The Constitution lists circumstances under which the right to vote cannot be denied. The Second Amendment, similarly (and more directly) mandates that the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
So: I agree with you. The Constitution protects the right to vote. But let’s be precise about the language – the Constitution protects the right to vote by forbidding its infringement in a wide range of circumstances, rather than by universally affirming its existence.
And… in like manner, the Constitution protects the right to keep and bear arms. It would be passing strange to heroize the Constitution’s protection of the right to vote one minute, and vitiate its protection of the right to keep and bear arms the next…correct?
It might not be Obama’s lookout to “instantly evaluate and fix” the book-cookery, but the underlying problems at the VA are definitely His Problem. We’ve known the VA is unable to handle its caseload for pretty much his whole administration, and he doesn’t seem to have done a great deal about it.
Congress may be the ones controlling the purse strings but I don’t recall Obama demanding extra funding - or at least not making a big deal of it.
I agree he hasn’t made the VA a priority. My point is not to laud his accomplishments, but to point out that he is no worse than his predecessors, and any criticism that singles him out while holding his predecessors blameless – even by omission – is not a balanced one.
Gross mismanagement or wrongdoing. Your first example is clearly neither. The sale of ports to UAE companies was 100% legal and was only abandoned because of a political furor where Democrats played the xenophobia card.
The disbanding of the Iraqi army was a dumb decision, but it wasn’t an example of the system not working. That was Paul Bremer’s(or Garner’s, I don’t remember which one of them did it) very public decision. It wasn’t something that went hidden and then the President found out about it from reading the papers.
Then why haven’t you been mocked? There’s no goalpost shift. The five examples I listed were examples of wrongdoing and gross mismanagement, and they went on for some time without the President supposedly knowing about it.
The examples Bricker gave were not in that category. One wasn’t even a scandal and the other was a very public decision that the public knew about the same day it happened.
You have a habit of getting ahead of yourself. Must be nice to live with so much certainty in your life. Why, you’re almost like GWB himself!
Being “no worse” than one’s predecessors isn’t really a defense, considering who his immediate predecessor was. I take exception to people blaming Obama for Bush’s failures, but I do think he should be held accountable for not trying to fix them.
I agree that he shouldn’t be held responsible for Bush’s failures, and I also understand that the government is big and he’s had a lot on his plate, so maybe the VA wasn’t a huge priority.
But can we at least admit that the lines of communication within the executive branch have seriously broken down in the last few years? Even if you choose not to blame the President for not knowing what his government is doing, shouldn’t it be clear that a lot of people are keeping a lot of things from the President? To an unusual extent that seems to have gotten worse?
Wrong and wrong. You can’t see past your ridiculous biases, and you look at everything the President does as “wrongdoing and gross mismanagement”. My three examples in post #50, and Bricker’s, meet those categorizations just as closely as yours do.
And you didn’t mention “wrongdoing and gross mismanagement” in post #47 – you just said “ignorance of what the government is doing”. You’re trying to change what you’ve said just because you might be starting to realize it was foolish.
No, no certainty. It’s not needed when arguing with fact-free drivel.
There are 4.3 million federal employees; he can’t be expected to keep track of all of them. I don’t think it is happening to an unusual extent either. Again, my problem with Obama is his unwillingness to fix the problems he knows about, not why he isn’t finding out about the ones he doesn’t know about.
Hold on now. The proposed sale of ports to UAE companies was “wrongdoing”? Really? And you accused me of bias. So name which one or two of the five examples I listed was an example of something nonscandalous going on.
Fair enough. However, I listed five examples and challenged Bricker to come up with two related examples. I can see now why there might have been confusion, but the point stands: This President continually uses ignorance as a way to dodge responsibility for gross misconduct within his government. And in a few of those cases, it can probably be demonstrated that he’s lying. Most notably in the VA case, where received a very specific letter from a Congressman detailing the corruption in the VA a year ago.
The IRS non-scandal – some bureacratic mismanagement… but “scandalous”? Only if you’re a Republican who wants to make some hay out of virtually nothing.
The website failure… scandalous? No, just poor execution. Big mistake, sure, but scandal? No, not even close.
Health care cancellations – scandalous? No. Not even close. Some bad politics, some misstatements, maybe some humdrum lies, but scandal? Come on.
Don’t take any of this personally, adaher. You’re probably a nice guy. But you are wrong a lot. Way more than you should be. Such wrongness, when it happens over and over and over again, deserves mockery (and it’s fun).
If you don’t like being mocked, then make a real effort to try and be wrong less. It’s like every single post you make contains wrongness – and often it’s the main thrust of your post that’s wrong. Just cool it and slow down, and check that the unsupported stuff you post is actually true.
You say “some bureaucratic mismanagement,” but that would suggest there was no special attention given only to right-leaning organizations, and there’s a fair amount of evidence that there was such special attention in play.
I agree it’s not a scandal of Presidential involvement. But it’s fair to call it a scandal.
Perhaps. My opinion is based on the FBI report, in which they stated they “found no evidence of “enemy hunting” of the kind that had been suspected, but that the investigation did reveal the IRS to be a mismanaged bureaucracy enforcing rules that IRS personnel did not fully understand.”
No one thinks adaher is one of the brighter bulbs on the Christmas Tree, but his stupidity in this thread surpasses. I still wonder if he’s really an intelligent liberal posting inanities here to give Republicans a bad name. (I only skim these threads and apologize to adaher if I’ve overlooked his award-winning stupidities from earlier threads.)
Blatant lie, as others pointed out. Even adaher is knowledgeable enough to glance at a graph and realize the 2008-2011 blip is due to crisis-avoidance programs like TARP (started, correctly, under GWB) so this lie is willful ignorance on adaher’s part, rather than the raw stupidity we expect from sincere Republicans.
And given a Republican Party which had vowed to embarrass Obama at every turn, he might have had more success increasing State Dept. security budget if he’d asked for reduction.
But the Gold Medal for stupidity comes when he compares Obama’s “mistakes” with one of GWB’s and writes:
Even Bricker was smart enough to get this one right:
The way that important trillion-dollar decisions in the Iraqi adventure were turned over to youngsters whose qualification was right-wing thinking, not knowledge of Middle East, while GWB just played with his chainsaw in Texas was a travesty. The way you ignore the facts, when even your fellow traveler Bricker tries to protect you from ridicule, would be amusing, if not for the fact that many GOP leaders are almost as stupid as you are.
Well, I did list gross mismanagement as one of my criteria. And the UAE ports thingie and the disbanding of the Iraqi army were not examples of that either.
While I can agree that the disbanding of the Iraqi army proved to be a big mistake, it was a decision made transparently and with full accountability for the one who made it. In the five examples I’ve cited, the President has failed to find, or really even tried to find, who was actually at fault. Whereas in the case of the Iraqi army disbanding, we know exactly who made the decision because he made it publicly.
All I really ask is that he say, “Yeah, it looks like we dropped the ball on this.” and recognize that since there is an identifiable pattern of governmental incompetence and mismanagement, that he make it a priority to fix it. What’s happening instead is that a President who wanted to be transformational in the fashion of Ronald Reagan is actually just reinforcing Reagan’s basic case, that government is the problem.
Here;s what I don’t get. The media is pretty much united in scorn for the President’s accountability-dodging, but the liberal dopers are resolute in holding him responsible only in the most general sense, if that.
Fighting ignorance, or perpetuating it? I report, you decide.
Yesterday in another thread, adaher made a very specific claim about specifically the 2000 election. When challenged he admitted he was babbling about the 2012 election. (“It’s the thought that counts.” :smack: )
It’s fun to watch you blather your opinions. But don’t expect anyone to pay attention to your “facts” unless they’re accompanied with a cite.