Empire of the Iguanadons

megalomania
n.

1. A psychopathological condition characterized by delusional fantasies of wealth, power, or omnipotence.
2. An obsession with grandiose or extravagant things or actions.

Well if you were still harboring any sort of doubt before, stop harboring it now. The one calling himself Barack Obama has finally thrown aside any deception about who and what he really is after delivering a speech in Cairo which just ended that sounded like something straight out of 1933. He all but flat out admitted he's muslim, stopping short of actually saying it, though he has fully acknowledged his muslim upbringing and roots. Of course he touts it as beneficial for establishing better relations with the muslim world. The reality of it is he's not doing this for international relations. He's doing it as part of a calculated agenda that many of us have been warning you about for months, even years. I at least have been making every effort to point out the obvious since it became clear he'd win the primaries last year.

If you think I'm on crack, just look at how he's been behaving lately. Running around apologizing to the muslim world for everything America has done, and what we stand for. Now he demand Israel bend and cease settlement in land they rightfully occupy both as a matter of history and as a matter of spoils of war. He flat out demands that Israel accept the two-state solution despite. Neither of these conditions is acceptable to Netanyahu and he's made no bones about saying so to Obama's face. The other night he pulled a complete 180 and told the world he thinks Iran has every right to develop nuclear power despite the fact that he must know they are using that as cover for a weapons program. Ahmadinejad has already made it perfectly clear what his intentions are. To wipe Israel off the map, even bragging that they could do it in 11 days. We already knew he despised the Iraq war but he also threw that one into the mix, basically telling the muslims it was a mistake to have gone there. And he's even declared that he has no intention of keeping troops in Afghanistan either.

It isn't just his total disregard for our interests overseas either. Just look at the domestic agenda he's been ramming through Congress since taking office. Plunged the economy into a full blown depression in 4 short months. Quadrupled the federal deficit, caused the stock market to collapse, and FIRED the CEO of a PRIVATELY run corporation. He wasn't happy with that though. He's also driven GM into a bankruptcy deal that ceded control of the company to the federal government. Effectively nationalizing them the way he's done with the banks. Then there's the administration's refusal to allow banks who are ready to pay back their TARP bailouts. Yep, you read right, he's blocking them from paying so he can keep them on the hook. He can't complete his agenda of destroying the country unless he's got control of the system and control of enough major industry. It won't be too much longer before the worst of it starts. Hyper-inflation as the Federal Reserve will be directed to begin printing assloads of money to cover all this. The dollar will collapse. Not even Jimmy Carter did this much damage in so short a period of time. Unemployment is already into double digits and still rising. The only reason there's been a "drop" of any sort is because there are people now falling off the rolls after running it out that don't get counted anymore.

It's going to require a miracle of epic proportions for the country to survive another two years of this before we get the chance to remove the Democrats in Congress who are eagerly going along with everything the Obamassiah dictates from on high. Only then will we be able to begin reining in the uncontrolled spending, nationalization of industry and commerce, and getting people back to work. That's only half of the solution though. We have to somehow manage to make it to 2012 so we can vote the traitorous bastard out of office. Frankly I don't think we're going to make it that far before he decides to surrender us to the enemy.

And remember, this all happened almost exactly the same way in Germany in the 1930s as Hitler rose to power. Congress rubber-stamping his every wish. The media fawning over every word. Don't say we didn't warn you when the revolution finally comes. Barry Soetoro, aka Barack Hussein Obama, is a danger to the very existence of this country. He is the very definition of a megalomaniac.
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"It is pointless to resist, my son." -- Darth Vader
"Resistance is futile." -- The Borg
"Mother's coming for me in the dragon ships. I don't like these itchy clothes, but I have to wear them or it frightens the fish." -- Thurindil

Well. I guess that's that then.

Boy did we not hear the same speech.

Sorry, I do my best to avoid hearing political speeches in general, even State of the Union addresses. I find they're usually bloated with PR stuff rather than anything useful most of the time and the real meat of any given major speach is going to be summarized by at least half the media within minutes and the blogosphere very shortly after anyway. As it is, I can only address the things he's done so far rather than what he said (which sounds like what the media told us he was planning to say). From my perspective, this isn't news but rather a confirmation of the stance several of us have taken from well before the man was elected by the half of the nation that voted for him which certainly didn't include me.

A megalomaniac? I'm sure he's aware he has no actual power. No, he's just the mouthpiece for the actual megalomaniacs that guard their power with propaganda that fools argue over as if it mattered. Regardless of the "political system" or world leader who's "elected" things will go the way that the powerful find advantageous. Those in the know control those who aren't in the know, it's been done since before recorded history. I also have to say Godwin would be proud of your final paragraph, way to end on a cliché note.

Given that The Marxist Revolution was already closed fo posting, I thought this might be as good a place as any to bring to your attention today's Snopes article of the day. I seemed pretty timely and on-topic for here to me, but I'll let you each decide for yourselves.

Anon, you sound like one of those shadow government types, perhaps you know more than you're letting on... in any case, "Obama" as he insists on calling himself is who is at the head of the executive branch right now and its his policies the Congress is rubber stamping and it's our media that's fawning over his every word and whether Godwin would be proud or not history is repeating itself right before our very eyes and apparently folks like Dwip who didn't see the speech for what it was are about to be doomed by it.

Conner, strangely enough I read that article already - from the Pravda website. While they are in fact a tabloid news service, everything the editorial said was pretty much right. Makes you wonder, no?

I didn't know you followed the Pravda website, but that's it's attributed source. I agree, if even mainstream (supposedly non-partisan non-biased) sites like Snopes are picking up on stuff like this now, why isn't the rest of our nation? You can bet other nations are...

I don't follow Pravda, I forget how I ended up there but their tabloid articles were worth the entertainment value - and of course I eventually saw the one about capitalism and America.

Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that you were some sort of tabloid junkie or anything, I happen to subscribe to Snopes' and Hoax-Slayer's RSS feeds as well as Reuter's Odd Stories listings myself, sometimes it pays to know what's going on from the humorous perspective too as well as in the greater online community and sometimes it's just amusing.

What you're saying: Obama and the liberals have ruined the country and we're all going to live in shacks with dirt floors and die from diseases or a giant civil war.

What I'm hearing: THE SKY IS FALLING THE SKY IS FALLING.

And you guys claim to think for yourselves? You watched his speech and you took from it exactly what you wanted to hear and not what he actually said. But that's pretty typical for sheeple. Follow your party line. Don't bother swerving for the potholes, as long as you stay on the line, you'll get there before you ruin the steering. You hope.

No, Whir, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that the country is in really bad shape and Obama is not helping any and that we're long overdue for a giant civil war which probably won't actually come because there are too many sheeple populating the country. I did not watch his speech, as I quite specifically stated over a week ago in the second comment of this thread. Whir posted before me that he did watch the speech and got something entirely different from it. Were you trying to address Samson and Anonymous as "you guys" or just not bothering to read what was posted before attacking all the participants of the conversation?

Let's see. How long have I been railing against the damage libs are doing to this country? How long have I been pointing out that Obama's policies resemble the policies that led up to 1930s Germany? How long have many of us been screaming at the top of our lungs about things he's said and done, clear back to the early primaries, only to have people like you (Whir) simply shout that we're nuts and the country will be just fine?

Now look around you. You're in Michigan. Where the new Government Motors Corporation is now operating. How's your jobless rate there? Is it still under 8% like Barry promised you? Or has it risen well past 12%? Is our deficit cut in half like he promised? Nope. Seems to me it's been quadrupled since taking office.

I watched part of his speech, and I took away pretty much what he said. He's a muslim appeaser, an obvious anti-semite, and a Marxist. There, I said it. Barry is a damn racist slime bag. Hardly surprising considering he's a Kenyan national and was raised with a muslim education. But the press is doing their level best to suppress any information that would bring that out into the open. All they do is fawn over his every action as though he's the second coming of Christ himself.

So don't expect me to be handing out any kind words about the man unless he has an epiphany and unloads a carpet bombing on Iran or sets out to wipe that smug look from Kim Jon Il's face. I can guarantee you he's not about to do that though. It would cost him any hope of reelection since the lunatic libs who supported him to begin with would turn on him for it.

I think you meant me, not Whir.

Since I'm here, a couple of comments.

1. As regards your first comment, Conner, I think you somewhat miss the point insofar as in this case, words were important. Nobody's really said the things Obama said in Cairo before to my knowledge, and given the fact that America has been engaged in a propaganda war of sorts in the Middle East for a very long time, one that we have been losing, the President going to Cairo and talking about a bunch of issues that Muslims find important was a big thing.

At the very least, it was useful to bolster regional moderates, based on some of the things I've seen. May have helped in the Lebanese election wherein the moderates unexpectedly trounced Hezbollah. May be helping in the Iranian elections going on today, although last reports have both sides claiming 60% of the vote, and we'll all see anyway because it's Iran.

That said, we've all (Obama, various Muslim countries, Israel) got some concrete actions to be taking if we want to satisfy each other, so yes.

2. Regarding the Pravda thing, I'm still in repeated facepalming mode over it and anybody actually reading that drivel, and have no reasonable comments.

3. Regarding the actual post that started this...yeah, I dunno. I mean, we so clearly didn't hear the same speech I'm not even sure where to begin, but let's take the points you made and note what the speech said.

Transcript here if you missed it.



- A few words in Arabic and a "peace be upon them" do not a crypto-Muslim terrorist make. By that standard, we have any number of military officers guilty of the same thing, which I'd suggest means that your standard is no standard at all. But I'm not really here to debate this particular strain of crazy talk, so let me just note that he said about the level of stuff that would be polite to try to do if you were a tourist. Hell, I'd have tried to say about as much if I was giving the same speech, and I'm a pretty obvious and avowed athiest.

- That aside, if you accept that a lot of Muslims have a big problem with America and Americans, and a particular strain of Crusader/Jew paranoia that's even more out there than I think your particular theory is, anything that gets them to think that we're actually a lot like them in many ways is a good thing. And I think he said some reasonable stuff along those lines.



- Offhand, he apologized for torture, and he apologized for overthrowing governments in Iran. If there were others, you might want to point me at them, because I don't remember them.

- In any case, taking the coup thing first, damn right. In that particular case, everybody knows we did it, Iranians certainly know we did it, and not acknowledging it only makes us look like tyrranical assholes to everybody. In short, we're not kidding anybody, and it costs us nothing to apologize, and takes away ammunition from the people who'd like to use it against us.

- Besides, can you name me one time when a CIA-backed coup actually worked out in a reasonable way for the US, nevermind the people of $COUNTRY? I'm not sure that I can (there are a few borderline cases), but I can name you a whole bunch of times where somebody found out that we did one of these things, and it pissed everybody off for thirty or seventy years. Ever wonder why we don't have a lot of friends in Latin America? Yeah.

- And as to torture, goddamn right he apologized. Not only are we better than that sort of thing, this particular bout of torture does not appear to have significantly helped us much at all, but it certainly gave the people that hate us some fantastic talking points against us. Because you know, if I was an Iraqi or whoever, and guys were coming up to me and saying "You can't trust the Americans - they'll take you and put you in cages and torture you. They're evil! Just turn on the TV!" That would have some resonance, and it appears to have done so for real Iraqis. OTOH, we stopped torturing people and cleaned up our act, whereas the jihadists are still beheading people, and you'll notice that Iraqi public opinion isn't really strongly with the jihadists here.

- In short, what Obama sounded like in that speech to me is a recognition of something of a conservative idea - used to be that the world thought of America as that shining city on the hill (to borrow a phrase), and we got all kind of respect and admiration for stuff like the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights and democracy and all that, until we started doing a bunch of stuff that wasn't particularly democratic or respectful of rights. So in that sense Obama's trying to walk the walk at the same time he's talking the talk. I for one am perfectly ok with that.

- On the flip side of this, Obama also said some things to the Muslims that they needed to hear. We've never really called them on the carpet in any real way about all of that ignorant shit that gets spouted about the Holocaust and Israel, let alone us, and he called them on the carpet. This is good.



I'm pretty meh on this, mostly because I don't pay an enormous amount of attention to it beyond the basics. If you've got a better idea that works for both Israelis and Palestinians that isn't nuclear weapons, feel free to tell us all, because it would sure help. What I got out of this is that Obama called down both sides in that particular spat, Israelis and Palestinians, because both sides haven't particularly been going along with what they said they'd do. Note that he was also calling for everybody to recognize Israel's right to exist, here. From what I've seen, Obama seems very interested in regional peace, and he's both talking the talk here as well as walking the walk by trying to get negotiations back up and running.



- Iran actually does have the right to nuclear power, as long as they follow international treaty, which includes monitering and inspections. Fair enough, although clearly we're all worried about nuclear weapons. As a talking point to the Iranians, reasonable. And frankly it's a better position with them than the one we've got right now, which is they do what they want, and we can't really do a damn thing about it. As to Ahmadinejad, it's becoming increasingly clear that his own boss doesn't necessarily agree with him, and a very large part of the Iranian people definitely don't. Depending on the election he may not be in power much longer. And in any case everything is really dependent on what Ayatollah Khamenei says.



We've been over the fact that you and I are basically in agreement on Iraq, but nevertheless, he pretty much had to say this in any event. He definitely had to say the bit about not leaving troops if he wants anybody to get past that shit about the American Empire coming to colonize the Middle East for their oil.

And in any event, why the hell would we want to leave troops in a mostly stable Iraq anyway?



Not to mention why we'd want to leave troops there, either, once we've cleaned it up. Which, let us be fair to Obama, he seems very interested in doing. You don't have troop surges and war expansions if you're not interested in winning the war.

I'll just be ignoring the economy bit. That time has not yet come.

In short, your Munich analogy is completely full of fail.

Yes, Dwip, I did mean you rather than Whir. Guess I was thinking of who I was responding to rather than who I was typing about.

The specific words may have been important from a diplomatic perspective, but how much of that is lip service that I need presented to me verbatim rather than in summary? I'm not the one he was playing diplomatic appeaser to, the enemies of the U.S. and of Israel were.

Your arguments, as usual, are very good and do present a very valid point, though I have to wonder how much your own political stance is coloring your perspective. From what I've been seeing/hearing about our current president, the only really good things he's done so far in office have been in conclusion or follow-up to things previous administration had started, and he's done plenty that I'm not very happy about, particularily on the homefront.

As to the election yesterday, my understanding is that the final verdict was that Ahmadinejad won.

So Dwip. Let me ask you this then. If keeping troops in Iraq and Afghanistan is such a bad idea, why do we still have troops in Europe 60 years later? Why are we still in Korea? Shouldn't we have pulled out of all of those places since we came in, kicked ass, propped up governments, and no longer have any "legit" reason to be there?

As far as the speech, clearly you were watching it with some kind of blinders on to have missed how blatant the whole thing was as an appeasement speech to the muslims. Hardly surprising, since he openly admitted to being one during the speech. Not in specific words, but by acknowledging his roots. And of course with his own family saying he was born in Kenya and went to school in Indonesia at a facility that did not allow foreign citizens to attend. But we're just supposed to ignore all that, right?

Oh, and it appears as though ol Ahmadinejad stole an election right out from under everyone in Iran. Again. Surprised? I'm not. Guess who's excited about it. Obama. Just lovely.

In a very nice moment, the internets kindly ate my goddamn comment that I just spent an hour on, so I'll confine myself for the moment to noting that as regards Iran, while Khamenei seems to have thrown something of a coup to throw the election Ahmadinejad, Mousavi and the people who supported him are apparently rioting in the streets of Tehran in vast numbers, with violence and numbers not seen since 1979. Been checking the NYT, Andrew Sullivan, and TPM (not sure who else is covering it) all day. The optimist route says this will bring down the regime in Iran. The pessimist route says nothing will change. Dunno, we'll see. Crazy stuff in any case.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go beat something with a stick.

Well on that note, I share your hope that the rioting causes regime change. But the realist in me says the military will roll and people will die in vast numbers, not seen since... 1979. Somewhere in the mess of recent news about all this there was a guy who was predicting a Tienanmen Square sort of outcome. That may well be about to happen. Honestly, if they all want to kill each other that's fine by me. It keeps them out of everyone else's way. So long as they make sure to get Ahmadinejad first.

And, yeah, he who trusts the net to post the long comments is lost. Was it the kind of eat that a more robustly programmed application might have saved from the fire? Say, like, Bethesda's forum when that damn "authorization mismatch" error kills your post?

In a moment of extreme frustration and anger, Dwip uttered:

My condolences to you, I hate when that happens to me.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,526222,00.html

They're spinning the story as Netanyahu caving in to demands, but I think he very cleverly played Obama for the fool here. Agreeing to allow a "Palestinian" state alongside Israel as long as they lay down their arms and give up any claims they have on Jerusalem. Brilliant, he knew they'd never go for that. And IMO it forced them to reveal their true intentions in rejecting the proposal, while at the same time forcing Obama to acknowledge it as a step toward progress. Netanyahu is a genius.

Well, we knew that if Israel was ever allowed true self-governance without American intervention they'd make all the other governments out there look bad, of course, they'd also eliminate most of the middle east and become a very wealthy and powerful nation pretty quickly through unintentional expansion... afterall, in the name of self-defense they could easily wipe out their arabic and muslm neighbors and after doing so, who could blame them for taking claim to the spoils, like the oil and land and such, that were still left over afterward...

This is utterly unrelated to the subject, but:



Who, without cheating, can guess who this is being said about. Bonus points if you can guess who actually said it and why the entire thought is so full of irony it hurts.

Without cheating? Did we forget to include what qualifies as cheating?

My first guess, off-hand given recent discussions on ichat and TMC and such, would be that Cratylus said it about Scandum, as for the irony, well, that aspect is self-explanatory to those who know Crat. ...on second thought, I don't think Crat ascribes quite that much credit to Scandum, so maybe not.

Heh, yep. Cratylus said it about Scandum. But the irony is that Cratylus himself fits the exact description. Anyone who has had to deal with him on any level knows this.

*L* The sad part is that I've actually proven your point by my answer since I just now read the summary in my email from TMC where that post came from and had responded as I did something like 7 hours ago.

Let us try this again.



I'm unsure as how to explain this adequately, but I really do believe that this is the sort of speech that needs to be observed via the actual text. Something about both the individual lines and the speech as a whole needing to be parsed and understood in the whole context of the thing.



Without trying to sum up my entire political philosophy right here and now, let me note a couple of things:

- No secret I'm pro-Obama. That said, I am a registered independent, and I try my best to call spades as spades when I see them. You're right to some degree that much of what Obama's done right was continuation of Bush administration stuff, although I see some other original things he's done (closing Guantanimo, statements on torture, this speech) as being useful and important, and more on that in a moment. Other things I disagree with him almost entirely on, witness Iraq, which I've talked about here and also at my own blog. For what it's worth, I also think he dropped the ball on North Korea, but then we've been collectively dropping said ball since at least the elder Bush, so no surprise there. I'm not really sure about his economic measures, but I also know they need longer than this to really take into account. The list goes on.

- In this specific context, the speech in Cairo, I support the President for a number of reasons.

On the one hand, a reading of history that suggests that our support of things such as the coup in Iran (which joins a long list of other things starting with everything we ever did in Latin America ever), has done very little over the long term except come back to bite us in the ass, which is why half of everybody distrusts us, despite the ridiculous amount of humanitarian aid we give, etc. Wasn't always this way, of course - used to be that we were almost universally admired. Go back to the Wilsonmania post-WWI, or the post-colonial movements in various countries lifting whole swathes of the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. We've got a historically strong reputation for human rights, and if we repudiate torture and make note of our faults, people will respond to that, and I think they have.

Both of those things, in fact, do help us. We've already seen Iraqis take stock, notice that we don't randomly behead people, and help us out. We're apparently more trusted in Afghanistan than most Afghan national institutions. Those aren't Obama's doing, but he's got his role to play, and he's playing it. Lastly, regarding the apology for the Iranian coup, I view that as a clever denial of ammunition to the Iranian conservatives by taking away one of their big talking points against us.

In addition, I think we have a choice regarding the Middle East, and more generally the world. We've seen, and I'm thinking specifically of Iran, where sanctions and belligerance have gotten us, which is nowhere. Again with Iran, we really have two choices. We can bomb them, or we can talk to them. It should be obvious to all of us at this point that the bombing them thing just isn't going to work - we'd need to pull a second Iraq invasion, and we just don't have the guys to do it. So it can't hurt to talk. What's more, and I think we're seeing this right now, the actual Iranian people don't really hate us and would love to talk, but they need to get around the government. A willingness to talk on our side only makes them stronger.

As far as the Middle East in general, there's essentially no way that we're going to go from the various systems in place there now to American-style democracy in any kind of short time span, nor is it going to look like secular American democracy. We know that from our own history, and there are a fair number of other examples. This is a generational struggle, here, and you've got to make the people want it. Once they do, they'll generally get there - see also, 20th century. If our best export is our culture, and I'd argue that it is, we have everything to gain from worming our way in and working things gradually in ways that don't freak out the governments. If I read Obama correctly, that's what he's trying to get at, and I think it's a good idea. We'll get nowhere trying to replace Muslim culture, but we'll get everywhere trying to work with it and within it.

At the same time, Obama called some people to task, both Arab and Israeli, Holocaust denial and terror on the one hand, the value of sticking to your previous agreements on both sides, which I think was long past needing doing. I don't really know if he can pull off a Palestinian/Israeli peace, but he seems to want to walk the walk on that, so good luck to him.

...I think I made the points I wanted to. That was long.

Oh, yeah. One more thing. You see this bit about talking equaling surrender, or the futility of talking all our problems out, witness Samson's Munich thing, but I don't think that's where he's coming from. Notice that nobody's talking about diplomacy with Osama bin Laden, or stopping what we're doing in Afghanistan/Pakistan. Obama seems to me thus far to have a reasonable sense of when to try diplomacy and when to try force. We'll see, but.

Ok, NOW I think I'm done with that bit. On to Samson.



There are some key differences, but let me lay this out point by point.

- In all cases, we started out as legitimate occupation authorities, although I'm hazy right now on what our exact status was in 1940s Korea. UN mandate I think. Either way, goal to transition control back to friendly local governments.

- In the case of Europe and Korea, we ended up signing security treaties with them to help protect them against the Soviets and North Korea/China respectively. This is not the case with Afghanistan (sort of/yet), or Iraq (again sort of/yet). Granted we're currently fighting wars in both, but to make the analogy fit, we'd need to be there to help protect them against, say, Iran or Russia, which isn't the case.

- In the case of Europe and Korea, there was (and is) broad popular support in those countries for various reasons for our troop presence there, albeit waning in recent years in Europe. There is not, and this is key, that same kind of broad popular support in at least Iraq. Afghanistan remains to be determined. This has several effects, but at least in Iraq leads to us being seen as occupiers and as targets. This is somewhat marginal now, but will as Iraq becomes more and more stable become more of a problem. You've already seen our military commanders acknowledging and talking about this.

- All of that said, there comes a point where our continued presence is superfluous. If Iraq is stable and has reasonably well-run institutions, there starts to become little need for American infantry divisions to maintain the peace, and we just get in the way. A residual force of trainers, which is what's being talked about, is one thing. Combat units rather another, which is something the Iraqis make a big deal out of.

- And in any case, leaving large forces based in Iraq and (possibly) Afghanistan ties down those troops to the area, is expensive as all hell, makes people mad at us, and gives some truth to all that Al Qaeda propaganda about how we're all Crusaders come to occupy them, which in turn leads to our people getting killed. In short, it's just not worth the trouble after a certain point (namely stable countries). Better ways of going about it.



I just spent a ridiculous amount of time spelling this out in two comments, but I can break the speech down line by line if you REALLY want me to.

I'll refrain from comment on the other bit. It's been proven to my satisfaction that Obama is who he says he is, and legitimate political disagreements aside, your continued walk down this path of the crypto-Muslim Obama mostly serves in my opinion to make you look ridiculous.

Lastly, eat it, internets. My use of Notepad thwarts you and your comment-eating ways.

That would be 1950s Korea actually, but ok. Goal met, we should have left long ago. South Korea has a stable and friendly local government. The North not so much, so if we're there to do something about someone, why haven't we done it?



Broad popular support from who? South Korea maybe, but the north wants us dead, not just gone, dead. That doesn't sound very broad or popular for us staying there. Nobody here at home raises an objection because they all grew up with the reality that US troops are in Korea. I think the same is actually true of Europe as well. Nobody questions it because, to them, that's how it's always been.

Now, the last time I heard from actual troops on the ground, the Iraqis have always generally supported us being there. Sadr doesn't count, he's part of the problem. The government there has had a change of heart but such things happen. The fact remains that the people don't seem to give a rip what their government says, they'd rather we stayed and finished mopping up the bad guys. But this isn't the story you'll get from the liberal press.

The same is more or less true of Afghanistan. The people rather appreciate us being there to lay the smack down on the Taliban, because, well, they don't like the Taliban. The government has mixed feelings, but I suspect that's more of a face saving deal because of the whole muslim image thing. Fortunately it seems Pakistan has finally seen the light and is helping to deal with the remaining problems on their side of the border without us needing to fulfill Obama's threats to bomb them to shit.



i'd argue we long ago passed that point in both SK and EU. Clearly both have stable and reasonably well-run institutions. Yet we're still there, keeping the peace, because those rat bastards won't spend their own money to defend themselves from the Russians. I say we cut our losses and pull out, let them deal with defending their own territory for a change. Then we can use those troops to crush the Taliban and Sadr and whoever else is left to mop up in Iraq and Afghanistan. And we'd have plenty left over to roll over Ahmadinejad as well. Assuming the Iranian people don't beat us to it.

The only reason the Euros weren't mad at us in the immediate aftermath of WWII was because for the most part they had been fighting with each other for so long that by the time we had to come save them from themselves, they were sick of fighting. The problem with using the same thing against the muslims in the Middle East is that some of them have nukes now thanks to NK, China, and Russia. Letting them fight each other to the point of getting sick of fighting would probably be bad for their immediate neighbors who would prefer to just be left alone. Radiating that much of the world doesn't seem wise, though ultimately it's probably unavoidable as long as we continue to pander to Iran. Eventually one of them is going to pull the trigger weather we're there or not and they'll use Israel as the convenient excuse. Those people are all crazy and need to be treated as such, and Obama is too blinded by his own roots to see that.

There's clearly no point in hashing the speech out since we're simply not going to agree, no matter how badly you'd like to think I'm a complete idiot for seeing the speech as nothing more than appeasement politics and condemnation of Israel's rights.

And while you may have accepted the liberal spin on Obama's birth records, some of us still remember his own family members who witnessed the birth saying over and over again that he was born in Keyna. If it's not true, why have they continued to block anyone from asking them about it firsthand? Seems to me if it's true that he was born in Hawaii as he claims it ought to be easy to prove. Someone should be able to verify it with a firsthand account. There should be a vault copy of his birth certificate available. His mother should be able to prove she was a US citizen at the time of the birth ( his father wasn't - something even Obama does not deny ). A certificate acknowledging he was born isn't enough. A birth announcement in the local paper isn't proof of anything. I can call up my local paper right now and announce the birth of my son to the world. Doesn't make it true or prove anything.

There are a large number of people, more than you're apparently willing to acknowledge, who have not accepted this "proof". It's not just some fringe crackpot movement. He's not a crypto-muslim. He is a muslim. Period. his education in Indonesia's muslim schools is undeniable. He acknowledged his muslim heritage in the speech. He's no longer hiding from it because he's already achieved the goals he set out to achieve. Mainly converting the US into a Marxist nation. Prostrating himself before the muslim leaders of the world is just icing on the cake at this point.

Please don't take this the wrong way, but your posts and Samson's posts about this [or any political] speech are already often pushing the limits of my political attention span, reading the actual speech line by line would just be too much for me. Listening to it would surely put me straight to sleep. This is why I usually skip "State of the Union Address" events too and why most of the time, even here, my posts tend to be relatively brief. Other than the fact that I'm not sure I usually have all that much to say and would rather say too little than look the complete fool, that is.


I used to strongly maintain my political independance as a voter too, but as I've gotten older, I've noted a shift in my own perspective strongly enough that I actually register republican anymore but still vote by individual rather than party affiliation. I do respect that you have always, in my opinion, tried, with mostly success, to maintain an unbiased observer/reporter from what I've seen, but I think in this case your points sound like their being colored by your support for Mr. Obama. Now if we just left your arguments to the above paragraph, I'd have been forced to concede that I agree with you entirely. Obama's done a fine job of wrapping up some Bush projects and continuing some others, he's also a great orator who clearly knows how to persuade folks to his perspective and is using that skill effectively (for the most part) in the Middle East, he's also dropped the ball badly in North Korea (which I'll agree his predecessors hadn't been doing much better since Reagan left office) and I don't think he's done so well in dealings with China, the EU, NATO and the UN. I can't say with certainty what the end results might be for his economic measures (is there really ever an end to economic measures?) but I can say that I don't approve of most of them and I think that we're going to suffer from some of them.


I'll agree to this with the notation that I don't think they're responding to it in positive ways, I think many countries at this stage are thinking we've devolved, as a nation, to the governmental level of schoolyard bully and this just shows them our weakness that drives us there. (In their opinions, not mine.) Basically, I think it's, to other peoples, a demonstration of the "do as we say not as we do" parental style of looking down upon the children [rest of the world].


I prefer to think that they were taking note of these things because the opposing side is still doing things like random beheadings than because of Obama's speech. But, hopefully you're right and it has helped some over there. Either way, I think the people, rather than the government, already were favoring us over their local alternatives for some time now.


I suspect that we actually have a few more options available to us as well, but.. yes, I agree that we really don't have the manpower nor the need for a second Iraq invasion and talking can't hurt as long as we're not dealing with Hamas or Bin Laden that way.


Part of the problem there is that we're currently seen as trying to force the "American Way" down their throats, maybe they don't want americanization ..certainly the "conservatives" over there don't.. and this is where the "crusaders" thing comes in, it's not that they see us as being on a crusade for something but that they're equating us to the Holy Christian Crusaders of the middle ages. Worming our way in is a better tactical approach than was taken back then, but the result is still not so desirable.


Yes, I understand where you're coming from, but I think Obama is talking about pulling troops out even if at a slower rate than he'd like because his military advisors are actually helping him out there. I think talk has its usefulness and its limitations and I'm not convinced that you're right that Obama knows when to talk/act, but hopefully you're right and I'm misreading him, only time will tell.


That was long.. I'll continue to comment on just your last bits from the end of your post...


Samson, he really has.. right or wrong, do we have to make him break down the speech in question line by line??


I can't say that it's been proven adequately to me yet, but I can say that it clearly doesn't matter at this point because he got into office already and appears to be staying there regardless.


*LOL* Given the length of many of your posts, I'm mildly surprised you hadn't already been doing this, but kudos for figuring it out. I'm one who tends to type it all up, then highlight everything, copy it, then post it rather than opening a notepad like tool to write it in to begin with, but.. same idea.

Since it appears that Samson already responded while I was typing..


I think it's been publicly questioned (and/or objected to) once or twice here at home in my recollection too, it's just usually answered with rhetoric. That makes it hard to continue questioning it knowing you're not getting an answer. We certainly have had it made clear to us in the past that our bases and troops are not universally welcomed over there anymore.


*nod* *nod* *nod* ... *snicker*


I sure hope you're wrong about that, as much as I favor the "Sea of Glass" solution, I know in reality what that would mean in the long run...


Huzzah! Huzzah! Huzzah!


I think I already covered this one for the most part in response to Dwip myself, but since you said that you "can call up my local paper right now and announce the birth of my son to the world", allow me to be the first to congratulate you on his arrival. If you'd like to visit my mud, I'll see if I can't find you a cigar.

Brief points:

- I actually meant 1940s Korea. My recollection of the thing is that we and the Soviets were given mandates by the UN over formly Japanese Korea following World War II. They set up the North, we set up the South, there's some crazy electoral hijinks, cue war in 1950 and a US-led UN force to fight the Communists. My point was that it's been a while since I've studied the region, so I'm hazy on the precise details of pre-war Korea.

- My main point is that the key difference between Europe/Korea and Iraq/Afghanistan is that we persisted in maintaining troops in the first two because of dangers posed by other, external state actors/militaries that required a large military presence to counter. That kind of issue isn't really a big issue for either Iraq or Afghanistan. Stabilization is, but at some point that's going to stop, and absent those external state actors, neither Iraq or Afghanistan really has a need for enormous US troop presence in divisional or corps strength.

- Leaving Europe aside, South Korea is at the very least still threatened by the North, and there's still a fairly clear rationale behind our being there. IMHO, I'd say we're probably headed for a war there in the not too distant future.

- In terms of popular opinion, I'm talking about the people of the country in question, not the people we're fighting/protecting against. I don't really give a good goddamn what the North Koreans think of us at this precise moment.

That said:



This has clearly changed over time, but my read of 2008-2009 reports by independent journalists (such as Totten and Yon among others, hardly liberals) suggest to me that there is at the moment pretty broad support for the US military in Iraq, conditioned on the understanding that we're not going to be there forever. OTOH, earlier (2004-2006 roughly) reports had Iraqis seeing us as an occupier and not to be trusted. Behind both trends seems to lie an attitude of "you can help us fix our place, but it's our place, not yours."



Note that we don't entirely disagree here, and in fact I noted that the US military is perhaps the most trusted institution in Afghanistan right now, whereas the Afghan army and police are widely seen as corrupt and incompetent. That said, my read of the whole situation is that it appears more tribal than religious per se, and in any case I don't trust the Pakistani government as far as I can throw them, which considering them versus is me is probably negative far.

That doesn't really change my point, though. Positing a stable Afghanistan (which is a ways in coming, trust me), I don't see a really great reason to post brigades or divisions of troops there. We may or may not wear out our welcome, but at some point enough is enough.

Anyway.

Clearly, it's time for that whole "X users have posted comments since you started writing this!" feature, considering we all seem to have posted over top of each other. Anyway. Conner's turn:



I've been accused of being a political junkie and a history nut that writes too much, yes. It's a burden I bear.

Although, come to think of it, I could probably dig up some really epic emails about Alsherok between Samson and I, so maybe we're just bad influences on each other? Dunno.



My own voting record is near 100% Democratic as it happens, but there's some reasonable causes for that, starting with the fact that the Oregon Republicans are batshit insane. I'm caught between being sympathetic to at least some Republican ideals, while thinking that the actual Republican party is pretty much morally bankrupt. Not that the Dems are always much better, but lesser of two evils, here, and at least in state elections they were clearly better for most of my voting life.

But anyway.



This, yes. What I was attempting to get at.



You are correct, and to be clear, I'm not trying to pin everything on Obama, here. The good actions of (primarily) the US military have gained us a lot, especially in Iraq.

That said, I think there's a big difference in public opinion and swaying of same between places where the people have every day encounters with Americans (read: Iraq), and countries where this isn't always the case (read: most of the rest of the Middle East). This latter category is where I think Obama can do the most good.

As to the people versus the governments, I dunno entirely, and I think it depends a whole lot on who you're talking to. Seems clear to me that normal Iranians, for instance, seem to like us more than their own government, or at least don't dislike us. Further west, where Israel isn't really loved and there's a big Palestinian problem, not so much, although there are other issues at stake too. Depending on where you are, too, the people may also be mad at the US for supporting their own government.



He's talking about that in terms of Iraq at least, and I think we're lucky enough to be at a point where Obama can afford to talk about pulling troops, as opposed to 2007 and 2008 where that wasn't so obvious, and he looked dangerous instead of mildly off base.

Although, to be sure, per SOFA we pretty much have to do much of what we're doing, so.

And that said, my sense is that, besides Iraq, Obama has a reasonable sense of things. Mostly. But we'll see.



Normally I just type it all out in the browser, copy to clipboard if it's long, then post. This time about, I had a browser glitch which ate the comment. Ah well.

On a completely unrelated note, Iran sure is going crazy.

Heh. Too bad I wouldn't have clue 1 how to go about doing something like that.



My read on NK has always been that they're mostly blowhards. However, in more recent months (coincidentally, the length of the Obama administration), they seem to have become far more aggressive and Kim Jong Il has gone into extreme degrees of apeshitness. Considering Obama seems to be spineless in his reaction to all this, I have to agree you're probably right. A war is inevitable and seems likely a lot sooner than most of us would like. Further, it appears as though NK is determined to take it nuclear. Which I'm not sure even China is going to sit by and just take.



Try living in California. Where all your politicians are batshit insane and the choice boils down to which one is slightly less so. Around here, that tends to be the Republicans. Arnold not withstanding, since IMO he may as well switch parties.



Well ok. See, I'm even hazier about what happened pre-1950s on that. But I can't say I'm surprised at the outcome given it was a UN mandate. I think I've made my opinion of the UN and its competence in world affairs pretty clear in the past. I think the UN has been responsible for more bad shit in the world than anyone is willing to admit to. Everything they've ever done is a collosal failure.



Thanks He's got a bright future ahead of him. One day he will be president and go on to dominate the world. So sayeth The Wedgy. So will it be done.

The brief, I-don't-really-know-Sandbox-but-what-the-hell thought is that upon clicking the link, check the comment count, or the timestamp or something. Upon posting check it again, and if it's higher, warn the poster. But yeah. Not that it's a big deal, just when we're all writing huge epics.



More or less, yeah, although you can vary between some combination of Obama, the notoriously nationally autistic Kim Jong-Il being worried about his health/succession, or some amount of both. I'm not sure we know. In any case if the experts are to be believed he's been doing some particularly crazy shit lately, even besides the nukes. Way I figure it, we've got a pretty good chance that either KJI will decide to start a war because he can, or the whole place will fall to pieces when he dies and we'll have to pick it up, or the somewhat smaller chance of him dying and everything suddenly becoming sunshine and flowers with that pine fresh air freshener scent.

And by "somewhat smaller" I mean *guffaw* mostly.



Not that we've ever disagreed on the UN, because...yeah, but to be fair to them, this WAS their one shining moment, when most everybody got together and actually saved the free, peace-loving peoples of somewhere from getting obliterated. Granted they got lucky because of the Soviet UN boycott, and they haven't done so good since then, but hey, everybody gets lucky once, right?



Just think. With the Wedgy backing him, he won't even need to pull an Ahmedinijad and rig the vote, either!

Agreed, who cares what the folks we're there fighting think, I was referring to the folks we're supposedly there protecting as well.



Well, at least we're on the same page here. I can't fault you for it because when the topic turns to something I'm passionate about I tend to do the same thing, but I really do try to avoid politics most of the time.. I know, I know, so what am I doing here, right? *L*



I'm glad to hear that you're acknowledging that this isn't all about Obama on his white horse in his shining armor..

But it isn't those other countries that Obama's been visiting and addressing, it's Israel, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan...

Agreed.


Again, I hope that you're correct, being president of this country is a partial puppet position, but it still has the potential to do a lot of world scale harm if his judgement is too faulty, especially with most of congress in his pocket.


Ah, I've suffered those myself in the past. Again, my condolences since there's really nothing else I could offer.


Yes, they are, I've been getting breaking news alerts" in my email from Yahoo (off the AP wires) all day at an astounding rate, particularly about Obama's comments on the situation over there.


Sounds like we're actually all in agreement on this one, just not the same voting districts.
Personally, I've been voting mostly republican for all my adult life too,but because in my locale they were usually the lesser evils.


*L* It might indeed be a useful feature, I know that gmail has something like thatwo that when you're reading an email thread that has another email in the conversation arrive while you're still reading it or already responding to it, you get a notice bar to give you the option to refresh the thread. Does Wordpress have something like this? If so, maybe you could use what they've got as a basis for a similar function for Sandbox? ...just some thoughts on the notion, which should probably all be reposted to the Sandbox forums at some point...


Personally, I really like that last option. ;D

*mutter* none of my bbcode tags worked.
I even appear to have gotten them all right (well, except for my closing /url tag after the link to Kiasyn's Sandbox forums, ok, and the one quote opening tag that I did as quotw=Dwip, so I can't type, but still, none of the ones that were right worked). :,(

Borked bbcode tags fixed

It seems we all pretty much agree on how we need to handle Iran, NK, and Israel. Just not on who should be representing us while doing it.

As far as Sandbox stuff, I think it's pretty fair to say the public side of the codebase isn't going much of anywhere. There's really not a lot left *I* want from it, other than comment preview and a less clunky way to start new posts, and some interface tweaks to streamline a few things. The AdminCP never really bothered me that much but I can see it would need an overhaul before being truly worthy.

The comment features you're talking about are probably AJAX code and I don't really know the first thing about how to work with that. It would be handy to have for quite a few things, like being able to fix a borked comment (user edits) right here from the front page without even losing your spot in the sea of other stuff. Wordpress probably has stuff like that but their code is a gruesome spaghetti pile. Really hard to wade through it looking for stuff to steal.

Well I still have to go with "arrogant prick", but the number of times 0bama uses "I" instead of "America" or "we" as opposed to any of his predecessors is suspect.

Thank you, Samson!

As for Sandbox not really going any further publicly, I understand, I still check the forums there daily as part of my regular web un and there hasn't been so much as a new post in almost a year. *shrug* It's kind of a shame really, Kiasyn had a pretty good idea there but there is just too much public influence towards myspace, facebook, twitter, etc for a small blog product like that to sail, I suppose.

I understand completely, I've played with Wordpress a little too. I'd say you could ask about the AJAX stuff at muddomain, but I think he packed up and left us completely, didn't he? ...on the other hand, as much as Wordpress pushes that they're part of the open source community and that they want plug-in and such, you'd think they'd make some effort to keep their code clean enough that the public could easily figure out how to interface nicely, but aybe they don't really want anyone blatently copying their maincode so they purposely keep that obfusicated.


Wait, are you saying he uses "America" or "we" rather than "I" more than any of his predecessors or less than they did?

Got another link for y'all that I thought you might enjoy, author accreditation issue aside, check this out and tell me what you think: http://www.hoax-slayer.com/teacher-letter-obama.shtml

Indeed. False attribution aside, the letter more or less perfectly outlines everything I have against Obama right now. What more needs to be said?

An outright lie but who expected anything else from a power hungry dictator? Last I checked it's been about 10-20 degrees below normal here in CA - which as far as I can see is part of the SW USA they claim is supposed to be suffering through longer, hotter, drier summers. That was in 2007 folks. Times changed, here we are in 2009 and I've run my AC a total of two times so far this year - because it simply hasn't been hot. At all, other than those two days. Highly unusual. And you have places recording snowfall into June that NEVER get snowfall in June. The whole thing has to be full of fictions and bogus data.

One comment in the responses to that news item says it all:

Global temperature is measured through thousands of stations located throughout the world. The continental United States itself has 1,221, and supposedly they are among the most reliable in the world. But how reliable are they? Anthony Watts, of the invaluable blog Watts Up With That, took it upon himself (and a group of more than 650 volunteers) to find out. They examined 70% of the stations. The results are nothing short of stunning. We found stations located next to the exhaust fans of air conditioning units, surrounded by asphalt parking lots and roads, on blistering-hot rooftops, and near sidewalks and buildings that absorb and radiate heat. We found 68 stations located at wastewater treatment plants, where the process of waste digestion causes temperatures to be higher than in surrounding areas. In fact, we found that 89 percent of the stations - nearly 9 of every 10 - fail to meet the National Weather Service's own siting requirements that stations must be 30 meters (about 100 feet) or more away from an artificial heating or radiating/reflecting heat source. In other words, 9 of every 10 stations are likely reporting higher or rising temperatures because they are badly sited.

This issue by itself probably warrants a whole damn entry of it's own, and I may split it into one later, but for now I'm just too damn lazy and it fits in with the Megalomania our glorious leader is suffering from.

We monitor our own weather here at my house in Texas (bought one of those clocks with the indoor/outdoor temperature on it) as well as through one of those monitoring stations and we hand, then we must be the exception. Most days the temperature at our house is 2-10 degrees warmer than the local weather station reports. On the other the nearest monitoring station to us is several miles away. As for the cooler weather you've seen, guess you wouldn't want to live here, we've already broken the triple digit mark at least twice just this week.

Setting that aside, I think most of the global warming craze is a ridiculous fad started by Gore a few years back to begin with. A few erroneous readings here and there and some faulty science and, presto, instant Nobel prize.. who'd have thunk it'd be that easy?

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/blogs/beltway-confidential/White-House-Firing-AmeriCorps-IG-an-act-of-political-courage-48538447.html

Yeah, you read right in the link. Obama thinks illegally firing the IG of AmeriCorps was an act of political courage rather than a violation of the very law he sponsored and actually managed to get passed.

Maybe he hasn't read that open letter to him that I linked from hoax-slayer.com the other day yet?

It makes more sense to look at Obama's immigration policies. An amnesty would certainly give him the Mexican vote in 2012, and getting in more immigrants from 2nd and 3rd world nations is always good for the cause, as those immigrants tend to vote for whoever is in favor of free handouts, which pretty much boils down to a vote for the Democrats.

Most political decisions are relatively easy to fix, but if he opens the borders for the Middle East and gives 10 million illegal immigrants citizenship - that's gonna be a consequence we'll have to live with for the rest of our lives.

So, Superman, you figure he's praising the firing of the IG for AmeriCorps in order to facilitate amnesty for 10 million currently illegal immigrants and the opening of the doors to americn citizenship for the whole middle east so that they can all help re-elect him in 2012? Or are you responding to his speech or one of the other tangents we've hit in the 41 comments before yours? (Sorry, just a little confused on what the connection is between what you're saying and what we were discussing...)

It's a consequence we're already living with as the result of Regan having granted amnesty to the first bunch back in 1986. One of his biggest mistakes which we are reaping the fallout from to this day.

If Obama grants another amnesty, it will only do the same as when Reagan did it and encourage even MORE of them to show up here. And I personally fear he won't stop at amnesty for Mexican illegals, he'll do the same for muslims as well and then 10 years down the road when they're bombing our cities from within everyone will be too blind to have seen what caused it. France and Spain both are starting to realize this today.

France and Spain are finally starting to wake up to the net effect of granting citizenship without penalty to anyone who snuck into the country illegally in the past? Yet, here Obama's getting ready to repeat Reagan's big mistake of doing it too?

Yes, France and Spain are apparently getting tired of having their cities bombed and their leaders both know who's responsible and how they got there. Amazing, yes?

But, how will they hope to finally do anything about it, especially France, with their arms in a permanent surrender position?

Seriously, it is actually kind of amazing that they've both finally gotten fed up enough to be ready to do something about it, especially that it's happening with both countries at about the same time.

Suff Obama, what we really need to make the world a better place is get rid of fat people. They're a drain on resources; they cost too much have in society, they wear too much cloth (or cheap man-made fabrics), they eat too much (granted, most of it's garbage), but most of all, they look ugly.

Wow, what a rude opinion.. but, okay, if you really feel that way, how do you define "fat people"? Are we to assume the Barbie standard and anyone who's healthy or heavier needs to go? Or perhaps anyone as heavyset as our current surgeon general, eh?