Please wait...
So sad to watch Europe burn again. Sadder to think that 1. Obama's policies wrought this. and 2. we escaped another 4 years of this narrowly.
You're about 25% correct.
(1) Putin is solving what we couldn't. He was going to do that anyway. That takes you from 100% to 50%
(2) When we put Obama in office, we thought he was going to rise above the neocon regime-change bullshit. We thought he was a fairly credible non-interventionist, if not actually anti-war, candidate. We were wrong. The foreign policy establishment changed his mind. Now, Trumputin's term has only just started - so any glowing statements about what we missed out on are way premature. Obama fooled us - I can say for a certainty that Trump has fooled some of his voters - remains to be seen how bad.
That takes you from 50% to 25%. Not good so far.
It is true that immigration is doing a bad job for local terrorism. What would the Kacinskys and McVeighs do, when illegal muslim immigrants took their jobs?
Imagine muslim immigrants starting to visit your schools and stealing all the precious mass shooting opportunities!
And if you say anything about bin Laden, he had ZERO choice. If it ever got out that he ignored the world's most wanted man, Americans would go crazy, and his political clout would have been erased.
created ISIS. Why on earth do you think he's non-interventionist,
other than a few drone shots here and there....
I'm not sure your question is fully formed, but I'll do my best:
* A pullout from Iraq is a non-interventionist act.
* A pullout from Afghanistan is a non-interventionist act.
* Allowing the CIA to fund an ill-conceived insurgency in Syria, while ISIS was already on the rise, is no such thing, and is disqualifying. But CIA-funded proxy wars have a long and ignominious and, above all else, bipartisan history in US politics. The GOP has done it time and time again. The Dems have done it. So, spectacularly ill-considered, at least in hindsight. They must have thought this would be over a lot quicker than it was. But it didn't go down the way it did in Tunisia or Egypt or even Libya, so we sit here having this conversation now.
Your question seems self-contradictory, but put that to one side. I'm not sure you ACTUALLY read my post ;) - I was saying that what we thought we were getting, when we voted for him, and what we actually got, were maybe two different things. Yes, the Obama Doctrine (to the extent that a doctrine even exists) is "don't do stupid stuff", and his administration has been somewhat marked by a disengagement with the rest of the world. But at least in the case of Syria, he *did* intervene, and he *did* do stupid shit. For all I know, Hillary probably talked him into it...
Trump is going to do something really bloody stupid. Of that I have no doubt.
I tend to call those people insane.
But one thing is undeniable: he called Rosie O'Donnell a fat pig, and a slob, and he meant it. For this reason alone, Trump is the single greatest president of our era.
That's hyperbole. Of course you don't like him, we know that. I think he's done a decent enough job. The ACA has its warts, but it's a step forward. Foreign policy is a mixed bag... he did the inevitable thing in pulling out of Iraq/Afghanistan and creating that power vacuum you naturally abhor. The American people did not want an endless war, so pulling out was inevitable and something that had to be tried. I'll continue to lay the blame at the feet of Shrub and Cheney - they really did willfully trump up the intelligence on the WMD's.
That's hyperbole. Of course you don't like him, we know that. I think he's done a decent enough job. The ACA has its warts, but it's a step forward. Foreign policy is a mixed bag... he did the inevitable thing in pulling out of Iraq/Afghanistan and creating that power vacuum you naturally abhor. The American people did not want an endless war, so pulling out was inevitable and something that had to be tried. I'll continue to lay the blame at the feet of Shrub and Cheney - they really did willfully trump up the intelligence on the WMD's.
Everything is hyperbole to someone.
ACA is only a step forward if you believe that health care is something that ought to be managed by the government. If not, it's a giant step backwards. As has already been discussed ad nauseum, the system was already broken because of too much regulation. Simply allowing medical insurance to be purchased across state lines, with pre-tax dollars, and giving providers permission to deny service to those who cannot pay (read: illegal immigrants using the ER as their primary care clinic and then stiffing the doctors) would have solved 95% of the existing problems.
George Hitler Bush and George Wanker Bush both get the blame for starting the Iraq war. Obama gets the blame for engaging in pussy warfare instead of bombing the shit out of anyone who shouts "Allahu Akbar" when people die.
A conversation with a liberal:
Did you know the US government put small pox on blankets and gave them to the Indians?
Did you know the government put a toxic substance called fluoride in the drinking water just to see what happened?
Did you know the government gave syphilis to African-Americans just to study what would happen?
Did you know the government sprayed St. Louis with toxic zinc cadmium sulfide to test what it would do to the citizens?
I think the government should be in charge of health care.
And the notioning of "trying" is ridiculous, and showed that we didn't have grown-ups in charge.
We're still in Germany, Japan and Korea to this day. You don't have to fight continuously, but you do need to destroy your enemy, and install a friendly government. We did neither.
Fri Dec 23 2016 02:20:26 PM EST from Ragnar Danneskjold @ UncensoredIgnoring illegal immigration and its effect on the working poor as stressed our safety net programs....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloward%E2%80%93Piven_strategy
This is rich:
the road for a future president to deal with.<<<The doubling of the debt was doing nothing more than kicking the can down
First of all, the debt didn't double in GDP-ratio terms, and there was a recession to deal with. Not just a recession, but the only modern recession that couldn't have been dealt with by monetary stimulus alone. So an increase in the debt ratio was the right thing to do!
Second: it's funny how we've come full circle. When I was younger, I used to be a bit of a deficit scold. I would log onto this very BBS and gripe about how we needed to align taxing and spending better, balance the budget, find a solution to the trade deficit, etc. You, Ragnar, would respond with statements to the effect of "you're worrying about it too much. Even Keynes said `we owe it to ourselves.'"
So don't worry about it so much. We'll find a way - if Trump doesn't follow through on his promise to make the deficit even worse.
Lastly, nobody's ignoring illegal immigration; deportations reached record levels.