Our fearless leader has informed Congress that, “I’m the decision maker.” He’s of course referring to their move to oppose his decision to send more troops to Iraq. I suspect his next course, if he had a football, would be to pick it up and go home with it.
I really think this guy believes he’s in his own game world. Perhaps a football is the wrong idea. Maybe someone needs to get this guy a World of Warcraft subscription. He clearly has a need to play out some fantasy scenario. At least in WoW he can do it without destroying the real world for the rest of us.
I love that the President keeps suggesting that Congress isn’t giving his “plan” a chance. He keeps talking about the “plan” as if it’s something unique. Someone needs to tell this guy that the rest of us aren’t convinced that his “plan” is anything more than a nuance. It’s also a nuance we’ve seen before. It doesn’t matter if the names have changed a bit. The story is still essentially the same.
These guys have all been living in their fantasy world too long and the problem is that their fantasy world is our reality. The Vice President was on CNN the other day and looked like a fish out of water. He kept acting like he never said anything positive about the past “plan”. I kept thinking that he’d gotten way too used to the fantasy of Fox News and they way they treat him. Mr. Cheney actually had the nerve to now suggest that failure in Iraq is going to be our fault because “we don’t have the stomach for it.” On Fox they’d all just agree to everything he said and offer no real counter. Of course he’s right. He’s Republican! What we don’t have the stomach for is an administration that doesn’t give a damn about the citizenry it represents. It doesn’t matter what we think to these people. We’re the problem.
So, I’m thinking at this point that we should just tell the President that the football we’re giving him represents the policy and we should hand it to him and let him go ahead and take it home. As soon as he hits the door we just all go ahead and do what needs to be done while he sulks at a distance. George Bush has forgotten the one biggest reality in all of this “game”. He’s not the decision maker; we are and we’ve spoken as loudly and as clearly as possible on this issue.
8 Comments
Actually, according to the Constitution, he gets to decide. If this were a true democrocy, we’d all get to vote on each issue and would vote ourselves all sorts of stupid bennys. This being a constitutional republic, however, means that he gets to decide, and thank God he does. The last time we cut and ran from an obligation, it cost three million lives in Sout Viet Nam and Cambodia. I would actually prefer sending a football (and a lift ticket) to Ted Kennedy. Those boys know how to have fun! SKI FOOTBALL!
According to the Constitution he gets to decide part of the equation, not 100% of it. I find it quite telling that just the other day he took a 180 degree turn in his approach to the new Congress and said nearly the same thing above.
I also don’t buy the Vietnam argument. It doesn’t hold water. By definition we could have never left under the guidelines this sort of thinking puts forth. We should have never gone to Vietnam just as we shouldn’t have gone into Iraq. Trying to say we should stay indefinitely isn’t ever the right answer. “Until the job is done” is not a valid plan. We want to know precisely what criteria fits the job being done. The last time we let this guy decide that he showed up on a carrier with “Mission Accomplished” behind him.
Well, even though the Dems like to say that they now have a majority because the people didn’t like the war, they are not going to end it either. It was evident from the beginning to most of us that they were not. It was merely a way to diparage the current administration. Most of the Dems do realize that we need to be there and will not vote for cutting off the funding, which is the only way they can end it. Actually, there are a lot of conservatives who don’t approve of how the war has been handled, and I am one of them. I think (but don’t know, as everyone else seems to think they do) that recent changes to the rules of engagement will make a lot more difference than anything we have done so far. Whether JFK should have sent troops to Viet Nam is an open question, and I’m really glad you are sure of the answer. I’m not. I AM sure that LBJ bungled his part in it badly, but by the time Nixon worked on it for a while, Militarily the problem was very close to being under control.At that time, congress cut off funding and the REAL slaughter began. I also know that the money expended in that war was the beginning of financial hard times for the Soviet Union who finished plunging under the waves as a result of Reagan’s genius. If we had perservered, it would have been a mixed bag, with the U.S. having new oil supplies from the region and 3 million people left alive who died horribly as a result of our congress backing out of a committment. I will never claim that Viet Nam was our finest hour, because whatever good Kennedy saw in going there was corrupted by Johnson, but it ended much worse than it started, and left to the judgement of some Democrats, Iraq would do the same. There are lots more than two choices. Leaving now or staying forever are the two extremes. We did neither in Japan. We are still in Korea and Germany, but not fighting. We have troops all over the world that simply do a tour and come home. In many cases, they need to be there. Probably in some areas they are a waste, or their purpose is obscure to most of us. You will notice, I hope, that there has been no repeat of 9-ll here. Iraq is one of the hottest spots on the planet, and we should not and will not leave it empty of anyone to oppose radical islam. They want to kill us. They know how. Leaving them alone will not change that.
Joe, the President is having a much harder time doing what he wants to do now. The Congress cannot just go about ending a war on their own. I don’t agree with the overly-careful way they’re going about it but that’s another topic.
As far as rules of engagement changing, I’ll believe that when I see it. I don’t believe in this administration. They’ve given me NOTHING to extend that respect to their vision so I find I’m safer to start off being extremely suspect of anything that comes out from there.
On troops in Vietnam, that started with Eisenhower. It was one of the core transitional concerns between administrations. We agree on LBJ’s handling of it. As for the money spent impacting the Soviets. It also impacted us. It was another decade before we recovered financially.
As far as talking about Japan, we still have quite a large military presence there although it’s not exactly necessary to keep their people in line any longer.
As far as the paper-thin argument that we haven’t had a 9/11 since 9/11, I don’t put any merit in it. I don’t believe the situation would be any different under any other administration. Any administration would have taken steps to prevent that. For now, there was no 9/11 for a longer period BEFORE 9/11 than there has been after it. I don’t think that means Clinton was a terrorism genius and terrorism certainly didn’t start in 2001.
As far as “they want to kill us”, I have a hard time putting myself in other nation’s people’s and being able to say anything different about us. We’ve been responsible for more people dying in other countries in our nations history than virtually any other country on the planet.
Congratulations! That was VERY carefully worded. Yes we have killed a lot of folks in other countries. That’s because our conflicts have BEEN in other countries for the most part. We took out about 1/4 million in Japan, probably our largest two day sample. However, we normally credit Stalin with 20 million, Hitler with around 60 million, Sadam with around 2 million, Mao got about 20 million, Idi Amin got about 300 thousand and Milosevic scored around 1/4 million. Franco put away about 2 million just in executions. Somosa scored low at only 50,000, but then I guess business is slow in Nicaragua. Around 100 years ago, the three Pashas racked up a cool million points in India, and Ion Antonescu got another million in Romania, but we already added most of them to Hitler’s WW2 score, so we can let that pass. Since the above examples (and I could go on and on) occurred in large part in countries where the killer was killing folks in his own country, they would be, very carefully I might add, excluded from your “killed more people in other countries” statement. I could research how many have died in England’s many overseas conflicts for a comparison, but frankly, I don’t care. The point is that in a period of time when warfare became widespread and we became very good at it, we would have naturally killed a lot of people, especially in other countries, since that’s where the wars were! The other point is that for the sake of preventing our world from falling to people like Hitler and Stalin, most of those folks needed killing. That’s what armies do! They kill people and break things. The three million that we ARE responsable for that grates on me are the ones we left to die in Viet Nam and Cambodia. We left other “friends” to die in Iraq after the fist gulf war also. There was no excuse for that one either, in spite of who ran it. I don’t want to do that again!
As to Clinton’s not having a 9-11, he had plenty of terrorist incidents of his own, he just chose to do nothing about them. Our people were killed by terrorists here and abroad all through his administration and he ran from taking military action against the killers and refused on several occasions to stir the waters by accepting the gift of Osama on a silver platter. I know, bush has not gotten him either, but as far as I know nobody has offered him up to Bush like they did to Clinton. I do not know what the ultimate outcome will be in Iraq. We (pretty much everybody, since most were in favor of going there in the first place even though they don’t remember it now) misjudged how the Iraqi people would react to Sadam’s downfall. Since the border with Iran has become a free fire zone, I notice that the enemy is dying with increasing frequency and in larger batches. There is nothing like the blood of the enemy to hearten our allies, and perhaps that will change things, perhaps not. Whatever happens, it would be a terrible mistake to abandon the field and let chaos rule until another Sadaam takes over…Joe
Joe, if you’re going to keep changing subjects all the time this is going to just go on and on. You pointed out we didn’t have bases in Japan any longer. I pointed out that this wasn’t accurate. Now you turn that into a discussion of how we do have troops all over the world.
This is similar to the way Sean Hannity works. Someone calls in and when they get Sean on a point he says, “Let me ask you a question” and changes the subject.
People killing their own citizens is an internal conflict. Hurray. We don’t do that very often. No, we just show up everywhere else in the name of Right and kill countless other people.
I also note that you reference the completely debunked story of Bin Laden being in Clinton’s reach and his having turned it down. You really do need to get your news from varied sources. That never happened. Clinton, in my view, still didn’t do enough but at least he was involved and had people like Richard Clarke keeping them up-to-date. That Bush’s administration tried to suggest that Clarke was a nutcase just underscores how far these people will go to forward their cause. The Dems would also disagree with you and point to Tora Bora. Frankly that sounds suspect to me as well.
As far as people forgetting their support. We agree. Thankfully I was never one of those people. This plan stunk to high heavens from the moment I first heard about it. Those who supported it were snowed by this administration. Those people are going to have to live with that. They have to accept that they were duped. That’s not my fault.
People who knew the situation in Iraq didn’t misjudge the reaction. The administration just chose to ignore and attack anyone who spoke up about this.
Also there is nothing like the blood of the “enemy” to hearten our enemies. I really am less concerned about what our dwindling allies think of the situation. We broke it, we own it now. Where have I heard that before?
As far as it being better to leave or not, at this point that’s an unknown. No one can say for sure how that would turn out. We left Vietnam and today Vietnam is no longer an issue and no longer an enemy. Hmmm.
I’m assuming you detest the work our fathers did in world war two? That’s when we killed the most people. Hitler must be very proud of you..Michael
Michael, there’s no comparison between what we’re doing today and World War II. We were involved in attacking countries. One of them, the Japanese, had directly attacked us. This is not the same thing as terrorist attack by a splinter group. We had little choice but to go into Germany as they were allied with the Japanese and had declared war on us as well.
I have complete respect for our veterans. I’m one myself.