President Biden: The NEW one and only politics thread

You applied a bunch of thought to this reply.

Possibly all the thought you’re capable of! ‘Gratz!

 

I thought both of you had interesting thoughts that made me think. Not any exchange I thought needed to end in insults.

 

Boris Johnson is a straight-up sociopath but he is disciplined about it.

He's what we could have if an intelligent floor model of Trump ever emerged.

 

My posts are about the rough (morally, strategically) 21st Century our military, defense and intelligence experts have had - with or without Trump.

Your posts, however eloquent, are generally about Orange Man = bad. Which, yes, he is bad. He also had nothing to do with Abu Ghraib or the rise of ISIS.

 

They sure looked amateurish. When the US defeated Japan in WWII, the allies often kept the Japanese administration on temporarily in countries the empire had conquered to maintain order. When Bush/Cheney conquered Iraq, they basically outlawed the Baath party and kicked out the country's Baathist bureaucracy. The result was rioting, looting and general disorder, as well as a power vacuum that factional militias filled. Rumsfeld's reaction: "Stuff happens."

What happened to that seasoned Iraqi military leadership that the US put out of work? They weren't unemployed for long. How Saddam’s men help Islamic State rule

Trump does deserve credit for one thing: he discarded the GOP talking point that the invasion of Iraq was justified in any way. You don't hear any weak claims anymore from diehards that "weapons of mass destruction" were discovered anywhere in the country.

Of course, Trump had to insert a lie as well, claiming that he opposed the Iraq adventure all along.

 

Remember when we were going to be greeted as liberators, with flowers and candy? Pepperidge Farms remembers.

Meanwhile, Bush had zero clue that Sunnis and Shiites can’t stand each other, and then you toss the Kurds in, and any other factions, and you have the mess that we exacerbated.

 

I honestly don't know how I feel about Afghanistan other than pissed at the number of Americans and allies killed or maimed and money spent for essentially nothing.
I truly hate it for the people who live there, but it's not our responsibility to stay there forever. Our presence has been a piece of gauze on a sucking chest wound for two decades.
The UN as a whole needs to make a decision as to either go in no holds barred and put an end to the Taliban or treat the place like North Korea. It super sucks for those people unfortunate enough to be born there, but the piecemeal approach clearly doesn't work.
Oh, and any government or power structure based on religion is idiotic at best.

 

It makes you wonder how a staff of longtime Republican apparachiks could be so ineffective. U.S. Rep Babara Lee makes a compelling argument that the administration wanted to be able to justify establishing a permanent military presence in Iraq to replace bases the military had in Saudi Arabia, which are widely viewed as a motivation for the 9/11 attacks. Permanent Occupation | Barbara Lee - Congresswoman for the 13th District of California

 

I'm reminded of Adolf Hitler's prediction regarding Operation Barbarossa in WWII: "We have only to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down." It didn't work out that way for the Nazis -- despite horrendous losses, the Soviets wore the invaders down in a stubborn war of attrition. That's the way a legitimate nation defends itself, whether a democracy or a totalitarian state.

I look at the ease with which the Taliban overruns our supposed allies in the Afghan cities and, for that matter, the way Isis swept through northern Iraq and Syria. We spent almost 20 years of blood and fortune bankrolling a structure that, basically, appears rotten to the core.

 

Maureen Dowd, also worried about the cools.

Opinion | Behold Barack Antoinette

It’s hard to stop thinking about the over-the-top fete the former president held at his Martha’s Vineyard manse for his 60th birthday. It is such a perfect taxonomy of the Obama arc.

As president, he didn’t try hard enough on things we needed. He was a diffident debutante with a distaste for politics. Post-presidency, he is trying too hard on things we don’t need. The culture is already swimming in Netflix deals, celebrity worship, ostentatious displays of wealth, not to mention podcasts. Did the world really need “Renegades,” his duet with Bruce Springsteen?

 

Dowd is maybe the most pathetic political columnist in the country. Not the worst, just the saddest, because she takes it personally that some pols lead happier lives than she does. IMO any President who served two terms to the best of their ability, even GW Bush who was a disaster in many ways, is entitled to do whatever they damn please after leaving office.