I’m in DC this week and all the teabaggers are riding the metro to their protest. I would point out the irony of them using government subsidized public transport to get to their protest, but it would be a big whoosh.
Indeed. That would only work if they understood what the hell they were protesting about.
Some of your loonies are front and center, Dio. Van Jones comes to mind. I heard audio of him saying “white polluters are steering poison into neighborhoods of people of color”. Sure they are. While they chuckle and twirl their mustaches.
Such rhetoric plays well to some people, but I want people who advise the President to have some grounding in reality.
So, you think they put the toxic shit in the Hamptons? You think the relative economic power of the residents has no effect on such decisions?
This is me as well. GW Bush and the GOP controlled congress clearly tried to buy votes with programs and earmarks during his term. The GOP had a chance to put their money where their mouth is on fiscal policy and didn’t take it. I didn’t like it then and I don’t like it now that the Democrats have a working majority and are trying to push through all of the fantasies they’ve had for decades.
Anyone that has looked into the facts and is capable of looking beyond ideological blinders can see that everyone in charge is or has been spending money like water for reelection, crony payoffs and personal gain since 2000.
Bush was willing to deficit spend to fund the military and the Iraq war.
Obama is willing to do it for social spending.
Option A was a clusterfuck of cosmic proportions, ruinously expensive, politically disastrous, and internationally destructive. Oh, and corpses. Lots of them.
Option B might actually do some good.
See the difference, or should I type slower?
Statements like that are part of the “poor me” justification to pander to those looking for someone to blame for their life being less than they think they deserve.
You and I both know that the “steering” of “posions” is heavily regulated and monitored these days.
As recently as the 1960’s or so this wasn’t the case. Coal plants were not built in the Hamptons then because of overt influence. Today, they wouldn’t be built because of covert influence and regulations on population density, wetlands or whatever other NIMBY justification could be found.
Van Jones pandering to a cheering crowd about the “white polluters” is race baiting and is just as racist an act as someone making a blanket statement about any group of african americans. He’s either deluded into thinking it’s the truth and therefore not capable of rational decisions in a position of power or he knows it’s a lie and is being dishonest and manipulative.
We’ll know in 10-20 years how much of a mistake the Iraq war was. Some people were adamantly opposed to the Marshall Plan. Regardless of its ultimate success or failure, it was hugely expensive.
Option B is also hugely expensive and might do some good in the short term…until people realize they can vote money into their pockets without having to take any personal responsibility for bad choices or behavior and the country goes bankrupt supporting them.
Who in the hell is Van Jones? I’ll bet that two weeks ago you had no idea. I certainly didn’t.
80’s pop dude. IIRC, wrote the score for Chariots of fire.
Comparing the Iraq War with the Marshall Plan? Have to ask if you’re serious on that one. If you calmly reflect and retract, then I won’t have insulted your intelligence. If you really mean it, to such insult is even possible.
Then why haven’t they already? Our people are ignorant children who need firm guidance from wiser men? You, for instance?
And there would be no chance to change course? We vote in the Utopian Socialist Party on Tuesday, by Thursday we are breaking open each other skulls to feast on the gooey insides?
If you think the Iraq war is in anyway comparable to the Marshall Plan, you are so devoid from reality that there’s no reason to take seriously anything else you might have to say about politics.
(And I should point out that Bush contributed far more to the deficit than Obama has.)
You’re right. I didn’t. Then I heard about him. How is whether I heard about him two weeks ago relevant? Does that change the ridiculous statements he made? Or how they clearly show him to be someone I don’t want in charge of a fast food restaurant, let alone anything in the government?
That’s more a bottom line for the free spending would-be social engineers currently in charge.
As I said before…money has been wildly spent by both sides. It all depends on which ox is getting money stuffed in its pocket whether one side or the other hyperventilates.
- Invade country.
- Spend money to rebuild it to
(a) Ensure the next government is friendly
(b) Provide an opportunity to show other governments in the region that our system is better
(c) Profit from a friendly and stable government rather than worry about a hostile one.
We could have waited for Saddam to do something to justify the invasion beyond violating UN sactions, trying to assassinate GHWB, etc…but GWB started it for better or worse. To win militarily and withdraw, leaving the populace to be fought over by Iran and Saudi Arabia proxies and the Kurds would have had the same result as leaving europe to the Soviet Union and Japan to the Chinese.
Spoken in absolutes like a true believer in discourse.
He still has a year or so. Give him time.
You may, if you choose, believe that money squandered on a futile military adventure is on the same moral plane as money spend to help our people.
I know it’s liberal dogma that the Iraq War is 100 percent bad and always will be. Even the suggestion that that view may not hold in 20 to 30 years is viewed as heresy.
You may, if you choose, believe that the reasons the war were started are simplistic and cartoonish absolutes. We will never know what the world would look like today if that step had never been taken or if things were done differently along the way.
My point for talking about it in the first place was to illustrate that it was frightfully expensive…just like Obama’s laundry list is and will be.
Except if you actually dig into your analogy further, it falls apart. The grants and loans that constituted the Marshall Plan were offered to nearly all of Europe, with the major exception being Franco’s Spain. This also included nations that weren’t active belligerents or were neutral, such as Ireland, Turkey, Sweden, and Switzerland.
Invading a country for the primary purpose of installing a friendlier (and likely more compliant) government is outright imperialism. From the already recorded books of those who were there, the US didn’t have a clear plan for the post-invasion phase. As Cheney and Rumsfeld said, they expected we would be greeted as liberators, the Iraqis would sort out their own house, and we would likely be able to largely withdraw in 6 months to 1 year. The Marshall Plan, on the other hand, was a plan that had both a short term and long term vision. It was about both reconstruction and public relations, even if it meant buying some good will. But most importantly, tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands didn’t have to die for the Marshall Plan to succeed.
Not to mention the fact that, whether you like his policies or not, Obama has never hidden the fact that he believes in government spending to help fix certain problems, and he has been clear from the beginning that reforming health care was a key part of his agenda.
Bush, by contrast, constantly portrayed himself as an opponent of big government and large deficits, yet consistently failed to practice what he preached. He was happy to give tax cuts to the wealthy, and to keep spending on ill-advised foreign adventures and domestic pork, all the while talking about fiscal conservatism and responsibility.
I’m not trying to equate the two. I brought it up in the first place as an example of an expensive endeavor that some people at the time were adamantly opposed to.
Some people will never be able to admit that anything good has or will come out of the Iraq war because it conflicts with their world view.