Sure, you smug douchbeg. You said he does not support the 2014 timetable. An aide to Romney says he does, he just would not have announced it.
So which is it? You identified this point as a key difference with Obama.
Yes, you can go to a web page and read it, but this is mitt Etch a Sketch. You seriously want to assert that his positions are as static as a web page?
South Vietnam had a much bigger head start, and they were never able to do it. South Korea also had a bigger head start too, and American troops are still there.
Personally, I’ve had enough of open ended commitments to prop up corrupt and/or inept regimes, and I think most Americans would agree with me.
Suppose Afghan troops never get to the point where they can protect the sovereignty of their country. That’s a distinct possibility now considering how long U.S. troops have been there. It sounds like Romney would be okay with a War Without End if it comes to that (if it hasn’t already come to that).
i.e. yadda yadda committee yadda yadda study yadda yadda who me decide? yadda yadda…
Don’t worry. A helping hand from the US Government will get them to self-sufficiency before you know it and will never ever tempt them to treat the safety net as a safety hammock and fall into an open-ended pattern of dependency. That’s what nine out of ten Republicans will tell you (the tenth is still checking the poll numbers), right?
And he can arrange that, too. (One little secret the Mormon missionaries won’t ever tell you is that posthumous baptism is . . . only the first step.)
Four years ago, Senator Obama had the same handicap, and I don’t recall your posting anything about that relegated him to mere contrarian status. Did you?
I said:
So there’s no conflict. My statement focuses on the announcement as being unwise, just as the unnamed Romney aide also did.
Are you having trouble reading and understanding written material at this level? How old are you? Perhaps an evaluation by your family physician would be a good idea. As people age, cognitive loss can presage a number of conditions.
The OP complained of being unaware of Romney’s position. You now seem to concede that you were aware of his position, or could easily have become aware, but suggest that he may have changed this position. I suppose that’s possible, but I’m not aware that he has in fact changed this position at all. Has he?
It’s hard to determine the precise argument you’re making. What is it?
That’s a very valid criticism of his position, yes.
But this thread seemed to complain that his position was mysterious or unknowable. You obviously know his position, since you have assembled a very cogent argument undercutting it.
We have a winner.
He’s flip-flopped on so much that he needs to at least hold steady at zero on a few things.
I reckon he’s just smart enough to know, he’s probably not smart enough to actually defend the positions he wants to take. Better to just say a lot of weaseling nothings.
How about when he said he wouldn’t release any more taxes because his opponents would just pick them apart, looking for ways to use them against him! Come on, that is comedy gold right there!
Won’t release more than 2 yrs, but his party has made a unending, stupid, stink about Obama’s birth certificate, and still are 4yrs later! How do they expect anyone to take them seriously?
There’s no doubt it’s an incredibly simplistic and sophomoric (and I’m talking high-school sophomoric, not college sophomoric) position, but Bricker’s right: Romney does in fact have a position on Afghanistan.
But hey, if the people on his own team can’t manage to say what it is, especially given that this particular position would have taken about 15 seconds to master, you can hardly blame anyone else for concluding that there was no position.
But to get this thing back to stupid Romney lack of ideas, here’s Romney not taking a position on Obama’s decision to stop deporting people who were brought into the country illegally when they were children. (As 'luc would say: liberal site, shields up!)
I don’t agree with Romney’s goal or strategy-- I want us out, now. But given his strategy, and the fact that he has little or no access to the data he’d need to accomplish implement it, I can’t fault him for saying he will develop his tactics once he has access to that data.
There are times when I wish the SDMB functioned more like Facebook, so I could “Like” a post. This is one of those times.
The main thing that keeps Romney’s base energized is the fact that he isn’t Obama. He doesn’t *need *to let us know what his positions are, because that would distract from his message of “I’m not Obama”.
Aside from the flattering implication that you’d remember posts I wrote four years ago, I suspect that Obama knew that he was under a similar handicap. That’s why, exactly four years ago, he wasin Afghanistan, meeting with soldiers and holding discussions with the President of the country.
This would be a perfectly reasonable response by Romney. Saying that he disagrees with Obama’s timetable simply to be on the record as being against Obama is not a reasonable response.
At this point, if Obama mentioned that the Earth was an oblate spheroid, Romney would immediately join the Flat Earth society.
But prior to that point, he had already made strong statements about the subject. Was he simply contrarian then?
If you look far back enough on my posts, you’ll find that I was giving Bush the benefit of the doubt on the Iraq situation, based on the fact that he was President and was certainly privy to information that we, the public, did not possess. As it turned out, he had made all that shit up. So by 2008, Bush had squandered any credibility that his strategies were based on information gathered from the field. So, yes, I think a member of the Senate Foreign Relations committee could have been sufficiently in the loop to form a competitive strategy regarding Afghanistan, certainly in the large details.
All of this arguing, however, is your attempt obfuscate the fact that Romney said he would that he would schedule his Afghanistan policy based on the input of commanders on the ground, and then critiqued Obama for doing precisely that.
*My point is that I do not believe that Romney’s critiques regarding Obama are based on policy or an intelligent assessment of the situation on the ground – it’s a completely reflexive thrashing of any policy that Obama puts forward, regardless of its merit. *
No it isn’t.
No. He, along with most of the Republicans, has always been against an announced time-line for end of combat.
Why don’t you guys bash Romney for his actual stance, which is very bashable? Why do you feel it’s necessary to make shit up about him to bash? I just don’t understand that.
The guy wants to prolong that useless war in Afghanistan instead of just getting the hell out of there. That’s what I object to about Romney’s Afghanistan policy, and that’s one of the reasons I won’t be voting for him in November. I’m not crazy about Obama’s plan, but I think he’ll get us out of there faster. Faster = better.