Cite. With your track record, every single factual statement should be cited. I don’t believe anything you say without a cite, and even with a cite, you usually turn out to be wrong.
Could hardly have been any other way. War is the machinery that produces wounded veterans, and the very people who fostered and promoted our most recent national nightmare refused to prepare for the consequences. It was going to be easy, slam through the Balkans, in Moscow by Christmas…wait, that was somebody else’s national nightmare.
Point being, they never fully acknowledged the depth of their folly, and its consequences. Even as they glowed with pride about how splendidly our trauma response medicine worked, it seems never to have occurred to them that burying heroes was a lot less expensive than repairing them. A modest increase in funding would suffice, and the money could be drawn off wasteful programs like food aid and environmental regulations.
Comes a time when you have to seize the bull by the tail and face the situation. They never did that. Its like they continued to plan for the results of a cakewalk when the actual situation was a debacle. As if funding for the results of feeding thousands of soldiers into a meat grinder was the same as admitting you had done so.
Yes, agreed. I am annoyed by the apologists who always seem to trot out some form of, “What, did you expect that Obama would be in the know for such details? He’s the president and above such things.” That always tells me that the person doesn’t understand how large bureaucracies work and the role of senior leadership. No, Obama or his agency heads need not know how many bottles of ketchup are in the Federal buildings’ cafeterias. But they need to assemble teams that understand more than policy–they need to understand basic management stuff, like proper spans of control, how to manage capacity and throughput (whatever your activity is), how to design robust monitoring mechanisms, how to confirm through audits, etc. And then they need to hold people accountable.
What could possibly have led anyone to think Obama could do this, or could assemble a team capable of it? Because he’s smart? There’s lots of brilliant people who lack these specific skills, and he’s one of them. And we put him in charge of the most complex bureaucracy in the world.
If only Romney had been elected, he could have privatized the whole mess and run it on a sound, for profit basis. Because Republicans are so much better at this sort of thing, being hard headed realists, and all. What’s that you say, they are the ones who got us into this mess in the first place?
Well, there you have it! Who could possibly have more experience in managing a disaster? And aren’t they at the very forefront, the cutting edge, of solution-providing? Aren’t they knee deep in the crucial, all important process of assigning blame?
Friend adaher does offer reliable information, albeit inadvertently. I was pretty certain that BenghaziGate was a flop, but now I know for sure. The box is open, and the cat is as dead as a doornail.
There was no cat. There was never a cat.
Of course. Bush even left him a memo telling him all about it.
Are you certain?
Was there even a box?
no box and no cat, goddamnit! >o.o<
Earlier in the thread, iiandyii. Normally I’m happy to re-cite, but only for posters that have something to contribute. Since others have responded to my cite of the letter and it’s just you who doesn’t believe it, we can all just ignore you for now.
Come back when you’ve got something to say.
While I don’t blame the President personally for this one(clearly a staff error), it’s certainly going to add to a narrative of a White House that’s just not on the ball:
The White House blew the cover of the top CIA agent in Afghanistan on Sunday, when the person’s name was included on a list given to reporters during a visit to the country by President Barack Obama.
The name was then emailed by the White House press office to a distribution list of more than 6,000 recipients, mostly members of the US media.
The agent in question, listed as chief of station, would be a top manager of CIA activity in Afghanistan, including intelligence collection and a drone-warfare programme under which unmanned aerial vehicles mount cross-border attacks into Pakistan.
and, if there were a cat, it was dead, before it was alive.
Back when I was in management in a western NY city, we bid every two years on the VA contract for a certain material. We worked hard to get it, but never did, it always went to this small competitor of ours.
After a few years, a few failures, we saw the newspaper story that two purchasing people at the VA were fired for taking kickbacks from contractors…including the winner of the contract we wanted.
the bottom line? We never got the business, they just changed the reason for retaining the existing contractor to some form of “too much trouble to change vendors”.
I looked. Didn’t find it. It’s probably there – but there are a lot of cites to click through in this thread.
EDIT: Found it – post # 20. Reading it now.
That’s just the normal graft that occurs in the government. Still, a candidate who promised change should be making this stuff a priority.
Problem is, Bill Clinton was right: Obama was an off the shelf Chicago politician trying to masquerade as a change agent. Both Hillary Clinton and John McCain were more genuine change candidates than he was.
You said ‘SPECIFICALLY’, as if Jeff Miller told the President about the fraudulent wait-time documents in Arizona. These were not addressed at all in Jeff Miller’s letter – in fact, Miller later said that VA leadership responded to him afterwards regarding some of his specific concerns (like the Legionnaire’s disease outbreak).
So you were wrong in using the word “specifically” – the President was not told specifically what was going on with the Arizona wait-times scandal.
It’s usually futile to try to correct adaher, whose single sentences often contain multiple misconceptions. In this case, however, he seems to have made but a single error, albeit a central one.
[QUOTE=Wikipedia]
The station chief is the senior U.S. intelligence representative with his or her respective foreign government whose true name is known to the host nation and other intelligence agencies.
[/QUOTE]
I’m not condoning the WH blunder, but at least the outed agent was already known to those who matter most. Contrast this honest blunder with the criminal act of the Cheney-Rove Administration who deliberately outed Valerie Plame, whose job really was secret, to advance their program of deliberate lies.
In that case, blame the cite. Both of those quotes come from the news story. And I never said it wasn’t an honest blunder, nor did I even bother to blame the President for it. Just observing that the administration as a whole is looking pretty amateurish. And no one gets fired, which is just further proof that we’re in Bush’s 4th term.
Yes, our guy goofed, but your guy did it first, but you say our guy was worse and we say your guy was worse. No one’s mind is changed at all. When the president is sitting, he is an easy target, no one on the other side is as vulnerable…
That said, the R’s seem to manage to abuse power far more arrogantly than the D’s. Given the opportunity, their fk-ups are a lot worse. Obama seems to have said, “I’ll go slow, be very careful about what I do.” That philosophy, for me, is working, 1000%.