US Politics Mega-thread - Page 3767

On May 08 2016 05:47 OuchyDathurts wrote:
How does one go from Cheney saying it's a good thing we didn't take out Saddam to taking him out 10 years later? Delusions of grandeur, lunacy, staggering incompetence, greed? To take a 180 that hard requires a high level of shadiness IMO. A normal person doesn't sing the praises of not turning the country into a catastrophe then 10 years later think "Oh yeah, no, this is a fantastic idea!" You're the president and you don't wonder how old Dick had a complete and total change of heart on the matter? How that "quagmire" he talked about 10 years before was suddenly hunky dory now and things would be so easy peasy we don't need any strategy beyond next week? Nothing about that situation adds up to aww shucks guess we were wrong to me.

On May 08 2016 05:48 Thieving Magpie wrote:


I'm glad that 10 years ago you were exactly the same kind of person you are today.

EDIT:

Fundamentalists stay the same no matter what new information gives them.
Rationalists changes their stances based on what new information gives them.

10 years is a long time to change how you see the world.

On May 08 2016 05:48 Thieving Magpie wrote:


I'm glad that 10 years ago you were exactly the same kind of person you are today.

EDIT:

Fundamentalists stay the same no matter what new information gives them.
Rationalists changes their stances based on what new information gives them.

10 years is a long time to change how you see the world.

On May 08 2016 05:57 OuchyDathurts wrote:


Do you understand how absurd that statement is?

I'm glad you're equating changing your opinion with justifying the invasion of a country. That's quite the lovely apples to apples comparison.

On May 08 2016 06:09 WolfintheSheep wrote:

Not to defend the Iraq war or anything...

But your statement is even more absurd. 10 years is a lot of times for situations to change, especially when it comes to dictators and unstable regions.

With the end of his term on the horizon and a successor on the campaign trail, Barack Obama delivered the commencement address at Howard University on Saturday, encouraging thousands of mostly black graduates to change the US through civic action and compromise.

“Passion is vital, but you better have a strategy. And your plan better include voting,” Obama said, bemoaning low youth turnout in the 2014 election. “You don’t think that made a difference in terms of the Congress I’ve had to deal with?”

In the 40-minute address, Obama was equally light-hearted, cracking inside jokes about campus eateries and dormitories, and serious in his charge of graduates to fight for change and justice. “My generation,” he said, “is too stuck in our ways to provide much of the new thinking that will be required”.

The president also urged the younger generation to channel their indignation into action. “Change requires more than righteous anger – it requires change and it requires a program and it requires organizing,” he said, noting the growth of young activist movements including “black Twitter” and Black Lives Matter. “I’m so proud of the new guard of black activists who understand this,” he added.

“To bring about structural change, lasting change, awareness is not enough,” he went on. “It requires changes in law, changes in custom. If you care about mass incarceration, let me ask you, how are you pressuring members of Congress to pass the criminal reform bill now pending before them?”

In a likely allusion to presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump, whose rallies have been disrupted by progressive activists, Obama also discouraged graduates from trying to shut down the speeches and events of people they disagree with.

On May 08 2016 06:17 OuchyDathurts wrote:


10 years to change ones opinion on general life junk is not even in the same universe as 10 years to completely change your opinion on removing Saddam. Everything Cheney used as reasoning for not taking him out 10 years before is what happened when we did it 10 years later. So apparently this sweet new info proved to be so entirely false that every single thing we knew would happen before ended up happening, hmm weird.

I think I'll stick with there were ulterior greed based motives that lead to thousands of Americans all dying for absolutely nothing. Of course on top of creating more terrorism in the world than before, displacing millions, etc, etc. The reason for the change of heart 10 years later was cash money.

On May 08 2016 06:32 LegalLord wrote:

Long enough for the facts on the ground to change?

Shall we all revolt against fossil fuel because of what it does to the environment? Gas subsidies were on his mind when Tesla founder and CEO Elon Musk argued for a carbon tax, as reported in The Guardian.

Musk spoke at the World Energy Innovation Forum, held at the Tesla factory in Fremont, California, when he said, “The fundamental issue with fossil fuels is that every use comes with a subsidy. Every gasoline car on the road has a subsidy, and the right way to address that is with a carbon tax.”

Musk admitted that the fossil fuel lobbyists who influence politicians would make the changes he suggests difficult. He offered that the way to overcome the political challenge is to educate the public. People need to grasp the reality and scope of the threat of climate change, and understand it is directly attributable to fossil fuel use. He pointed out that proposed climate change policies in the EU have already been dropped because of economic pressure from oil companies.

“It is quite worrying, the future of the world,” Musk said. “We need to appeal to the people and educate them to sort of revolt against this and to fight the propaganda of the fossil fuel industry which is unrelenting and enormous.”

By seizing the Republican presidential nomination for Donald J. Trump on Tuesday night, he and his millions of supporters completed what had seemed unimaginable: a hostile takeover of one of America’s two major political parties.

Just as stunning was how quickly the host tried to reject them. The party’s two living former presidents spurned Mr. Trump, a number of sitting governors and senators expressed opposition or ambivalence toward him, and he drew a forceful rebuke from the single most powerful and popular rival left on the Republican landscape: the House speaker, Paul D. Ryan.

Rarely if ever has a party seemed to come apart so visibly. Rarely, too, has the nation been so on edge about its politics.

Many Americans still cannot believe that the bombastic Mr. Trump, best known as a reality television star, will be on the ballot in November. Plenty are also anxious about what he would do in office.

But for leading Republicans, the dismay is deeper and darker. They fear their party is on the cusp of an epochal split — a historic cleaving between the familiar form of conservatism forged in the 1960s and popularized in the 1980s and a rekindled, atavistic nationalism, with roots as old as the republic, that has not flared up so intensely since the original America First movement before Pearl Harbor.

Some even point to France and other European countries, where far-right parties like the National Front have gained power because of the sort of resentments that are frequently given voice at rallies for Mr. Trump.

Yet if keeping the peace means embracing Mr. Trump and his most divisive ideas and utterances, a growing number are loath to do it.

On May 08 2016 06:09 WolfintheSheep wrote:

Not to defend the Iraq war or anything...

But your statement is even more absurd. 10 years is a lot of times for situations to change, especially when it comes to dictators and unstable regions.

On May 08 2016 05:22 Thieving Magpie wrote:


You do know that, if the USSR was not such a big superpower, there is a damn good chance that the US would have invaded it to stop Stalin as well. It was called The Cold War for a reason--and none of that was because of peace. And yes, I do believe Stalin meant well. I also believe he was coward who saw enemies in every corner and in his attempt to protect himself burned the world around him to do it. But yes, I do think that the core of his intentions were also well meaning.

Donald Trump on Tuesday night assumed the mantle of presumptive nominee and declared: “We want to bring unity to the Republican Party. We have to bring unity.”

Three days later, the GOP is tearing itself apart.

Friday brought another day of incredible division and revolt with Jeb Bush and Lindsey Graham falling in line not behind Trump, but behind House Speaker Paul Ryan, who said a day earlier that he cannot yet support the brash real estate mogul as his party’s standard-bearer.

Trump, instead of trying to make peace, lashed out.

He fired off a vicious statement, calling Graham an “embarrassment” with “zero credibility.”

Then he laced into both of his former rivals during his rally in Omaha, Nebraska, where he is continuing to campaign ahead of Tuesday’s primary, despite having vanquished the rest of the GOP field.

“But I won’t talk about Jeb Bush. I will not say — I will not say he’s low energy. I will not say it,” Trump told a boisterous crowd who booed at the mention of his critics. “I will not say it. And I won’t talk about Lindsey Graham, who had like 1 point, you ever see this guy on television? He is nasty. … He leaves a disgrace, he can’t represent the people of South Carolina well.”

Trump also alternated on Friday between shrugging off Ryan’s bombshell announcement and scorching him.

During a phone interview with Fox News, Trump said he was “very, very surprised” at Ryan’s comments. “It’s hard to believe,” he said, adding, “It doesn’t bother me at all.”

His tweets, however, suggest otherwise.