These are prisoners held by the U.S. for being war criminals, not domestic criminals the U.S. is holding for Afghanistan until they can get their act together. If you want to compare this sort of thing, you do it on grounds of these being prisoners of war, not domestic criminals.
I mean, I’m all for saying that prisoners of war shouldn’t be held without trial, either, (even if that trial just is to establish their status as combatants) but, for some reason, the OP is about how horrible everyone is who voted for Obama. He attacked people for a stupid reason, the very people he wanted to convince, and he wonders why he’s not being taken seriously?
Dude could just have posted about how mad he was about this and how fucked up it was, and I bet he wouldn’t have anyone disagreeing with him. He’s the one who decided to make it jingoistic/partisan.
But the only reason you currently oppose torture is because Obama does. If Obama did a 180 on this like he has on every other policy related to “terrorism,” you would then support it, just like you now support endless American presence in foreign countries, bombing of civilian populations, detention without habeas corpus, and all the other things that you opposed when Bush was doing them. Why should I care what principles you claim to enjoy seeing Obama uphold when the only principle you and the other cheerleaders have is “it’s good when our guy does it?”
There were such candidates on the ballot in most, if not all, states. Yes, I understand the political realities that a third party candidate doesn’t have anything approaching a realistic chance of winning the election, and so arguing that a vote for Obama or Romney was a vote in favor of detention isn’t really a meaningful argument. But this is the issue with the two party system we have going that despite that usually the winning candidate treats it as a mandate to enact all of their positions.
What I’d hope is that, for those for whom these are very real concerns, perhaps they would see that there really isn’t all that much difference between the candidates on an issue like this, more votes would follow, and perhaps in time, one of the major parties would consider adopting one of the positions represented by one of the those third parties, and then there would be a legitimate case to be made of voting for or against such ideas.
What does the evidence show regarding the legion of things that Bush did that current Obama fellators claimed to be horrified by at the time, only to have a mysterious change of heart?
My only interest in this thread is the novelty of Grumman having been out-Grummaned. Can anyone out-Robot the Robot? Can that level of indignation and leftist outrage even be parodied?
I remember when opposing the mass murder of Muslims for no apparent reason beyond the comic-book understanding of “Al Qaeda” wasn’t considered a far “leftist” position but just a thing that most “Democrats” believe.
A good entry for my competition. Very strong indeed; however, you aren’t eligible for the prize. Someone other than you has to make with the crazy in order to win.
The US is occupying some countries and waging “war” on a couple of pages of the dictionary.
Nothing that would constitute war in any traditional (or legal) sense.
How to balance humanity and America’s safety when illegal enemy combatants have been captured seems like a difficult problem. I’d like top-secret briefings from the Pentagon and CIA before commenting on the correctness of present policy. (Several years ago there seemed to be clear blunders, e.g. incarcerating people who were obviously innocent. Are such abuses continuing?)
But what I’d really like to understand is why anger like OP’s is focused against Obama specifically, rather than against the “American government.” Does he have some other reason(s) to hate this President which are leaking through? It’s not like Obama reversed a Bush policy of lenience toward the illegal combatants. :smack:
What makes the idea of blaming Obama for the on-going mistaken military adventures particularly baffling, is that he was one of the very few Senators who opposed escalating the Afghanistan misadventure into the Trillion Dollar Fiasco of Iraq. And those who answer “but why is he continuing these adventures?” ignore the very reason that Obama (and other rationalists) opposed the Iraq War: because of the difficulties of withdrawing from such a misadventure, once started.
Obama took his seat in the Senate in January 2005, twenty-two months after the Iraq invasion began, two and a half years after the opinion camps on it formed, and over a year after the capture of Saddam Hussein and the transformation of Iraq from a war with the Baathist military into a war with the insurgent population. To claim that he was a Senator opposing the initial invasion is so nakedly wrong and ahistorical as to show evidence of a totalitarian desire to rewrite reality by fiat.
(Predicted response: why are you disagreeing with me? Are you a Romney supporter?)
Obama publicly spoke out against the then-impending invasion of Iraq as early as October 2002; at that time, he was an Illinois state senator, and was basically already running for U.S. Senate, though he didn’t formally announce until several months later (still before the invasion had actually happened).
From the very start, Obama drew a distinction between the then-impending invasion of Iraq (which he opposed and labelled a “dumb” war) and the then-already-ongoing war in Afghanistan (which he supported).