AstroProdigy

Mission accomplished!

Just wanted to point out: criticizing his methods his one thing, but as to "level of success" at keeping america safe, I don't think theres anything to really complain about. Like cancer said, we haven't had another major attack. Really? Because our ports are wide open in case terrorists wanted to attack. The whole "fight them over there so we don't fight them over here" is a delaying tactic. They build momentum as you continue violent occupations with corrupt puppet governments so that later they'll have a lot more power than they do now. But I guess then you can blame it on a future president and wipe Bush's destructive legacy clean. The whole reason they got the momentum needed to do 9/11 was because they fought a long war with the Soviets and got an ample recruiting ground for the future. Iraq has provided them with another recruiting ground and the repercussions are already starting to come out in much of the Muslim world with battle hardened returning insurgents. The Afghanistan/Pakistan border has turned into what Afghanistan once was except now it threatens a large, nuclear armed Muslim country. The fallout for Bush will be felt for years to come on terrorism alone not to mention global warming and the great neoliberal scam and people will and do blame America in general for electing him twice. But anyway more specifically back to your question if 4000 dead American soldiers and trillions of dollars squandered for a horribly inefficient American version of imperialism that will give us blowback for years if not decades to come counts as success then yes you're right. After all the economic crisis caused by Reagan blew up under Bush Sr. so all those conservatives who have a hard on for Reagan can blame it on Bush for being to moderate just like every economic problem starting from day 1 of Obama's term caused by Bush will be blamed on Obama (some are even blaming the period after the election when Bush was still in power and the economy was continuing to spiral on Obama already) and a future terrorist attack will be blamed on Obama by all those conservative sheep. I just hope people have finally smartened up to the bullshit (unlike the countless other times).

He made it one of the hardest presidencies in recent history. 9/11 got him 90% approval ratings making it incredibly easy to get positive things done if he wanted to. New Orleans was a giant failure partly to blame being Bush's cronyism which is his fault. The Tsunami didn't do shit to make his presidency harder and I don't know what other bullshit you can tack on to try to defend this utter failure. One thing we know is there hasn't been a terrorist attack in 7 years unless you count all the constant terrorist attacks on our troops "not a terrorist attack" because it was during our own hostile occupation. Sure if you change the definition then you're right. Clinton didn't get thousands of troops killed in an utterly pointless war (for America at least) that was based on doctored evidence that very damn well has links to the highest levels of government. They wanted this war so bad they were willing to use any college students paper and ignore the CIA's statements to get it. Clinton may have had his own problems, but Bush makes him look like George Washington. He's only human is a dam bullshit response. I bet even you could have made a better president than him because at least you wouldn't be a massively corrupted former playboy now born again ignoramus with his life handed to him on a silver platter. We'd probably all make better decisions than him. There is no excuse for Iraq and the more evidence that will come out on this in the future the more it will be proven that Iraq had nothing to do with keeping America safe at any point.

Looks like a shit fest excuse of a thread with a couple of racists spewing their ignorance all over it.

Therefor is was a fine desision to take the Muslims off the plane. When they were cleared by the FBI and the airline still didn't let them on the next plane they made the correct decision. Think about it, you have say 100 people on a plane that you own, you want to put their lives in danger and risk losing a plane for the sake of a few people? All that should have happened was they get angry, fly on another airline so the company only lose a few passangers. Shit happens, they should just deal with it. I would rather fly with an airline like that rather than an airline that lets anybody on. You do understand sarcasm right? Shit happens is not a good excuse for discrimination. It's not a disregard for what anyone else says. I skimmed through the topic because I didn't have the time to read it all. Most of it is LOSA arguing with people anyway. No you just got clearly proven wrong on your argument that there's no safer place on a plane and responded by saying basically "sure there's facts, but I'll believe whatever I want anyway".

Sure thing why do we even allow Muslims to live among us? You never know no one ever knows anything for sure if they did then there wouldn't ever be surprises. And I still say something that's just been proven wrong conclusively is still correct because I don't want to admit I'm wrong. I noticed you only skimmed through the topic since you have a complete disregard for anything anyone else says.

There are practically no Jews in the Arab world, though. A few tens of thousands each live in Turkey and Iran, but these aren't Arab countries. Considering all the bad blood a power sharing agreement it would take a long time before a power sharing agreement could work. Edit: Cyber Propaganda Let's wait for the responses then!

Here's the link to the interview it's been updated to include more than I watched last time Here Woot! Sever the Jews didn't live in peace with Arabs for very long throughout their history. The fact is Muslims may have been better to the Jews than Christians were historically, but that isn't saying much. There were periodic pogroms and massacres whenever there was chaos (comparable to the way Assyrians are the big losers in Iraq since 2003) or when a particular leader didn't like them. Jews would have probably done the same thing to Muslims and Christians if they dominated large swaths of land. That was how it was then and now that there is so much bad blood between the Jews and the Arabs it's impossible unless there is some serious reconciliation over a long period.

If a suburban white kid is walking through the projects and thugs attack him that's criminals doing something wrong which you can prosecute against, but then again they're criminals. A more comparable scenario is a white kid in the projects being harassed by black cops. That needs to be made an example of. The selfish part of your whole argument as that we should all just think for ourselves in the short term and not care about the repercussions. If there were clear discrimination going on against me first I'd try to reason and then if the people are so racist they continue then I should and would do something about it.

And Israel is also the one who first broke the ceasefire by sending in forces to attack Hamas militants on November 4th to coincide with the American elections. They're also the ones who attacked Hamas militants again when Hamas was considering extending the ceasefire this time around Christmas and invaded around New Years. This whole thing was planned by Israel over 6 months ago. Here. They're going to be done before Obama on January 20th takes over though as this was their last chance to get guaranteed and unconditional support from the US to whatever they do and they don't want to burden Obama with this right in the beginning of his term (and piss him off). The problem is Hamas won democratic elections and letting up on the pressure might allow them to lead the country that wants them in power. Funny thing democracy advocacy dries up when the democratically elected leaders aren't puppets. This anti-zionist concept is as integral to Hamas as the concept of the West Bank being holy Jewish land is to Israel. Israel is the one who made any Palestinian country in the internationally recognized pre 1967 borders impossible by sending in half a million settlers to 1) take over all of Jerusalem and 2) cut up the Palestinian populated territories in an apartheid type of arrangement. Israelis even have nice new roads in the West Bank that Palestinians are not allowed to use. Considering the resistance to Israel by a relatively small group of settlers how do you think Israel is ever even supposed to evacuate the West Bank even if the leaders want to. Israel created an impossible situation itself by thinking of the short term benefits of cutting up and colonizing the West Bank without considering the consequences. Even in Gaza sure there are no settlers, but all the borders are tightly sealed off and even access to the sea for this coastal strip of land is impossible thanks to Israel. How are Gazans supposed to even survive when Israel allowed barely any humanitarian supplies in while it was supposedly observing a ceasefire purposely to try to starve the Gazans into overthrowing Hamas. Let's face it here Israel hasn't been the victim for a long time now and the sooner we stop putting the Holocaust into every sentence involving Israel the sooner we'll realize that Jews are susceptible to becoming oppressors just like every other group in the world. Just think logically who would be the ones with long term strategic planning like this the 60 year old country under a constant state of readiness or the newer wannabe Hezbollah reactionaries. I'll post a Charlie Rose interview that explains all of this tomorrow.

It's this mentality that worries me. This isn't at all what this country was built on nor does it have any place in a liberal democracy. Sure it is, but that doesn't mean it gets to be just as valid as his. While he bases his opinion on the bigger picture you base yours on a backwards, selfish approach that has been proven wrong over and over again in history.

There's two points I want to make here. First is that in the short term keeping your mouth shut works, but oftentimes in the long term it just delays a real solution. If you look at the pre Civil rights and post Civil War era there were two conflicting ideas about what black people should do between DEB Du Bois and Booker T. Washington. Du Bois promoted what was in effect realized in the Civil Rights era that you need to protest and try to bring about change more rapidly whereas Booker T. Washington wanted a very gradual change brought about through hard work. What happened before the Civil Rights Era is that Washington's approach failed to make any progress for blacks in the south. The same applies here. As long as Muslims just take the racist misconceptions of them and try to stay out of trouble things won't change. We need as a society in the long term to stop seeing them as terrorists. The "War on Terror" won't end until the Muslim world is no longer poor which will take decades and until then "keeping your head down" won't solve anything for Muslim Americans. Second is just what Sever said in his last post. Just because racism will always exist that's no reason to accept it and not be constantly vigilante about changing it. That's quitters talk and if everyone followed that in the civil rights era then it wouldn't have happened at all. Politics isn't about reaching lofty goals like ending poverty or racism or crime. It's about getting as close as humanly possible.

There's a difference between making deals between the government elite and business elite without any consent from the population and having a properly regulated cooperation among the population. Also in case you haven't noticed no matter what bs is said about unions being to blame for the fall of the American auto industry the mainstream media refuses to point out that the rest of the first world has had a huge advantage over us. I'm talking about "evil socialized medicine" that countries like Japan have and that has allowed their auto companies to not have to deal with the insanely overpriced health insurance costs that US companies have. It turns out deregulation often makes companies less competitive so you can't even justify it against a backdrop of widening wealth gaps and a choking of the middle class.

It's not that the solution is forcing everyone to work together even more. It's recognizing that people need to work together and then making the rules to make this as humane as possible. According to libertarians the government should only be there to protect us from each other, but the current financial crisis shows that there are new ways for us to hurt each other and if you really want to do this you'll need to drop the Ron Paul embodied, strict, predetermined ideology of just leaving the markets alone.

I think we can all agree that the period of 2005-2006 at least under Bush was a period of relatively high economic growth and progress. Our Gross Domestic Product went up on good margins and therefore we must have been doing good right? Oh oops the Human Development Index for 2005 that had us placed number 12 in the world with a HDI of .951 went down to .950 and ranked number 15 for 2006 and that was "progress". Oh no it turns out there was never any economic progress at all under Bush and it was all just the rich making more off the backs of everyone else while everyone else continued to sink further into poverty undisturbed the entire time? Oops sorry to burst everyone's bubble. I wonder how future reports for 2007 and 2008 will turn out... http://hdr.undp.org/en/statistics/ Edit: Looks like the UK that was following our model much more closely than other European countries has gotten punished for that mistake too.

Well the vast majority of us can't just support ourselves on farms because the fundamental changes of industrialization, even if they can be reversed smoothly and peacefully, would mean going backwards in living standards. Therefore the notion that we should all just be left alone no longer apply because our lives are built on a level of interdependence that the founding fathers couldn't dream of back then. This is the basic Ron Paul fallacy as I like to term it. It's the belief that 220 years ago wasn't a fundamentally different time and that the laws that were applicable there can be applied today just because they were so nice back then. That system also only worked because of the truly monumental expanse of land that only needed to be dusted off of those pesky natives that made the notion of every man having his own plot of land possible.

Doctors need to learn new advances constantly or face become obsolete. Besides we probably will some day have a computer that can work as a doctor, but it would one incredibly complicated piece of technology.

Supporting Wahabbis is what got us into this mess in the first place. When you support the people who are the most extreme nuts in their religion that happens to believe you should be part of a greater Caliphate what do you expect to happen? This is especially true with the United States that will be guaranteed to be involved all over the world, including the Muslim world and automatically piss these people off. We're helping train the extremists of the future that we will then have to fight. Also Saudi Arabia's oil production is in a generally Shiite area ;-)

Just a little point to make here even though Syria's Alawite government hates Sunni extremists as much as Iran unlike Iran it has to deal with a Sunni majority and doesn't wanna look like it's working together with America to fight Sunnis. You wouldn't know if they secretly gave the US the ok and are filing complaints to look like they're angry. All this goes to show that if we REALLY wanted to fight Sunni extremists instead of supporting a Wahabbi government (the main funders of radical Islam and such wonderful groups as the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Iraq) we should have come to an arrangement with Shiite Iran and Alawite controlled Syria back when they were offering it to us. Maybe Obama will have the foresight to realize that our real enemies in the middle east are the Wahabbis and those they support.

Honestly NBV do you really want to defend people who make all their decisions in life based on a set of 2000 year old !@#$%^&*umptions? Do you really think they're voting for the right reasons or that they're helping the system by being an absolute voting block for any conservative candidate no matter what they do? It's not just these people who are harming the system. All those wishy washy moderates who vote based on "who they'd like to have a beer with" should also take the time to educate themselves as does any other group that votes based on blatantly obvious fallacies. I have trouble respecting any of them let alone pretending their claims are just as legitimate as a rational person's.

I'm feeling bad for Sally Housekeeper. Obama wants to eat her babies.

When you dwell on McCain talking points (and worse Palin talking points), take them on face value, and then expect some impossible answer to a misleading question from Obama then I doubt your reasoning. This comes especially after you clearly stated you're voting for McCain because he (or Palin) is closer to Jesus (or at least your interpretation of Jesus) than Obama. Sorry if I can't take your arguments seriously because it will follow a script already written for you. I can go read what your party says and not waste my time pretending you form your own opinions.

When I bring in an absolutist religion as the reason I'm voting one way or another then you can feel free to discount me. I'm sure you don't think supporting the Ayatollahs in Iran because someone's a Shiite is a rational decision so don't pretend Fake is using logic.