plate over the ensuing years… and they have repeatedly refused. And those that do show up have wussy rules of engagement.

Obama was on record back then saying he wanted the US to fill in for the NATO do-nothings. McCain was on record with the military officials.. reluctant to put a more American than NATO face on the conflict. It is, after all, under NATO command and has been since summer of 2006.

In 2006, to get all the countries to sign on to the NATO plan to take over from the U.S. in Afghanistan, certain “caveats” were negotiated. Some nations agreed to send troops that would not fight; others would fight, but only in certain areas. Some sent troops in for four months, others for nine months. Troops under NATO command could fire only when fired on—but they could not start offensive operations.

This is supposed to be a multi-national force, not a US force. Increasing the US soldier footprint is more of a risk as we look more like a US occupier/problem than a cure to the Afghans themselves.

Like or Dislike: 0  0

Ok, I’ll get off my dithering and indulge you some more, out of boredom….

@B-Rob #46:

(6) last but not least, Bush was asleep at the switch on 9/11.**

wordsmith #37:

with some of his political appointments still not in key positions due to the 2000 election results and partisanship on the part of Senator Levin and others; for nearly 7 months, confirmation hearings for Feith and a couple of other top advisors for Rumsfeld were held up. The incoming Pentagon policy team had no legal or political authority to do their jobs.

By your logic, do you give credit to President Bush for keeping America safe for the succeeding years to the end of his term?

Contrast this to:

1993 – WTC Bombing
1995 – Khobar Towers
1998 – Africa Attacks
2000 – Cole Attack

“Bush was asleep at the wheel”, yet you’re giving Clinton a pass? AND call yourself “Republican”?

Please offer a substantive explanation at exactly what you mean by “Bush was asleep at the switch on 9/11″ so I can rip into that one.

I thought Bush would be a good president, but I was wrong. He ended up being about as bad as Carter.

Why do I say this? Because I measure a president by one question: “Has he been successful in maintaining the military, political, economic, and technological superiority of the United States of America?” On this scale, and looking back 60 years or so, I would rank Roosevelt, Reagan and Clinton on the superior scale.

Clinton downscaled our military by half. The number of divisions of our military went from 18 to 10; the number of wings in the Air Force from 24 to 13; the number of Navy vessels cut by over half, from 600 to below 300. Research and development of new weapons were undercut while other nations pushed ahead with defense-building.

Lt. Col. “Buzz” Patterson’s book, “Dereliction of Duty”, pg 106-7:

When Vice President Al Gore was given the task of “reinventing government”, he and the White House took credit for removing 305,000 people from the government payroll. What they ddin’t tell you was that 286,000 of those cuts- more than 90 percent- came from employees of the Department of Defense.

~~~

The president also gutted morale. He immediately froze military pay at a time when it had already fallen behind the private sector by almost 20 percent. The pay freeze was especially egregious when approximately 80 percent of the force was earning less than $30,000 annually and more than twenty thousand enlisted personnel were eligible for food stamps. [source citation: "Clinton Can Undo the Damages in Military Morale", by David Hackworth in Newsweek, June 28, 1993, 24-5.]

According to James Risen in his anti-Bush book, Clinton

began slashing the intelligence budget in search of a peace dividend, and Bill Clinton showed almost no interest in intelligence matters.

~~~

Over a three-or-four-year period in the early-to-mid 1990s, virtually an entire generation of CIA officers – the people who had won the Cold War – quit or retired. One CIA veteran compared the agency to an airline that had lost all of is senior pilots

~~~

Morale [at the CIA] plunged to new lows, and the agency became paralyzed by an aversion to high-risk espionage operations for fear they would lead to political flaps. Less willing to take big risks, the CIA was less able to recruit spies in dangerous places such as Iraq.

This perspective is echoed by Robert Baer (not a Bush fan, either) in his book, “See No Evil”, where the former CIA operative and veteran case officer mentions a number of times how the Agency under Clinton was becoming “risk-averse”.

Under the Clinton Administration, the CIA’s standards for recruiting spies was impossible to meet. Spies, by the very nature that they are willing to sell out their own countries, are unsavory characters. Clinton set the bar so high on ethic standards, it made recruitment of high-value spies near impossible.

One reason why we suffered intelligence failure on Iraq’s current state in 2002-2003, was that we did not have a single HUMINT on the ground.

“Technological superiority” you say, as a measuring rod? Yeah….I guess Clinton gets credit for selling out missile and nuclear technology to China. Under Clinton, in 1998,

China had gained access to highly classified secrets on the most advanced thermonuclear warheads from the nation’s national laboratories run by the Department of Energy- pg 11, Dereliction of Duty

Foreign nationals from sensitive countries like China, North Korea, Iran, and the former Soviet Union were given access to national laboratories and DOE headquarters. Energy secretary Hazel O’Leary ended the standard security practice of requiring colored security badges in these sensitive areas, citing that such practice was “discriminatory”.

Should Clinton take blame/credit for this? Happened under his watch. The “wall” between the CIA and FBI occurred in 1995. Who do we blame for that? The PotUS at the time with 5 yrs to fix it, or the one down the road, 9 months into office?

What if he decided to hold off on Iraq and let the inspectors from the IAEA do their job, then trusted in their analysis?

Then we’d find ourselves repeating the same as we did throughout the 90′s, with this cat-and-mouse/hide-and-seek game. Saddam was initially shocked when Bush diverged from the Clinton approach and actually meant what he said when he threatened to bring down Saddam’s regime [60 Minutes interview with George Piro and Ronald Kessler's The Terrorist Watch].

Inspections weren’t working as far as instilling confidence in the international community that Saddam was disarmed. Sure, there were some successes under UNSCOM; but neither UNSCOM nor it’s watered-down, inspection-lite reincarnation, UNMOVIC, could prove with 100% certainty that Saddam was effectively disarmed. Saddam himself perpetuated the uncertainty, in part, as a defense against Iran. But the burden of proof was indeed upon Saddam- or should have been; not on the UN inspectors who were never intended to be weapons hunters in the first place, searching a country the size of California for wmd material. We also know from post-war documents that have been translated, of Saddam intentionally deceiving inspectors. Luck at finding illegal items, like fishing gyroscopes (the main component of a missile’s guidance system) out of the Tigris, is bound to run out. In 1995, it is only by sheer luck that we discovered some 1.5 million pages of documents thanks to the defection of Saddam’s son-in-law, Hussein Kamal; not thanks to any IAEA inspections. They had missed much of the hidden nuclear weapons program, as revealed through the help of Kamal.

Why should we gamble the lives of the world and rest our hopes on another Hussein Kamal (murdered by Saddam) defecting, let alone 100% success of UN inspections? Everyone knows Saddam was intentionally deceiving and hiding things he shouldn’t have, yet we continue to play this insane cat-and-mouse charade?

So you tell me what you think would have been accomplished by inspectors “doing their job” and “trusting their analysis” (Recall them missing anything important? Why don’t you do the research on that one

If he had done these things, he would be on Mount Rushmore. Instead, he did not even get a prime time speaking position at the GOP convention this summer, did he?

In the present, President Bush is damaged goods. Historians 50 years from now will put him in a better light.

** The efforts to blame Bill Clinton are ahistoric and laughable.

I play this game with you, because you choose to blame Bush for activities that began before his watch; yet absolve Clinton of all responsibility. And being the partisan you are, don’t acknowledge the succeeding years after 9/11 in which the country was kept safe, due to the pro-active response of the Bush Administration in taking the fight to the Islamic terrorists.

8 years vs. 9 months. You do the math.

Like the birthers, not really worth getting into here once you mention “Osama bin Laden is determined to strike in the United States” and do NOTHING in response.

Lol….and “duh”. So where was the actionable intelligence?

Like or Dislike: 0  0

Oh my….

@Curt #72:

There is really nothing to respond to. Wordsmith’s was not a substantive commentary. It was more akin to a lawyer getting up in oral argument and rather than responding to the other side’s argument, spends his 15 minutes talking about how the lawyer’s suit was not flattering and reminds him of a grandpa’s funeral suit.

ROFL…..just what I thought.

And I note have I not seen ANYONE deal with, nonetheless dispute the substance of my commentary.

You say as your avoid arguments with the commentary of other commenters. Speaks volumes.

Bingo, Curt! You nailed it, solid.

I seem to also recall early on, how he crybabied over me “changing the subject”. And then he’s all over the map wanting to air his own peeves and stand on his little soapbox in a bubble.

Oh, and isn’t this quite simply the pol pot calling the kettle…

@B-Rob #61:

Morons

@B-Rob #67:

So, moron,

Then in the same comment #67, goes on to chastise:

You resting on name calling is sophmoric

You’re a real sophomore, you know that?

But go ahead and say it: “Your side engages in it. My side is pure.” Rofl!!!

@B-Rob #66:

@ Wordsmith and Curt –

There is really nothing to respond to. Wordsmith’s was not a substantive commentary. It was more akin to a lawyer getting up in oral argument and rather than responding to the other side’s argument, spends his 15 minutes talking about how the lawyer’s suit was not flattering and reminds him of a grandpa’s funeral suit.

Projection much?

As Curt said:

And I note have I not seen ANYONE deal with, nonetheless dispute the substance of my commentary.

You say as your avoid arguments with the commentary of other commenters. Speaks volumes.

And while you selectively ignore what you can’t address, funny you should then go on to say

@B-Rob #67:

And I note have I not seen ANYONE deal with, nonetheless dispute the substance of my commentary. Not the four years, not the stress on the army, . . . nothing. Oh, sure, you cons throw a lot of verbiage around. But substance? None.

Who’s throwing a lot of verbiage around? You. Substance? Quite lacking.

You’re out here passing a lot of gas while the rest of us are laughing.

Do you still want to stick to your original argument, btw? Because you’re effectively behaving like what you claim to hate and ONLY see coming from “the rightwing”.

Like or Dislike: 0  0