If your friends can’t call you names, who can?
Have a beer, Margaret.
I’m with you on that one. In my circle of friends we often call each other names and pick on each other; mostly in a friendly manner but not 100%. It’s one of the reasons I call them “friends” and not just “people around me”.
Going just off my memory, it seems that military members frequently complain of too restrictive rules of engagement whenever a Democrat is in the White House. At least, ISTR that charge being leveled at Clinton. It might just be confirmation bias, but I don’t seem to recall many ROE complaints thrown at Bush.
For those with more military knowledge and experience – is the complaint that the ROE are too restrictive under Obama reasonable? Did he require onerous ROEs that put US forces at unnecessary risk? Does the President typically even get involved in details of the ROE, or does he just kind of set out some general principles and let the Secretary of Defense come up with the details?
Comment: Obama is a nihilist, who delights in destroying lives and things.
If he hand-wrote that response on the condolence letter and sent it back to the White House, how does it come to pass that he is in a position to distribute the letter to anyone else?
Maybe he scanned it before he sent it out, like, "hey, check this out?
If I ditched every friend who had “unpalatable aspects”, I’d have no friends. (Besides, who wants to hang out with someone who agrees with them all the time?)
And the way I look it is that I can call my friends names. You can’t.
I suspect that’s exactly what happened. Far be it from me to dictate how a man should grieve the loss of his son; therefore, I will forbear to offer any explicit commentary regarding the appropriateness of such distribution.
I will say that his behavior does not strike me as doing anything to ennoble his son’s sacrifice.
Any aspect?! Whoa. Do you have many friends?
Who else but a bosom buddy would notice the obvious flaws?
What?
What’s confusing about my question?
Self explanatory I thought. Why can’t he have hand written the response, scanned the letter, and then sent the original to the White House?
Therefore he’s free to distribute his response electronically. Maybe I’m daft.
The thing is, I can’t think of any motive for doing that that isn’t despicable.
OK. Yeah. Gotcha.
I thought you were talking about the logistics, not the morality.
. . . And that’s as good a reason as any to hope that the story is apocryphal.
I served entirely under Reagan. I was already in the exiting-the-service process when Bush I was inaugurated. While almost all US forces were not in combat most of that era, some folks including me were involved in low-intensity near-war much of that time.
And yes, we used to bitch all the time about damn politicians and their restrictive ROE.
At the small-unit level, “If it moves, kill it using any means available every time” sounds like a very sensible way to maximize your personal survival chances. It is, however, a very poor way for a country to optimize the political outcome of whatever they’re fighting for through you. And the lower-intensity the war, the more that’s true.
[QUOTE=Bayard]
For those with more military knowledge and experience – is the complaint that the ROE are too restrictive under Obama reasonable?
[/QUOTE]
Yes, that complaint is reasonable. But the same complaint was just as reasonable under Bush. I don’t really think the President has much to do with it.
And also under Truman, Ike, LBJ and Nixon. I think the notion of fairly unrestricted warfare stopped after WWII. Korea was our first proxy war with the USSR and China; Bombing Pyongyang would have escalated things to possible nuclear confrontation.