Why do all these righty morons seem to think that everyone that voted for him has “seen the light” about how stupid Obama is? This is like the 4th or 5th thread like this in the last week.
All I know is, I voted for him and I think he’s doing a great job. In fact, I think barring some major political crisis of the dead girl/live boy kind, 4 more years is in the bag.
I never thought Obama was the Chosen One. I also didn’t think he was a liberal. I thought he was a moderate and I’d prefer to vote for a moderate over a liberal or a conservative. I thought Obama would do as good a job as Bill Clinton and better than George Bush or John McCain. So I think he’s doing okay and have no regrets over voting for him.
Please explain to me how Alan Greenspan continues to profit from a job he left in 2006.
I voted for Obama and if he gets us out of both of the cheney/bush wars I will vote for him again.
Eight years of George Bush have lowered my standards. I no longer insist that the President make the country better. It’s now sufficient that the President doesn’t make the country worse.
So even if Obama doesn’t end the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, I’ll give him some credit if he doesn’t start any new wars.
I think all of this is pretty much right.
Despite BP’s incompetence in allowing the breach in the first place, i’m sure they’re doing everything they can to fix it, especially given the pounding that their reputation and their stock price is taking as the crisis continues.
The hilarious thing about all of this is that some conservatives (Sam Stone is apparently one) see the failure to fix the leak immediately as some sort of failure of Presidential leadership, although not a single one of these morons apparently have any idea how to do it themselves, and the actual engineering experts have been saying for the past month that this is a damn difficult problem with no simple solution.
There is some sense among conservatives (sometimes explicit; more often implicit) that this is Obama’s Katrina, the crisis that will measure him as a President. It even has the serendipity (if you want to call it that) of occurring in pretty much the same area. What these brain-dead douchebags know, but conveniently ignore, is that the two crises are really not at all alike, except that they both happened in the same region.
In the case of Katrina, the biggest failure was precisely in areas where competent, decisive leadership could have made a difference: in the aftermath of the hurricane. No-one blames Bush for the hurricane itself, or for the levees breaking; they blame him for how he and his agencies dealt with it.
With the oil spill, the biggest failure is the breach itself, and the ongoing inability to stem the flow of oil. And most engineering experts are agreed that there’s not much Obama can do, or could do, to change the timeline on that. I’m sure there are places where the cleanup and other defensive efforts have been less than perfect, but even if those efforts were flawless, they are still battling the biggest problem of all, which is that oil continues to flow into the ocean at an incredible rate.
Even if one were to concede, for the sake of argument, that Obama might have done some things better, and made some more decisive moves in the weeks since the spill, his own performance is still a minor issue in the ongoing crisis. Even under perfect leadership, we’d still be about where we are now. The only place where “Obama’s leadership” is at the top of the priorities is among idiots who see it as a chance to make political hay while the [del]sun shines[/del] oil flows.
No. That’s Allan Greenspan, with two "L"s, the well known Dutch author.
Well said, but I wanted to address the above about Sam Stone. I believe that his post in this thread is an example of changing his narrative to fit the conclusion he wishes to support. For instance, in this thread he says (quoted in full):
mhendo: Excellent post. One minor nitpick: Some do blame Mr. Bush for the levees breaking, on the basis that the Army Corps of Engineers recommended improvements which were not adequately funded. I think this is a victory of 20:20 hindsight; Mr. Bush deserves some small amount of criticism for this, to be sure, but to highlight this among the thousands of things vying for Federal funding because it happened to be something that failed catasrophically is to demand he read the future. Unless you also want him to have invested billions into earthquake-proofing half of California’s infrastructure against the Big One that hasn’t happened yet, but will someday cause several preventable disasters. Or build whatever is needed against a major quake on the New Madrid Fault. Or put up buffers against the megatsunami from that cliff in the Canary Islands. Now, the post-Katrina fuckups: those, he can definitely be criticized for. I’d be willing to see arguments why, from a pre-Katrina viewpoint, he should have funded the ACE recommendations about the levees. I’m not quite defending him; he made a bad choice. But an understandable one. Whose idées fixés has Mr. Obama failed to fund? Which of them will come back to haunt him in four years time?
I wonder if the OP has sobered up yet?
Didn’t see it coming and didn’t see it going.
Or in other words, say what?!
Let’s not lose the big picture: Bush’s cronyism represented piss-poor governance, which had effects large and small. The glaring problem was in FEMA. Conservatives should be as pissed about this as everybody else. Nixon had his personality flaws, but he valued competent administration.
The pre-Katrina ACE recommendations are a 3rd tier issue. I haven’t looked into it, but it was probably a pretty interesting policy challenge. If Republicans valued competence this would be grist for an interesting discussion. As it is there are plenty of more egregious ideology-driven errors to focus on.
The 2nd tier issue is what sort of preventative measures were put in place after Katrina. Tragically, I’ve heard rumors (source: Unaboard, some years back) that the plans are not especially realistic, and that we’ll be bailing out Louisiana again.
On a personal level, I’d recommend that any Louisiana resident consider relocating elsewhere. Sure, they have a terrific culture, but at some point you have to cut your losses.
Now Una, we both know that the ocean floor would have sealed itself up if only Obama had emoted more, or if he waived his magic leadership wand.
By now McCain would have had a massive heart attack and left Ms. Runner Up Teen South Carolina in charge. Keep that in mind when you whine about Obama.
Boy, you people have managed to put a lot of words in my mouth.
No, I don’t think Obama can do anything to stop the leak. I also suspect that BP is doing everything it can to do so - the leak is killing them as much as it’s damaging the Gulf.
But there’s a hell of a lot more an executive can do in a disaster like this. For example, he could have:
Put together an panel of oceanographic experts to help predict the effects of the spill and make recommendations for where recovery efforts should go.
Met with governors of the coastal states to find out if they had the resources for managing the cleanup, and what the feds could do to assist.
Launch an emergency regulatory review to see if any regulations were impeding the cleanup or fix in any way.
Convene a meeting of executives from other deep water drilling operations to find out if BP is putting its focus in the right place, or whether it’s doing too much stuff to cover its own ass rather than fix the problem.
Set up a web site for the American people to go to which has daily updates on where the spill is impacting the shoreline and where relief efforts need help.
Solicit volunteers for cleanup.
Offer an open competition for companies who believe they can speed up cleanup efforts.
Consult with other countries to find out if they have resources that can be brought to bear for containment/cleanup.
And I’m sure the list goes on.
What Obama did do is announce a commission “similar” to the Challenger commission, to look at what went wrong and what needs to change in the future. I put “similar” in quotes because, while the Challenger commission was top-heavy with actual scientists and engineers, Obama put together a commission that looks like him - policy experts, not engineers or scientists. He’s got one Ph.D scientist on the commission, but he’s a physicist. He’s got someone who’s supposed to know something about cleanup, but that person is also a committed environmental activist who can be counted on to be heavily biased. The rest of the commission is just politicians and policy guys. I expect it to come back with ‘recommendations’ that are just rubber-stamped political proposals for things Obama already wants - much like his deficit commission.
No, no… we’ve seen this guy before… he DOESN’T sober up. This is a PERMANENT state of his…
From what I understand, this situation is not like the Challenger. Oil drilling is not cutting edge engineering like a space shuttle. The science and engineering is pretty well understood. So it’s a matter of weighing the known costs and risks and deciding how much safety regulations should be imposed on the drilling companies. Which is in fact policy making.
I’ve read that this disaster wouldn’t have happened in the North Sea because offshore oil drills there are legally required to have safety equipment in place that are not required by American law for offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. Obviously American laws may change as a result of this disaster. But for conservatives to point the finger at Obama for not enacting enough regulations to protect the environment is hypcrisy at its highest.
At least Greenspan was able to publicly admit his Libertarian philosophy was flawed and wrong. I wish more people on this board could do it as well. The death of regulation resulted in a terrible blow to the world economy.Greenspan, Geithner and the rest should be teaching at Liberty University. Those people accept propaganda very well.
So far. Never underestimate their creativity.
Sounds better than it plays, I think. First off, volunteers? Do you mean unpaid volunteers? You will have to offer at least three hots and a cot to draw the number of volunteers any serious effort will require. So where do they live? Who feeds them?
They could all be local, I suppose, kind of like high school kids around here turn out to fill sandbags for flood emergencies. But that’s usually just a few days at most, this project…well, we have no idea, do we?
And, to do what? The easy stuff, sure, a pooper scooper and a bag for those convenient little tar balls. But what about the nasty stuff, what about the floating oil that evaporates a toxic atmosphere, that would likely require respirators. And respirators are bad enough when the temperature is about eighty and the humidity is low. In a Gulf Coast summer, one could fully atone for all sins, real or imagined. Volunteers for that sort of thing will need be carefully screened for health concerns, and their state of health fully established before they enter a potentially hazardous environment. We may need to know exactly how healthy someone was before, as compared to how healthy after.
We can, no doubt, offer full employment for heavy machine operators of just about every stripe. But have we the machines?
No doubt many of mine own ilk would be happy to volunteer as wildlife rescuers, but how many of us know anything at all about the Thirty-weight Egret or the Very, Very Brown Pelican?
All in all, likely to be a popular soundbite, but bound to create more problems than it solved. All in all, I would commend Obama for refering to this “volunteer” stuff only glancingly, it lends itself to cheap political theatrics.
Just so you’re aware, avoiding that is exactly the reason I quoted you in full from the other thread. You don’t see a discrepancy between them; I see some bit of sunlight between them (still); others can draw their own inferences and conclusions.