lolgaxe wrote:
gbaji wrote:
Serving your country, in whatever capacity, when asked by the president, is.
Doing things for the betterment or defense of your country/men is patriotic. Doing what a leader says because a leader says isn't.
That's great. That's also not what was being talked about. Willingness to accept a position if offered to you by the president isn't the same as "doing what a leader says because he says it".
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What has he actually done that has changed your opinion from his being the absolute worst thing that could possibly happen to the country to the point that you'd vote for Clinton to earn your "principled" vote of confidence?
He won the election. Silly me for giving him the benefit of the doubt and waiting to see what he actually does in office rather than spending all my time listening to people telling me about what they think he might have done in the past, especially when those things are, so far as I can see, based on sheer speculation and a desire to simply paint him in the worst light no matter what.
I gave Obama the exact same benefit of the doubt. He responded by proceeding to spend about a trillion dollars on completely unnecessary things that I felt would slow down the economic recovery (and I appear to have been correct). He followed that up with a foreign trip in which he basically vowed to pull US involvement out of a number of areas in the world, which I felt would only embolden more tin-pot dictators and allow other powers to fill in the void we would create (and I appear to have been correct on that as well). He followed that up with what appears to have been a scheme to gin up gun control arguments for his party, which backfired badly when the guns allowed to slip into Mexico to increase the death rate there so it could be blamed on US gun sales (coordinated with increased pressure on gun shows as the cause for those of you who were paying attention at the time) resulted in a Border Patrol officer being shot and killed and the program being revealed. He sent Clinton to Russia with that stupid "reset button", which (once again predictably) resulted in a more emboldened Russia, which has since then spread its influence even more. He watched the pitch go by on the Green Revolution in Iran, resulting in failure. He again watched the pitch go by in Egypt, sitting on the sidelines actually making a big show of "not meddling", resulting in extremists associated with several terrorist groups gaining power. He did the same exact thing again in Libya, refusing to aid an effort to topple Gaddafi, allowing other less friendly forces to step in, then when they nearly failed, finally stepped in and helped, but too late to prevent those other forces from having a strong foothold in the country (which, you know, leads us to Benghazi). Oh, and he actually violated the War Powers act in the process to boot (an actual "illegal war", which I thought the folks on the left were against). He then failed to act (once again) in Syria, when we could have literally picked any random faction in the conflict, supported them and had influence over the resulting government, instead allowing that conflict to fester eternally. Oh, and then failed to act on his own red line involving chemical weapons use. Oh, and then failed to renegotiate the SOFA in Iraq, almost gleefully withdrew our troops from that country, knowing there was an active war going on just over a relatively unsecured border and that Iraqi forces were not yet capable of dealing with that at the time. Which, you know, basically allowed ISIS to exist in the first place, spilling out of the conflict in Syria and into Iraq, giving them far more resources and actual territory to work with. A mistake that still hasn't been corrected (and a conflict in Syria that's still going strong resulting so far in more casualties than the entire Iraq war, and many times more displaced refugees.
I judged Obama purely on his actions, and the results of those actions. Nothing else. And yeah, I intend to judge Trump the exact same way. As I said earlier, if you want to attack him for his political actions, that's great. And heck, I'll likely even agree with you on some of them. But this nonsense? It's ridiculous.
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That's a really weird thing to insist when you spent so much energy to defend the guy that didn't want to deploy because the person he wanted to win an election didn't. Years after the fact.
I honestly have no clue what you are talking about? The only thing I can think of is one of the several lawsuits related to the whole birth certificate thing? Which had nothing directly to do with wanting or not wanting to deploy. If that's your primary take away from any argument I made about that, then you completely missed the point.
Unless you're talking about something else, in which case I have no clue. Maybe a hint?
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And when they do tune it out "someone" complains about how they're not actually just bored of all the howling and tuning them out but they simply must not be able to argue their points. Can you just imagine how annoying that would get?
You completely missed the point I was making. I'm talking about the public response to such constant attacks. It's not about them arguing points, or not being able to argue points. It's the basic point that when you make every single thing into the most important thing, then you can't be surprised when the public ceases to be able to actually tell when something is really important and when it's not. They'll either accept that everything being claimed is true, but nothing ever changes anyway *or* they'll assume it's all "fake news" and disbelieve anything that is said.
Either way, the result is decreased public attention to anything that happens.
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At least you're pretending to feel a fraction of how we actually felt with your howling at every single thing, no matter how minor, and attempting to convince the entire population that it's the biggest thing ever, and it's a totally horrible thing, and we must fight against it with all our might.
The key difference is that I spoke about things that actually happened. This howling is over... what? Rumors? Speculation? Anything else?
I have no problem at all with someone pointing out an action a political takes, a law proposed (or passed), an order given (and acted on), and expressing their opinion about that. That's completely reasonable. But to spend so much time and effort on what appears to be absolutely nothing? You must really not have a position to make if that's where you go, right?
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Obama bows too low and it's the absolute worst insult to this country, yet 45 doesn't salute during a national anthem and not even a peep.
it wasn't the bowing alone, but the message he sent during that trip. If you recall, I didn't raise the issue of bowing, and it was never a focus of my posts. I responded to those insisting that it wasn't a big deal by pointing out that it was kind of an inappropriate bow the way he did it. I think you're placing way more weight on that than I ever did. My focus was on the message of the trip.
And hey. If you had that much of a problem with Trump being a bit slow to raise his hand to his heart during the Anthem, you could have posted about it. What part of "I don't scour the media looking for silly gotcha stuff" did you not get the first hundred or so times I said it?
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Is this a Dread Pirate Roberts thing? Did the original gbaji give you his codes and you're just trying to continue the tradition? The original was never good with keeping track of his stories either but this is just beyond inconsistent. It's like you've never even seen a gbaji post.
I don't tend to bring such things to the conversation (I don't think I ever have). Other people may bring such things up, and I may comment on them, but if you think it's a big deal, that's your perception, not mine. For my part, I'm usually posting merely because I see someone else being overly emotional about something and so I respond.
So in this thread, it's people going hysterical over what I see as nothing more than media created fluff. And yeah, it reminds me a lot of the Plame investigation, which literally started because one reporter wrote an article in which he mentioned (almost out of the blue, btw) that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA, then another reporter wrote an op-ed speculating that if Wilson's wife was a "secret agent" of some kind, then her employment at the CIA would be classified, and if the first reporter got this information from someone with access to that secret than that person would be violating the law, and if that person worked at the White House, then this whole chain of speculation could be a way of getting back at Wilson for his op-eds attacking Bush's claim in the 2004 SOTU speech.
There's literally 4 levels of "if" in that chain of reasoning. Ironically, none of them being true. But that didn't matter. The speculation alone got traction, was repeated over and over, and lead to an investigation.
Sound familiar? If the Russians were the ones who handed the DNC emails to Wikileaks. And if they obtained it via hacking of the DNC server. And if they did it to help Trump win the election. And if Trump knew about this help. And if there was some sort of promised quid pro quo from Trump to the Russians. And if Trump somehow helped the Russians with the hacking, or with the release of the information. Then you'd have collusion with the Russians to steal an election, and criminal activity on US soil involved and could proceed with some kind of legal action. OMG! It all seems to clear to me.
Of course, just one of those "ifs" not being true breaks the entire chain, right? It's an incredibly weak series of speculations. You might as well start claiming that Trump used satellites to beam his mind control waves into people's brains to get them to vote for him. That's about as reasonable.
Or we can look at the far more likely explanation that Clinton was just such a weak candidate, with so many flaws, and so much baggage, and so many questions, that she could be beat even by a candidate as questionable as Donald Trump. And I honestly think this is the driving force for this. The Left spent so much time just utterly bashing Trump. He's a buffoon. He's a joke. He can't even speak properly (it's all yuge, right?). He probably can't tie his own shoes. He has no chance against the veteran politician that is Clinton, and everyone who knows anything at all knows it. Only a complete idiot would think he has a snowballs chance in hell of winning.
But then he won. And rather than face the fact that maybe they were just plain wrong, the left has lashed out in every direction to find an explanation. And "rigged election" is the easiest one to go for. Let's not forget that neither Trump or the Russians wrote the stuff Podesta and other members of the DNC wrote, which was such an embarrassment to them. It was the Democrats being themselves when they thought no one was looking. If you honestly think that the wikileaks cost Clinton the election, then isn't the real problem with the DNC and the Clinton campaign anyway? Maybe next time, try *not* to cheat in your own primary. Just a suggestion.
And if you think it was the Comey release a week or so before the election that did it, then shouldn't you be happy that he finally got fired? Except, that doesn't fit the new narrative, so you have to defend Comey instead, right? Um... At what point do you start realizing that the position and argument you're using is so incredibly twisted? It's not about fact, or right or wrong, it's about supporting whatever media narrative helps your "side" today. So the villain of yesterday becomes the martyr today.
Sorry. I find that way too contrived. Get back to me when there are supporting facts for any of this.
Edited, May 19th 2017 7:45pm by gbaji