Wednesday, December 02, 2009

The West Point address

I DID watch the bulk of it until the Sobieski kind of took the upper hand and haven't read the other blogs on the matter yet but I have to say the thought occured that Obama is somewhat better at foreign policy than domestic policy. I watched it basically because it was West Point and wanted to see the cadets. There was the element of pathos there, you'd look in the audience and realize that many of them are going to be deployed to Afghanistan and a certain percentage of them are never coming home. I also feel the war in Afghanistan is far more germane and relevant to the War on Terror, to crushing Al-qaeda than the campaign in Iraq was and is and there was a kind of inversion of priorities under Bush when we saw Saddam Hussein swinging from the gallows instead of Osama bin Laden though for the record I oppose the death penalty. The President will send 30,000 more troops over there, many by Christmas and the rest by next summer in a kind of two-step surge and the withdrawal date is set for sometime in 2011. What's a conservative to argue with? the speech was okay unless you like eternal warfare but it's hard to believe we're still at war with a bunch of cavedwellers who haven't been rocked back to the Stone Age yet. Bush kind of led us to believe the Taliban was crushed once and for all and all the action was in Iraq if you wanna be honest about it. I pray for those young men and women we saw last night, lives so full of promise and hope but Obama did well in laying out why they're going over there. Now to the other blogs......

18 comments:

  1. This conservative can argue with a timetable, terrorists are patient and they would have no problems waiting until 2011. Why in the world does telling your enemy your plans make sense anyway?

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  2. Obama has no absolutely no understanding of what the military is, how it functions, why it functions, how military operations are planned, coordinated and evaluated or anything else about the military.
    Barack Obama needs to demonstrate he is committed to winning the war in Afghanistan, and he clearly isn’t.
    I would listen to the Generals on the ground in Afghanistan and do what they suggest. But then again, I don’t believe that Obama really wants to win this war. This is war not date night, you can't take months to make decisions. Thats the reason why he as a General with experience in the field. But, you are not allowed to disagree with Mr. BO. So what do we have? We have a guy that knows nothing about what he’s doing and won’t listen to his advisers that do know about it and that has the experience. He doe’s not really want America to win this war. By sending more troops is what a president of the United States should do and not prolong the decision, like he has. Most important, when you are at war, you do not want the enemy to hear of any time table on withdrawal. There he has played into their hands of the enemy once again.
    He relies almost exclusively on rhetoric, his incomprehension of the War on Terror is very troubling and ignoring the difficult realities of a dangerous world, and thus he is unfit to be the President of this Great Nation.
    Our brave men and women of our military have been waiting 90 days for re inforcements. And this is what our commander in chief gives them. Just 70% if what the commanding General asked for. And a promise to retreat 18 months from now no matter what progress they achieve.
    The Taliban must be celebrating on the roof tops after learning that they just have to wait a mere 18 months before we cut and run from Afghanistan and leave them to run a muck!.

    The question is: can our great troops succeed in the field, even when headed by a narcissist who in his heart does not believe in what they’re doing?

    Also his priorities are all screwed up... he may want to focus on health care and cap and trade, but the American people have other priorities such as WINNING the war and JOBS.


    In my opinion Obama’s speech was lack-lustering, he showed absolutely no enthusiasm and that showed in the Cadets falling asleep.. He sounded to me like a waffling dithering boob. And was less a “Call to Arms” and more like a act of “Desertion”
    I guess that Obama feels he is doing his part for Alla by putting our kids in a no-win country to be killed off by his friends?

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  3. Beth and DD I'm coming at this more from the angle of be glad we got the 30,000 troops, he could've caved totally to his left-wing base. Hillary went on the news stations last night saying the timetable talk was misinterpreted but I really don't see him as being all that left-wing on foreign policy except for removing our missile shield in Eastern Europe of course. But to reiterate George Bush led me to believe for the longest time that we had actually defeated the Taliban and so when I heard the war there was still ongoing I was kinda surprised to be honest about it. Conservatives like Malkin and Hannity acted like it was somehow a sin to criticize Bush at the time, "Bush-bashing" they called it. Bush should have finished off the Taliban IMHO.

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  4. The Soviets went in there with over 300,000 ground troops. Just made the dang tribes mad. As our
    tactical brain trust down at Ft. Leavenworth notes, they left 15,000
    dead, the hulks of 451 front line aircraft and 147 tanks. So, our military suspects that 'bombing them into the stone age' is not all that effective if they already are in the stone age. It is far past time someone figures out what is it we want and how much will we pay? ..Reagan left Lebanon when
    300 Marines were killed. Dunno...
    BTW, cadets doze off whenever and wherever..isn't the speaker, its the curriculum.

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  5. We should come to terms with the facts of reality that our resources are finite. We cannot span the globe nation building and propping up governments molded in our image. While we do this and speak the virtues of Democracy, we not only fail to assert that we ourselves are a Constitutional Republic, we also forget preciesly what it is we are fighting to preserve as we destroy little by little this virtue domestically.

    Also, though the Taliban is far removed from any semblance of what is deemed as the westernized ideal, the Taliban itself is not inherently the problem Z. Al Qaeda on the other hand.....

    Perpetual War and Deficit Spending; that's what this Federal Government is about.

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  6. soap you just summed up my whole foreign policy!!! conservative in the old-fashioned way, war only as a last resort when we are directly threatened and only when we can pay for it. Alas you and I are in the minority.

    Yup BB the Soviets had their asses kicked big-time when they invaded Afghanistan during the 80's and guess who was on our side back then?

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  7. & re those cadets I thought they were very respectful during the President's address despite what Chris Matthews thinks.

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  8. George Will is on our side too Z.

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  9. Oh yeah and Ron Paul too (but nobody takes that nutjob seriously right? I mean why would they?? He's only been on point about the ills of our monetary system, the housing bubble bursting, and the tech bubble bursting as well)

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  10. but I do think Afghanistan is more related to the overall War on Terror than going after Saddam Hussein was and so I'm more partial if you will to the campaign there. Good to know Will is on our side, now let me go get my dictionary and thesaurus and look at what he has to say.

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  11. Re Ron Paul soapie (before I leave to go to work now) I've a theory. They pin the nutjob label on you the closer you get to the Overall Truth. You start hitting close to home and start touching some raw nerves and you get awarded your very own tinfoil hat.

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  12. Actually, while Afghanistan is much more relevant than is probably Iraq, Pakistan is much more relevant than is Afghanistan. And so you begin to see a domino effect here. It's a cycle that, within the context of the "War on Terror" will run in perpetuity. The people will sacrifice so long as there is war. And war is and always has been the justification to keep the fiat currency machine and expansive government running at maximum capacity.

    Read Will's column from yesterday (12-2-09).

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  13. Drudging the Will column, give me a few minutes soapster.

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  14. Well all I can say is let's say we never went into Iraq and sent every soldier to Afghanistan in the first place perhaps we wouldn't be having this debate. You would have had surges and then some but who am I to debate Will? It's like I'm tall and bigboned and played tennis a few times with my lanky Korean friend and each time he kicked my ass so why bother? & my vocab ain't quite up to his par either.

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  15. I thought I saw a headline that Obama's Tuesday address will talk about job creation, and I thought they meant last Tuesday but they mean THIS Tuesday, so when did Obama get a weekly TV show?

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  16. (drumroll please),

    that was a good one!

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  17. Ok, I'm probably going to catch hell for this, but what the hell, I know I'm right...

    A message to my fellow Conservatives: Get over it. So the President is going to speak to children. Holy Mother of God!

    As a father, I've been teaching my kid how to think for himself since he could understand what I was saying. I've taught him right from wrong, right from left, and everything in between. I've challenged him when he's wrong. I've corrected him when he over reacts to an issue. I've guided him through complex issues and believe it or not, have tried to present both sides of an issue so he can see it for himself and make a decision on what HE thinks about it.

    Now, my boy is long on book smarts, and a tad shy on common sense. And he does get ahead of himself in political discussions. But I know for a fact that if he should ever have to sit through a speech from the president, he's not going to be indoctrinated. He's not going to buy into the bullshit. He's going to think about it, ask me questions if need be and he'll be just fine.

    You know how I know that? Because I've raised him his entire life. I would hope everyone of you would know the exact same thing about your kids.

    So everyone chill out. It's just a presidential speech that most of them won't listen to anyways. If your kid is so susceptible to an hour with Obama, that they're going to be indoctrinated into being Marxists, Obama is not your biggest problem.

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  18. My nephew is too busy playing video games, I don't think he much cares.

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