To be fair none of these guys drove the country towards a military dictatorship. IIRC Eisenhower warned us of the military industrial complex in his farewell speech, its where all the hippies picked up the term from.
I thought you did:
Seriously, my apologizes if I misunderstood.
I have generally found that Republicans with military backgrounds are more likely to put country before party than Republicans without military backgrounds.
I sense a “I hate Bush more than you do” debate coming on.
So now apparently Bush feels snubbed by Obama in all this:
I think they all want to screw us and help the wealthy keep their money.
I figure we’d probably be on the same side in a bar fight, though. 
nm
Historycentral: History's Home on the Web We have been at war non fucking stop. If you include incursions like Panama and many other, you see we never quit invading.. We have over 800 bases in over 120 different countries.
The Military Industrial Complex is real. He was going to call it the Military, industrial and media complex, but was talked out of it. Ike would have been even more prophetic.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_United_States_military_operations Here is a list that shows our interventions too, We have been very busy.
Yeah, you misunderstood. My point was that Obama had a laundry list of options and waiting 8 months so that we could be super-prepared for the sort of operation we ended up having was probably not at the top of the list of options being presented to Obama.
We can monday morning quarterback him all day long. Some of my liberal friends think that he should have done this back in September or October with a couple of months of preparation (still a LOT of lead time as far as these things go). It would have affected the November elections AND we would probably have cut our troop presence in Afghanistan in half by now.
I think he handled this pretty well, a lot of things could have gone wrong and I think Obama deserves more credit than “well he just happens to be the guy sitting in the white house when all this went down”
I hope he’s intelligent enough to listen to his military advisers and did what they suggested.
And pick goodmilitary advisors rather than yes men who couldn’t or wouldn’t tell him the difference between fighting a war and rebuilding a country. (With the high-prices ‘services’ of his VP’s company jacking up the deficit.)
Sure, Republicans are for smaller central government but there is a difference between having a difference of opinion on what is good for the country and being so fucking sure that your ideas are better than the other guy’s ideas that you have convinced yourself that getting and maintaining a majority is more important “for the country” than things that are really important to the country.
If your point is that we have a militaristic history, then I don’t think anyone can disagree with you. I thought you were saying that folks like Eisenhower were part of some concerted effort to maintain some sort of military government.
I for one support having the largest military in the world. I do not support having a larger military than the rest of then world combined.
I for one don’t. If you build it you will use it. But then our military budget is larger than the rest of the world combined. Wouldn’t you agree we could cut back a little?
Agreed.
I can’t help thinking that OBL was basically a figurehead, and that there are plenty of people within al Qaeda equally if not more capable of running it (assuming OBL was responsible for running it and not, as suggested, just a figurehead)
That in mind, I can’t help thinking that his death makes NO positive short or long term change to the general safety of the world.
And having said that, I equally don’t think the world is or was ever in much danger in the first place, statistically and relatively speaking.
Why can’t you help thinking that? Sure, there’s probably other people that could do the job, but Osama has been recruiting and financing counterinsurgencies since the early 80’s. What makes you so easily say he’s probably not all that great at it? That he’s probably just a figurehead?
Your last two points could be easily applied to almost any crime we stop or punish. So unless your point is that we shouldn’t bother enforcing any laws, I don’t see one.
You could say that about anything to do with safety, too. But then again the US’s role isn’t to protect the world, just its own citizens.
Wow, I just heard this news. Do you think he is really dead?
It is weird, you would have thought something this big would have gotten more coverage. At least a mention or two on the news.
Nobody is being whooshed by that, Bub. :dubious: