Let’s roll the tape:
For Ghu’s sake, this wasn’t buried deep in the thread where you could have reasonably overlooked it – it was all of seventeen posts behind yours.
Hmm, Sam said this:
That seems like the scenario RickJay was ridiculing, or are you referring to something else?
Are you saying you think this strategy would work? It’d be great if we could go to our allies and say, “We’re going to spend less on our military. You guys better start picking up the slack” and have it actually work. But I’d be pretty surprised if that actually works.
I think the point is that the military bases in question need not be in those countries for them to be important to those countries.
That’s whats so great about 99-year-old battleships. There’s ninety of 'em!
So… Romney should pressure Canada by threatening to pull out of bases where? In Alaska? In the continguous US? :dubious: :rolleyes:
A military base isn’t like a fort you keep on your border to keep the Mongols out. I don’t understand why you’re having trouble grokking the concept that proximity to the country in question is only one small part of why a base might be in that country’s interests.
We care if the Balkans explode and we don’t have the resources in the region to respond. But you know who cares more? France. We care if China invades Taiwan and we have no ability to project force to prevent that. But we’re not the only country that cares. Canada also benefits from a free Taiwan.
I didn’t want to clutter this thread, so I started another one about how the candidates’ foreign policy only seems to recognize a half-dozen other places.
Does Obama think that having aircraft carriers means you need fewer ships, or does it just “seem” that way? It seems you believe the former. A more likely conclusion from watching this exchange would be that Obama was simply illustrating the foolishness of basing current military strength on a comparison with different levels and types of equipment from 100 years ago. Drawing a conclusion from these comments that the president doesn’t know what he’s talking about is ridiculous. Just because he didn’t start a discussion about the facts you mention is evidence of nothing. This was a debate on foreign policy, not a detailed discussion into our military capabilities.
This whole kerfluffle over bayonets is really amusing. Obama made a simple point: the strength of our military is a question of its capabilities, and not some abstract measure of number of ships. No one seriously disagrees with that, but an even more fundamental belief among conservatives is that every Democrat must be ignorant about the military, so it follows that they must find something to criticize about the remark.
Hence Sam Stone’s flailing about how carriers require support ships, which so completely misses the point that even he would see it were it any other context. We’re treated to a thousand right-wing blog posts about how horses are still being used in Afghanistan and soldiers still being trained on bayonets, as if that has anything to do with Obama’s comment.
It’s a perfect storm of the armchair general tendency among conservative men and ordinary partisanship.
Wow, I didn’t even know what he was talking about there. Someone clearly buys into the glurge.
Even then, even if it were true, it certainly makes a lot of sense. If you’re going to get someone back on their feet and employed again, a phone is even more necessary than an internet connection, and an internet connection is nearly mandatory these days.
Basic cell phones are extremely cheap (on the order of $20 each) and 70 minutes a month is worth about $3 from some companies, or about $7 for most pay-as-you-go plans. Yes, someone on welfare can probably afford that themselves, but again even if it were true, a federal plan of this nature would barely even qualify as a drop in the bucket.
Again, Ditka, stop bitching about pennies and ignoring the dollars if you want to be taken seriously.
[QUOTE=Richard Parker]
This whole kerfluffle over bayonets is really amusing. Obama made a simple point: the strength of our military is a question of its capabilities, and not some abstract measure of number of ships. No one seriously disagrees with that, but an even more fundamental belief among conservatives is that every Democrat must be ignorant about the military, so it follows that they must find something to criticize about the remark.
[/QUOTE]
Probably because so many Democrats (and Republicans too) ARE ignorant about the military, while thinking they actually know quite a bit. I agree that the strength of our military isn’t measured in the number of hulls or planes or bullets we have…that’s the whole point of the military we’ve built, and why it costs so much. We use technology instead of large numbers of planes and tanks ans ships to force multiply.
That said though, it’s all about requirements in the end. You don’t base your budget on vague things like ‘well, we have carriers now so don’t need as many ships’ (not saying that Obama said this btw), or ‘well, the budget sure looks like enough…I mean, it’s a lot of money right??’, nor ‘yeah, why do we need so much money for this stuff?? I mean, the UK only spends a fraction of what we do, and they have a navy thingy too, right??’ but instead on what our actual global commitments are (i.e. our requirements for the military). Do we have enough ships to meet those commitments? I mean, not ‘we sure have a lot of these useless carrier things that are clearly out dated’ (as I’ve heard numerous of this boards left wingers state in the past…ironic considering this change in the discussion here :p) but ‘we need X number of ships in order to meet Y number of requirements in Z theaters throughout the world…with some reasonable reserve for contingencies like being down for maintenance or allowing the crews to actually do something besides year round patrols’.
I’d say on this that Romney was more wrong than Obama, but Obama’s response wasn’t what it could have been either…and, really, this is yet another example of the media (left wing, right wing, whatever wing) blowing stuff up because it’s another Big Bird sound bite that was just a minor clash of no real substance, but has been picked up by all sides as some sort of mountainous molehill that must be discussed, dissected and examined from every angle for days on end.
Gods I’m sick of election season, and this year I’ve tried my best to ignore the whole thing, not watch the debates or get to involved in the discussions and just bleach out my brain of all the ridiculous drama and rhetoric. :smack:
Absolutely. How strong our military actually is is not the policy question. We don’t elect Presidents because they are good at assessing a modern military’s capabilities. The policy question is how strong it *ought *to be.
But Romney’s claim is that Obama made our military weaker by not building more ships. That claim is not just wrong, but fundamentally wrongheaded since it is measuring military strength by a stupid metric.
It’s absolutely about requirements. That’s why so many people were going “What the hell is Romney talking about? We don’t need all those ships!”
So, “A strong president should go to these countries and tell them in no uncertain terms that they will have to start picking up the slack, and threaten the pullout of strategic assets and military bases unless they step up to the plate.” doesn’t necessarily refer to strategic assets and military bases in or near “these countries”. I suppose that’s a natural companion piece to the assertion that a reference to “acts of terror” in a speech about the Benghazi attacks given the day after the Benghazi attacks doesn’t necessarily have bugger all to do with the Benghazi attacks.
Remember when we laughed at Bill Clinton for finessing the defintion of “is”?
You’re the one inferring that the bases must in “in or near” these countries. That inference doesn’t come from what Sam Stone wrote. It comes, apparently, from your own misunderstanding of why bases are important to the strategic interests of various countries.
In case anybody was wondering why Romney has such a hard-on for building ships we don’t need: Romney’s top Navy adviser made millions building them.
I agree…and as I said, from what I understand of the exchange Romney was wrong and doesn’t get it. It’s not the number of ships, per se, that makes us strong, but how those ships fulfill our global commitments that is the real bench mark.
So why do you say Romney was “more wrong than Obama”? Obama was never the one suggesting that we count ships to evaluate our strength. He in fact very deftly illustrated why arguing otherwise is stupid.
We’re not weaker now because we have fewer bayonets than we used to. Instead, things have evolved to the point that the utility of the bayonet is dramatically reduced.
So again, why suggest that Obama was wrong at all? Is it just in your DNA?
Sad, but probably true. The Karl Rove Big Lie School.