Putting aside the question of whether the issues involved are arbitrary, it’s a lot more than simple disagreement. Or even reflexive disagreement. But this was explained by Bricker, shodan, and myself. If you don’t understand by now, chances are you never will.
I can understand and still contend that you are completely and inexorably wrong.
Lo and behold, I do.
Please quote the exact statement I made which you claim is “completely and inexorably wrong.” Thank you.
Would you guys please take it to the pit??
So exactly who long do we need to store them? Orders of magnitude less than previously can still be a thousand years. A hundred years is on the fringe of acceptability if there is a bond to cover the cost.
That is the first I have heard of a “towering temper”. The quote doesn’t really give examples. While I’ve read books on FDR (including the recent FDR/Churchill dual bio), this is the first I’ve heard of it. I will have to read a few more FDR biographies. A task I relish.
Not to hijack the hijack, but:
Hang on a minute – this is from a WSJ editorial
Without that restraining power, all of the following have very good chances of becoming law in 2009 or 2010.
Now, I understand that it’s the Wall Street Journal, and I understand that it’s an op-ed piece. But is the bolded sentence above straight up incorrect?
(Cards on the table – despite largely self-identifying as fiscal conservative, I am fine with paying higher taxes to fund a Canada/U.K.-style healthcare system. Warts, “rationing”, long waits and all.)
What I am trying to do is demonstrate to the OP that there are considered reasons people will vote for McCain – Obama’s (perceived) stance on health care being one.
I could be wrong. The book may be inaccurate. FDR made enough political enemies that I am sure we could find books written by folks that had an ax to grind.
My only point (so many posts ago) was that grumpiness, like McCain can sometimes have, does not disqualify someone from being a President, nor necessarily make one a “bad” President. IMO.
I waiting for the moment when a President, who is a fan of an major sports team with a poor record, is criticised as having “poor judgement”. 
FDR is always of interest to me. I’m reminded what Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. said of FDR, “a second class intellect, but a first class temperment.” And FDR was an extraordinarily private person. Sure he had political enemies, but he was the platonic form of American politician. And I’m sure he lost his temper occasionally, but nothing like Clinton is reputed to have, or McCain or W.
Why?
Here’s why: The entire premise of Obama’s campaign is to run against a strawman to deflect and distract from his obvious lack of qualification, executive experience, years at a national level, and any accomplishments of any kind that aren’t simply the type of resume-padding controversy-free (and therefore leadership-less) issues like the one with Luger about nuclear waste where every single vote was in favor. Give me a break. That’s not leadership, it’s just naked political positioning to further the brazen ambition of a man who’s spent his entire political career trying to cut his opponents off at the knees by being the ‘last one standing’ when other circumstances are either used, abused, or created to allow him to gain the rebound benefit – whether it was his blatant use of a political scalpel to disqualify opponents in Chicago while gaining political cover for doing so by signing up new voters for the obvious purpose of finding technicalities to eliminate the standing of his opposition so he could run essentially unopposed in the primary there; and now, the media and the public – understandably sick of Bush – have allowed themselves to fall victim to Obama’s slick attempt to create an opponent that isn’t even running: Bush 2008; then, Obama runs against him and simply dovetails that into McCain using quotes out of context like the one where McCain said he voted with Bush 90% of the time – an answer he was giving to address the questioner’s assertion that he WASN’T in line with his own party enough (and by the way, Obama has voted more frequently with his own party than McCain has with Bush).
Obama latches on to how often McCain has voted with Bush saying that their policies must therefore be the same – while in the next breath claiming the ‘judgment’ (fortune-telling prescience) to know Iraq as a bad idea but nonetheless selecting as his running mate someone who VOTED FOR THE AUTHORIZATION. So which is it, Senator Obama? Are we hanging each ticket’s voting records around each candidates necks or aren’t we? At least in the case of Biden, HE’S ON YOUR TICKET AND VOTED FOR THE WAR THAT YOU CLAIM SHOULDN’T HAVE BEEN VOTED FOR AND HAD NO TROUBLE BEATING HILLARY CLINTON OVER THE HEAD ABOUT. The audacious, circuitous self-justifying “logic” of Obama’s explanations are exactly the kind of thing that folks didn’t like about Bush: his deflections. That’s why McCain.
If there’s one person on the planet in the Republican party that is the LEAST like Bush – both personally and politically – it’s McCain. His record is not 90% with Bush, by the way. That’s selectively taking only the last few years into account WHEN WE WERE AT WAR…you know, sort of like Biden voted with Bush for the war. Bottom line: Obama creates an opponent other than the one he’s actually running against and runs against that. He did it with Hillary by constantly saying we had to ‘turn the page’ in an obvious reference to Bill Clinton’s time in the White House – while then, in the next breath, saying he sometimes didn’t know who he was running against Hillary or Bill. He seems to be easily confused: he now doesn’t know whether he’s running against McCain or Bush. It’s McCain, Obama. Not Bush.
That’s why I’m voting for McCain. Obama’s character, style of running, personality, and lack of standing all combined.
I can’t know every detail about every issue in advance, but I can tell a snarky, smug, underqualified dickhead when I see one. A person like that in the White House would piss off lots of people and then smile about it. He’s a Ponzi scheme.
As for policy positions, they mean squat when they are coming from the mouth of someone who says one thing and then does another. It’s called lying. Since Obama lied about taking public financing, filibustering the telecom bill – which he then VOTED for – didn’t tell the WHOLE truth about Ayers initially with his 'he’s just a guy in the ‘hood that I once sat on a board with’ which left out the other board, the living room fundraiser, etc., etc., etc.
When a guy is shady – as Obama has shown himself to be – policy positions can’t even be gotten to since he can’t be trusted as a person.
The only thing you’d then have to go by are his years of voting records. Oh yeah, he doesn’t have any of those either since he just got to the Senate a couple weeks ago LOL And Chicago? 130 times present.
Sorry Obama. Your issue positions evolve right before our eyes and it’s plainly not because circumstances change. It’s because he has no core and only naked political ambition.
That’s why McCain.
Hilaryis44, is that you?
That’s actually a good summary of my gut-feelings about the guy. Ponzi scheme, yeah that’s about right.
It’s been noted since antiquity that all democracies fail once the electorate figures out they can vote themselves gifts from the public treasury. At that point, elections are won on the basis of promising the most goodies rather than any demonstrable fitness to lead.
Obama is running a more substantive campaign than McCain – who can’t quite figure out whether he is moderate McCain circa 2000, relying on Rove-Atwater-style nobama attacks, or intangibles of character.
Where Obama has gone into attack-mode it has been consistently based on policy differentiation which seldom misrepresent McCain’s actual position.
McCain’s association with Bush era policy and personnel is not a strawman argument.
I won’t dispute that Obama’s legislative accomplishments are thin on the ground – but then, I’m prepared to acknowledge, unlike you, that it’s pretty unreasonably to expect a junior Senator of a minority party which is out of government to be able to set any significant agendas or accomplish much of note. This is especially true given the incredibly polarised political environment back then, and the way the Administration enforced party discipline with Delay et al, and used time realise wedge issues by tagging bills with riders and stupid patriotic names so they could maintain the media narrative and divide Democrats. After the mid-terms Congressional wins, Obama has been busy running for President, so that hardly to be held against him.
But if you’re determined to discount even what he has managed to accomplish, and his work on Senate Foreign Relations, then that’s your prerogative.
As for his non-legislative credentials – they look pretty good to me actually. Let’s start with his graduating magna cum laude from Harvard Law School. That’s pretty impressive if you can turn your partisan blinders off for a second, and understand it’s praiseworthy and notable.
Then there’s his earning the position of editor at the Harvard Law Review. Now, I went to law school myself, so I know something about the difficulty and prestige of heading up a Journal let alone at Harvard Law. The selection process is entirely based on competitive grade merit and a written paper, as it does involve the University’s brand entrusted to a junior student. It takes a certain academic breadth and skill to be worthy of this right out of second year. The work involves filtering through thousands of highly technical jurisprudential commentaries and article submissions, from academics and jurists across the country, and therefore it is expected that you know your equity jurisprudence from your constitutional, as well as having a intellectual rignour in broader intellectual disciplines like political philosophy, etc. It is not a trivial task by any means and Obama’s tenure there is well regarded as far as I know.
With those grades and credentials, Obama could have easily got any position he wanted on Wall Street, or a plumb job as counsel for a big corporation, or a partner at a law firm, if that was what he wanted. But instead, he went through a path of community organising and teaching constitutional law, (he was continually being head hunted), prior to entering Illinois State politics. That was Obama’s choice to make; you can try to blithely dismiss it, but you’re showing your bias.
Did it never occur to you to actually think why certain politicians have worn their war authorisation as an albatross around their neck, whilst others are completely forgiven and even celebrated? I’m guessing not as you strike me as a uncritical supporter of the war, who doesn’t have particularly sophisticated views about politics. The answer is that some of these politicians were genuinely sceptical about the war and the statecraft of the Bush Administration whilst others didn’t have that vision and opted either for playing it safe, or reversing criticism for implementation issues, which is hardly the most compelling case to be made against the war.
Now, everyone who voted felt they had to take Bush at his word about the needed to be on a war footing to effectively leverage pressure – and some perhaps foolishly, in retrospect, thought diplomacy would be properly exhausted. Some had the judgement to see the weaknesses in the threat case being made, whilst others were just mistaken about the threat.
Biden at least, unlike Hillary, acted on his serious reservations about the Bush Administration’s approach by attempted to introduce a different bill, with the cooperation of Republicans Lugar and Hagel, which explicitly required diplomatic exhaustion. That bill failed, so Biden voted on the main authorisation. Liberal democrat haven’t held that too hard against him, because he was a genuine critics of the Administration, and he has a son in the war.
Another question to ask yourself, if you think this is just party-line partisanship, why do you is so much love for anti-abortion Chuck Hagel and Chafee, amongst Democrats, compared to other Republicans and hawkish Democrats who supported the authorisation? I’ll tell you why: unlike people like John McCain in Congress, and people like Kenneth Pollack in the media, who were deeply implicated in ever stage of cheerleading us to war, these guys were genuine critics who understood and spoke out forcefully against the failure of alliance building, the deceitfulness of the case, and they espoused an alternative sophisticated view of statecraft and importance of collective security regime.
Hillary, by contrast, didn’t have that overarching strategic vision and foreign policy understanding or at least the balls to articulate publically. Following Hillary’s public statements about the war, and it was obvious she was checking poll numbers and jumping at shadows to see what was politically safe before she said anything. She only spoke out against the war when it was politically safe, and otherwise bolstered hawkish talking points – the same kind of craven triangulation that meant Bill Clinton come never be the same kind of transformational president that Obama will be. That’s not something that was not going to be forgotten by the grassroots and foreign policy wonks of the party, who were absolutely livid at the betrayal of their principles.
McCain circa 2000 is nothing like the McCain of today. Whether you want to admit it or not, that much is clear to more and more people, including a whole bunch of dyed in the wool reactionaries on your side of politics. Just looking at his choice of running mate and it’s clear that he has decided to pander to the right to get elected. When he once had the courage to attack the extreme fringe as harbouring agents of intolerance, now he’s cosying up to bigots like Hagee, and Robertson’s Liberty University, etc.
Also, it’s a matter of looking at who the guy surrounds himself, not just speak about intangibles, and his limited points of differentiation from Bush (most of which he was explicitly reversed now). Palin was selected entirely at the behest of neo-con wingnut Bill Kristol, which is just McCain showing he doesn’t have the judgement or principles to resist these idiots. Furthermore, look at his campaign staffers, his foreign policy advisers and legal team – these are not new independent minded people; they are EXACTLY the same failed people of the Bush enabling era, and McCain would bring them all straight back to the levers of power in Washington if he won.
I mean, just do some reading about the candidates differences on foreign policy. If you’re prepared to do any digging you’ll quickly find McCain’s advisers are Randy Scheunemann, Robert Kagan, William Kristol, James Woolsey, John Bolton, Max Boot—all of whom are at the core of neo-conservative war establishment.
Also, to the extent that McCain has spoken about things outside the neo-conservative stable of ideas on foreign policy, his views are nonetheless terrible. I mean, ejected Russia from the G8 and the league of Democracies are both objectively awful ideas. He’s also run on the same exact impoverished view of diplomacy as the Bush’s first term, which thankfully even he has now rejected. Whether this is just red-meat rhetoric to throw to the base or not, it’s still a terrible meme and he doesn’t deserve to be elected by doing it.
I’m voting for McCain because both candidates are horrible, but with McCain, I will feel a little more secure on my home soil and my taxes will likely be lower. Do some of you people really believe a democrat when they tell you that if you make under $250K, you don’t have to worry about an increase in taxes? You can’t really believe that, can you?
Yes.
I don’t even want lower taxes. Taxes aren’t too bad like they are. I just want to know what to expect from one year to the next.
Do you believe everything a politician tells you?
The repubs have flushed our economy down the toilet. They have allowed the rich 1 % to have more wealth than the bottom 50 . They have fought regulation and allowed the financial thieves at the top to loot the system for billions. The repubs started a war and refused to finance it. They passed a horrible bankruptcy bill and refused to exempt people with catastrophic illnesses ,senior citizens or soldiers that return over and over to Iraq.
They do not work for you. They work for the extreme rich and just passed a bailout bill to give them a going away present.
Thats a bit of silly question. I’m not 12. I can judge for myself what I think is truthly, likely or believable. But I’ll answer you.
No. For instance I don’t believe much of what Palin and McCain have been saying. When they start talking about how they plan to fix the economy, get us out of Iraq and restore the image of America in the world, maybe I’ll start believing them. When politicians claim they’re going negative and that start thrwoing shit around to see what sticks it puts their credibility out of the window.