Well here ya go:
This seems like the smartest way for the right to make political hay out of this. Talk about the liberal “fawning” as though it’s an established fact. If anyone questions it, there are sure to be individual examples one can cite.
Here is what I don’t understand. Why bring up that it could have ended in disaster?
What is the point other than to undermine the success?
Now I see Fox is trying to justify torture and they are questioning the manner in which Bin Laden’s body was disposed.
I’ll give it another day or two before Fox gives full credit to Bush.
If you’re gonna go that route, let’s blame Truman for starting the Cold War. :dubious:
I don’t hear liberals blaming Reagan for the rise of ObL so much as :smack: the history that gets us into war.
Despite Bin Laden’s Death, Obama’s Re-Election Hopes Still Tied to Economy, GOP Strategists Say
Hmm…GOP strategeries…when in 2004, Bush’s re-election hopes were tied to “national security”. :o
The point is that Obama wasn’t a potted plant in this drama. He could have played it safe and gone with a drone attack as recommended by his military advisors. But he was smart enough to see that we needed proof that Bin Laden had been killed. So Obama made a decision that carried real risks. The raid could have ended in disaster. Obama, surely knowing this, was willing to gamble his presidency on the outcome.
If the military had been in the driver’s seat (as implied by the Facebook re-post to which I was responding), we would have gone with the drone attack. We didn’t.
This Facebook meme bugs me more than most, although I have so far refrained from commenting on it there.
[ul]
[li]The President was never debating whether or not to pay military personnel.[/li][li]I don’t think SEALs are properly referred to as “soldiers.” They’re Navy (or Coast Guard) and possibly commissioned. I would refer to a SEAL as a SEAL. Right?[/li][li]The President never claimed that he killed bin Laden. Cite.[/li][/ul]
A relative of mine who posted the last point (with text citation) was reprimanded for hurting her FB friends’ feelings. Mean old facts.
Quoth JThunder:
No, that’s not a legitimate story. The legitimate story is “Bush era Gitmo tactics did not help nail Bin Laden”. I mean, I know that words are at a premium in headlines, and all, but leaving off the “not” is a bit too far.
As I understand it, you could also refer to one such as a “seaman.”
I like the headline possibilities
“Obama’s Secret Lair Penetrated by Seamen”
AT THE TIME, it was believed that these tactics did help in locating Bin Laden. It was only afterwards that other testimonies came to light. Are you going fault the Fox News editors for failing to be psychic?
:smack: Osama’s Secret Lair, obviously. (Now you’ve got me doing it, Fox News!)
I disagree. Bush dropped the ball when he shifted focus from bin Laden to Saddam Hussein. Do you remember the buildup to the Iraq invasion? People literally thought bin laden worked for Hussein.
Its not going to have much of an effect on Obama’s reelection but it might have some, it might have enough. I think conservative efforts to take credit away from Bush is really backfiring. You have to look at this event through a very partisan prism not to give obama credit for this one. Of course there were a lot of people involved and a lot of people risked their lives to get us to that point but trying to take this away from Obama seems a bit petty.
I’ve been making that mistake all week. I can’t count how many times i have said Obama bin Laden.
Have you been asleep the last two years? Why should Republicans be held accountable when they can blame it all on Obama?
I don’t know if its egregious but its pretty fucking obvious?
Why are these teabaggers so afraid all the time?
Yeah? How about the fact that even BEFORE Clinton, America (under Reagan) funded and propped up the Taliban because it was ‘better’ than Communism. They gave money and weapons to those cocksuckers and now we’re paying the price. There would be no Taliban if we had just let Russia steamroll over Afghanistan. America’s cold war policy involved a lot of idiotic moves. Communism is far less dangerous as an ideology than Islamic fundemantalism simply because one is a religion and the other is not.
Even the most ardent communist militants didn’t think they were going to go to heaven and get 72 virgins for blowing up the capitalists. We should have tried to look down the road with some common sense and understand that if we just let Russia stamp out the burgeoning Islamic groups in the Middle East and replace them with Communism, it would have been far easier for us in the long run. Communism is inefficient and will eventually collapse on its own. The Islamic dictatorships are far, far stronger and they also have oil money (capitalism) behind them.
We should have backed the commies against these guys during the Cold War. Instead, we did the idiotic thing and naively thought that they would be our allies.
Quoth JThunder:
What time was that? The only people who ever believed that torture led to us hitting bin Laden were the ones who took Fox News’ word for it. There was no evidence to the claim at all.
Not true, Chronos. Even NBC News, a decidedly liberal outfit, has reported,
“It was those sometimes controversial interrogations that first produced descriptions of members of bin Laden’s courier network, including one critical Middle Eastern courier who along with his brother was protecting bin Laden at his heavily fortified compound in Abbottabad on Sunday.”
They also reported that current and former government officials have credited these techniques with the recent victory. Now, some have come forward to say that these “enhanced interrogation techniques” were not instrumental in uncovering Osama’s courier network. Maybe they’re right, maybe not. Either way, the point is that this belief that these techniques led to locating bin Laden were by no means the isolated imaginings of Fox News.