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But thank you for distracting a thread intended to point out the difference in response on American politics to your own private bete noirs. I hope to return the favor to you someday.
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Since your sources conflict regularly with intelligence sources, I'm going to have to go with the professionals, rather than journalists with axes to grind and income to get from their followers. I don't see Assad disputing it to any great degree, pretty much all the world, except for you, is convinced that he is the one who pulled the trigger, so I'm just not worried about your take on who is particularly responsible for the attack on Ghouta..
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http://www.thenational.ae/news/world/middle-east/syrian-chemical-attack-spurs-finger-pointing-inside-assad-regimeAug 26, 2013 - Exclusive: Split in Syrian regime's military as officers say they were not ... a few hours before the attacks," said a source from a well-connected family, ... in an area on the edge of Damascus known as Eastern Ghouta - once ... issued orders from a "high level" to wear gas masks in anticipation of the attacks. The delivery system was also through barrel rockets, possessed only by Assad and not the rebels. You're not worthy of much more, dweeb, than outright mockery when you say something idiotic like you said above, "it has been established..." So because I say the sarin used was used by the rebels and not the Syrian government you immediately believe the opposite. no, zolace. Because it doesn't make sense that gas masks would have been dispensed to folks by the regime if they didn't know a gas attack was coming. Is that such a hard thing to grasp? According to Hersh, in making their case for war the administration tried to pass off the December intercepts as having occurred in the days prior to the August 21 incident: "The former senior intelligence official explained that the hunt for relevant chatter went back to the exercise detected the previous December, in which, as Obama later said to the public, the Syrian army mobilised chemical weapons personnel and distributed gas masks to its troops.
"The White House's government assessment and Obama's speech were not descriptions of the specific events leading up to the 21 August attack, but an account of the sequence the Syrian military would have followed for any chemical attack. 'They put together a back story,' the former official said, 'and there are lots of different pieces and parts. The template they used was the template that goes back to December.'"
Putting together a "back story" is spook-talk for outright lying. There are laws against government officials doing that in testimony before Congress, and it appears those laws were broken.
Let's be clear about what administration officials yet to be identified did: they described NSA intercepts detailing preparations for a military drill that had occurred months earlier as communications sent in the days prior to August 21. You can come up with all the theories you want. But since it's been pretty well established that Assad is the one who pulled the trigger, quoting Hersh simply doesn't really make your case. I can go to the internet and find a dozen sources one way or the other on anything, you know it as well as I, but they don't make the case. |
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http://www.thenational.ae/news/world/middle-east/syrian-chemical-attack-spurs-finger-pointing-inside-assad-regimeAug 26, 2013 - Exclusive: Split in Syrian regime's military as officers say they were not ... a few hours before the attacks," said a source from a well-connected family, ... in an area on the edge of Damascus known as Eastern Ghouta - once ... issued orders from a "high level" to wear gas masks in anticipation of the attacks. The delivery system was also through barrel rockets, possessed only by Assad and not the rebels. You're not worthy of much more, dweeb, than outright mockery when you say something idiotic like you said above, "it has been established..." So because I say the sarin used was used by the rebels and not the Syrian government you immediately believe the opposite. no, zolace. Because it doesn't make sense that gas masks would have been dispensed to folks by the regime if they didn't know a gas attack was coming. Is that such a hard thing to grasp? |
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The problem is that you're not interested in actually addressing issues, zolace, or you would not choose automatically the worst construction possible. You are interested only on bashing on Americans, so that makes anything you say automatically suspect, not because you are anti-American, but because we cannot know that whether you are speaking from fact, or from a twisted perspective, such as the above sarin stuff, that is offered only to support your anti-Americanism.
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http://www.thenational.ae/news/world/middle-east/syrian-chemical-attack-spurs-finger-pointing-inside-assad-regimeAug 26, 2013 - Exclusive: Split in Syrian regime's military as officers say they were not ... a few hours before the attacks," said a source from a well-connected family, ... in an area on the edge of Damascus known as Eastern Ghouta - once ... issued orders from a "high level" to wear gas masks in anticipation of the attacks. The delivery system was also through barrel rockets, possessed only by Assad and not the rebels. You're not worthy of much more, dweeb, than outright mockery when you say something idiotic like you said above, "it has been established..."
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Your monomania is boring, zolace. You are capable of looking at things only through the prism of your futile hatred of this country. Enjoy your moment in the sun--as soon as the black guy is out of office, those cheering you on won't be listening anymore, and they'll instead be laughing, as I do, at a man incapable of thinking for himself.
You can mock without substance if you want to.It has been established that the Assad regime did not use sarin on Syrians, certainly not at the time in question. Please, go ahead and demonstrate that. Please don't bother bringing links from the immediate aftermath--it is clear that multiple claims were made by multiple interests. But the clincher is very simple . If the rebels were responsible for the gas attacks, how did Assad's people know to start issuing gas masks three days prior? |
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He is entitled to his opinion. I'm entitled to mine in stating that I believe he is wrong. That's what we get to enjoy in this country, Zolace. Don't like it? Tough freaking shit.
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The only time any conservative has any time for a black person and their opinions is when they are critical of other black people. Otherwise, they have zero tolerance for anything a black person has to say about their personal experience and go on to dismiss them as mindless plantation dwellers suffering from misinformed, prejudicial group think. You absolutely know that is true. We see evidence of that here everyday.
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Umair127,the point is, whenever a black man steps off the democrat plantation and suggests that blacks either need to take a firmer hand in their own success, stop using the past as an excuse, or the real underbelly of the situation, the fact that it is and always has been liberalism that has kept the black race down, he becomes a target for those who are using blacks.
This is no exception.
Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight. This "plantation" mentality pushed by the right is repulsive and ridiculous. It's language employed by conservatives to put black people in their place, nothing more. |
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http://www.salon.com/2014/07/11/the_rights_favorite_new_race_guru_why_you_should_know_jason_riley/The American left should start paying attention to the Wall Street Journal’s Jason Riley. His name is on the rise. An editorial board member of one of the nation’s most well-known publications, a paper that boasts an average weekday circulation of 2.4 million and falls under the umbrella of Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News empire, Riley has a new book out, “Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed,” which is beginning to pick up steam. This weekend, he’ll be featured on C-SPAN to talk about it. A few days ago, he sat down with Lou Dobbs. Before that, Bill O’Reilly. Now, his name is being praised by the National Journal (who called him an author who “annihilates nonsense”) and circulating throughout the Twittersphere as a man who has written “a great primer on race.” As an African-American columnist, Riley has built his brand by diverging from the “black liberal” moniker. In fact, his career has been predicated on maintaining a conspicuous level of skepticism toward the “Lean Forward” stylings of MSNBC and the left’s alleged coziness with black America. He once said: “I think there’s a pattern at MSNBC of them hiring black mediocrities like Melissa Harris-Perry, Michael Eric Dyson, Touré and, of course — the granddaddy of them all — Al Sharpton, simply to race-bait.” Quite often he goes “against the grain” (much like ESPN’s Jason Whitlock). Perhaps this explains why a friend and former colleague of his at the WSJ lauded Riley for being an “affable” editorialist “who came to his views as a college student reading writers such as George Will and Charles Krauthammer in the otherwise liberal Buffalo News,” an independent thinker whose mind was heavily influenced by the works of “economist Tom Sowell and historian Shelby Steele, black thinkers who rejected the liberal pieties about race.” Riley’s recent New York Post column“Why Liberals Should Stop Trying to ‘Help’ Black Americans” (much like his book) is undoubtedly a continuation of these teachings and his latest effort to invalidate liberal ideas. In it, he attempts to disentangle liberal rhetoric from the actual effects of liberal policies on black Americans. He wants to show how liberal ideology holds black success in the Lex Luger torture rack. But behind his fundamental question — “At what point does helping start hurting?” — also lies a troubling and familiar query, one that has historically proven resilient in American political discussion despite the best efforts to lay it to rest: Do black Americans actually need to be saved? Riley thinks this to be the case. And it’s liberalism that black Americans need to be saved from. The crux of his claim, it seems, is that liberalism’s coercive powers cause more harm to black advancement than the painful enduring legacies of American slavery and Jim Crow era racism. These legacies, Riley writes, “are not holding down blacks half as much as the legacy of efforts to help them ‘overcome.’” To attach a sense of urgency to his words he then cites a few obvious statistics to show how the plight of the black community has worsened in the last 50 years. “The black-white poverty gap has widened over the last decade,” he writes, adding that the “black-white disparity in incarceration rates today is larger than it was in 1960” and that “the black unemployment rate has, on average, been twice as high as the white rate for five decades.” These grim statistics Riley puts forth demonstrate what we supposedly should have been skeptical of all along, liberalism’s ability to save black America. Central to Riley’s rebuke of liberal politics is the presumption that black Americans have somehow been brainwashed into thinking of themselves as victims. “Today,” Riley writes, “there is no greater impediment to black advancement than the self-pitying mindset that permeates black culture.” This condition, Riley argues, is evidence of the triumphs(?) of liberalism, which “has also succeeded, tragically, in convincing blacks to see themselves first and foremost as victims.” Black Americans, so the story goes, have been duped by the liberal conspiracy. What’s more, they are as much to blame for conferring the status of victim as the grifting liberals who bequeathed that status upon them. The problem with this logic is that it is unprovable and only exists in the minds of those who rely on myth to explain their own shallow assumptions. There is no evidence that blacks see themselves as victims any more than any other demographic, whether they be white, Latino, Asian-American or whatever. Black people don’t carry with them, in the words of New York’s Jonathan Chait, a “cultural residue” of oppression that they remain entangled in any more than the next race. If Riley bothered to survey actual black Americans he might realize this much. That blacks see themselves (like I hope Riley sees himself) not as victims, but as human beings, operating from unique experiences and disparate backgrounds while all tied to a larger complicated history. While, undoubtedly, self-pity may exist for some black individuals, it has not infiltrated the masses. This is not to say that blacks have not been injured. The plundering of black people is as old as the country itself and still exists today. But it is not a result of the failures of liberalism; rather, it is a triumph of white supremacism. Liberalism did not deny opportunity and prosperity to black Americans; instead, racism attached itself to liberal policies. As the Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates eloquently articulates in his June cover story, “The Case for Reparations,” the liberal holy grail, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, was crafted specifically to include the racist traditions of the Jim Crow South. “The omnibus programs passed under the Social Security Act in 1935 were crafted in such a way as to protect the southern way of life,” Coates explains. “Old-age insurance (Social Security proper) and unemployment insurance excluded farmworkers and domestics—jobs heavily occupied by blacks. When President Roosevelt signed Social Security into law in 1935, 65 percent of African Americans nationally and between 70 and 80 percent in the South were ineligible.” Coates also recounts how troves of black soldiers were denied access to low-interest home loans under Title III of the G.I. Bill due to racist local V.A. officials and racist lending practices by banks. Liberalism was overpowered by America’s most time-honored tradition. Of course, despite evidence to the contrary, Riley is quick to remind us that this all happened in the distant past. And to be fair, his critique supposedly is limited to the last 50 years. Perhaps that is why he calls the spoils of the civil rights movement — “the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which outlawed racial discrimination in employment and education and ensured the ability of blacks to register and vote” — the shining example of “liberalism at its best.” This statement is not difficult to dispute, even if you only think (mistakenly) of liberalism within the confines of curbing racial discrimination. Other landmark achievements include legalizing interracial marriage and constitutional amendments banning slavery, giving blacks the right to vote, and bestowing full-personhood — rectifying the three-fifths clause — to blacks. “Liberalism at its best” was a set of laws guaranteeing black people what they supposedly were legally entitled to 100 years prior. The reoccurring theme was that “liberalism” (Riley’s definition) had to reassert its will against white supremacism. Ironically, Riley’s beacon of “liberalism at its best” — the Voting Rights Act — is currently under threat, not by liberals but by conservatives. Yet, he makes no mention of this whatsoever in his column. Instead of standing up for what he says he believes, he chooses to stand with the very man, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who voted to effectively destroy it. Last year, Thomas was part of 5-4 split decision that ruled the VRA was unconstitutional. The court’s reasoning was that essentially, things have changed and gotten better; racism is a relic of the past. Riley’s complaint against liberals echoes the dangerous logic used by the court (what’s in the past is in the past!). Liberals “continue to blame the past,” he writes, inferring that times have changed. Liberals, black and white, seem drunk off their “obsession with racial slights real or imagined.” Essentially, this means that we talk too much about race. He then quotes Thomas who said to a crowd, oddly enough, despite what he wrote in his memoir, that America is more color sensitive now than during his time as a black child integrating into white schools in the deep South before the legal abolition of Jim Crow. “My sadness is that we are probably today more race-and difference-conscious than I was in the 1960s when I went to school … Everybody is sensitive,” Thomas said. Doubling down, Riley claims that we live “in an era when public policy bends over backward to accommodate blacks” and that even “King and his contemporaries demanded black self-improvement despite the abundant and overt racism of his day.” Once again liberalism’s best efforts to save black America have had a deleterious effect on the black psyche. We can’t even help ourselves. According to Riley, the key offender of liberalism’s stranglehold over the black community is none other than America’s first black president, Barack Obama. Citing a sliver of the president’s remarks following the acquittal of George Zimmerman for the killing of Trayvon Martin — “They understand that some of the violence that takes place in poor black neighborhoods around the country is born out of a very violent past in this country, and that the poverty and dysfunction that we see in those communities can be traced to a very difficult history” — Riley misconstrues the president’s empathy for liberal brainwashing. He writes: “Obama was doing exactly what liberals have been conditioning blacks to do since the 1960s, which is to blame black pathology on the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow laws. And the president is conditioning the next generation of blacks to do the same.” Riley calls the president’s words a “dodge” for his policy failures, a representation of the “left’s sentimental support [that] has turned underprivileged blacks into playthings for liberal intellectuals and politicians who care more about clearing their conscience or winning votes than advocating behaviors and attitudes that have allowed other groups to get ahead.” Another example of the left’s indoctrination of black minds. If this all seems like déjà vu, it should. Many of Riley’s criticisms echo the oft-cited talking points of the right wing. Which makes his polemic, one that excoriates liberals for “more of the same,” particularly laughable. It is not new ideas he yearns for, but old ones that conform with his limited pre-established political leanings. But on a deeper level, Riley’s invective sheds light on the twisted logic that continues to pervade Republican circles. He thinks that once the liberal spell is lifted, black liberation will be realized. That when blacks no longer drink the liberal Kool-Aid, believing in their status as victims, they will be made whole. Republicans, desperately trying to convince blacks to abandon the Democratic Party, have imparted the same messaging (evidence be damned): Liberals have made your lives worse; but we can save you. Rid yourselves of liberalism, and follow us down the road to salvation. But the truth is no political ideology can save black people from the tireless forces of racism. White supremacy knows no party or clique. American history has proven how resilient the virus of racism can be; even when blacks have been made equal in the eyes of the law, racism resurrects itself and spreads through the veins that gives life to the American ideals of freedom and liberty. This is history. And the Jason Rileys of the world can try to ignore it all they want. But they can only obfuscate what we feel all around us, that which we cannot separate ourselves from, that which we carry with us each day. As James Baldwin reminds us, “The great force of history comes from the fact that we carry within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do.” To tell ourselves otherwise is to subscribe to a much more troubling pathology than victimhood, which is to detach ourselves from who we are. Strangely, this is the path Jason Riley has chosen. And the sad part is none of us can save him. I just got to the part where Riley was described as African American and stopped. He stepped off the plantation and will be dealt with, starting, I suppose, with this article. Of course he's an African American. His picture is in the OP.No one can reply to his 40 seconds? Really? Only he gets to express his opinion? |
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http://www.salon.com/2014/07/11/the_rights_favorite_new_race_guru_why_you_should_know_jason_riley/The American left should start paying attention to the Wall Street Journal’s Jason Riley. His name is on the rise. An editorial board member of one of the nation’s most well-known publications, a paper that boasts an average weekday circulation of 2.4 million and falls under the umbrella of Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News empire, Riley has a new book out, “Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed,” which is beginning to pick up steam. This weekend, he’ll be featured on C-SPAN to talk about it. A few days ago, he sat down with Lou Dobbs. Before that, Bill O’Reilly. Now, his name is being praised by the National Journal (who called him an author who “annihilates nonsense”) and circulating throughout the Twittersphere as a man who has written “a great primer on race.” As an African-American columnist, Riley has built his brand by diverging from the “black liberal” moniker. In fact, his career has been predicated on maintaining a conspicuous level of skepticism toward the “Lean Forward” stylings of MSNBC and the left’s alleged coziness with black America. He once said: “I think there’s a pattern at MSNBC of them hiring black mediocrities like Melissa Harris-Perry, Michael Eric Dyson, Touré and, of course — the granddaddy of them all — Al Sharpton, simply to race-bait.” Quite often he goes “against the grain” (much like ESPN’s Jason Whitlock). Perhaps this explains why a friend and former colleague of his at the WSJ lauded Riley for being an “affable” editorialist “who came to his views as a college student reading writers such as George Will and Charles Krauthammer in the otherwise liberal Buffalo News,” an independent thinker whose mind was heavily influenced by the works of “economist Tom Sowell and historian Shelby Steele, black thinkers who rejected the liberal pieties about race.” Riley’s recent New York Post column“Why Liberals Should Stop Trying to ‘Help’ Black Americans” (much like his book) is undoubtedly a continuation of these teachings and his latest effort to invalidate liberal ideas. In it, he attempts to disentangle liberal rhetoric from the actual effects of liberal policies on black Americans. He wants to show how liberal ideology holds black success in the Lex Luger torture rack. But behind his fundamental question — “At what point does helping start hurting?” — also lies a troubling and familiar query, one that has historically proven resilient in American political discussion despite the best efforts to lay it to rest: Do black Americans actually need to be saved? Riley thinks this to be the case. And it’s liberalism that black Americans need to be saved from. The crux of his claim, it seems, is that liberalism’s coercive powers cause more harm to black advancement than the painful enduring legacies of American slavery and Jim Crow era racism. These legacies, Riley writes, “are not holding down blacks half as much as the legacy of efforts to help them ‘overcome.’” To attach a sense of urgency to his words he then cites a few obvious statistics to show how the plight of the black community has worsened in the last 50 years. “The black-white poverty gap has widened over the last decade,” he writes, adding that the “black-white disparity in incarceration rates today is larger than it was in 1960” and that “the black unemployment rate has, on average, been twice as high as the white rate for five decades.” These grim statistics Riley puts forth demonstrate what we supposedly should have been skeptical of all along, liberalism’s ability to save black America. Central to Riley’s rebuke of liberal politics is the presumption that black Americans have somehow been brainwashed into thinking of themselves as victims. “Today,” Riley writes, “there is no greater impediment to black advancement than the self-pitying mindset that permeates black culture.” This condition, Riley argues, is evidence of the triumphs(?) of liberalism, which “has also succeeded, tragically, in convincing blacks to see themselves first and foremost as victims.” Black Americans, so the story goes, have been duped by the liberal conspiracy. What’s more, they are as much to blame for conferring the status of victim as the grifting liberals who bequeathed that status upon them. The problem with this logic is that it is unprovable and only exists in the minds of those who rely on myth to explain their own shallow assumptions. There is no evidence that blacks see themselves as victims any more than any other demographic, whether they be white, Latino, Asian-American or whatever. Black people don’t carry with them, in the words of New York’s Jonathan Chait, a “cultural residue” of oppression that they remain entangled in any more than the next race. If Riley bothered to survey actual black Americans he might realize this much. That blacks see themselves (like I hope Riley sees himself) not as victims, but as human beings, operating from unique experiences and disparate backgrounds while all tied to a larger complicated history. While, undoubtedly, self-pity may exist for some black individuals, it has not infiltrated the masses. This is not to say that blacks have not been injured. The plundering of black people is as old as the country itself and still exists today. But it is not a result of the failures of liberalism; rather, it is a triumph of white supremacism. Liberalism did not deny opportunity and prosperity to black Americans; instead, racism attached itself to liberal policies. As the Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates eloquently articulates in his June cover story, “The Case for Reparations,” the liberal holy grail, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, was crafted specifically to include the racist traditions of the Jim Crow South. “The omnibus programs passed under the Social Security Act in 1935 were crafted in such a way as to protect the southern way of life,” Coates explains. “Old-age insurance (Social Security proper) and unemployment insurance excluded farmworkers and domestics—jobs heavily occupied by blacks. When President Roosevelt signed Social Security into law in 1935, 65 percent of African Americans nationally and between 70 and 80 percent in the South were ineligible.” Coates also recounts how troves of black soldiers were denied access to low-interest home loans under Title III of the G.I. Bill due to racist local V.A. officials and racist lending practices by banks. Liberalism was overpowered by America’s most time-honored tradition. Of course, despite evidence to the contrary, Riley is quick to remind us that this all happened in the distant past. And to be fair, his critique supposedly is limited to the last 50 years. Perhaps that is why he calls the spoils of the civil rights movement — “the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which outlawed racial discrimination in employment and education and ensured the ability of blacks to register and vote” — the shining example of “liberalism at its best.” This statement is not difficult to dispute, even if you only think (mistakenly) of liberalism within the confines of curbing racial discrimination. Other landmark achievements include legalizing interracial marriage and constitutional amendments banning slavery, giving blacks the right to vote, and bestowing full-personhood — rectifying the three-fifths clause — to blacks. “Liberalism at its best” was a set of laws guaranteeing black people what they supposedly were legally entitled to 100 years prior. The reoccurring theme was that “liberalism” (Riley’s definition) had to reassert its will against white supremacism. Ironically, Riley’s beacon of “liberalism at its best” — the Voting Rights Act — is currently under threat, not by liberals but by conservatives. Yet, he makes no mention of this whatsoever in his column. Instead of standing up for what he says he believes, he chooses to stand with the very man, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who voted to effectively destroy it. Last year, Thomas was part of 5-4 split decision that ruled the VRA was unconstitutional. The court’s reasoning was that essentially, things have changed and gotten better; racism is a relic of the past. Riley’s complaint against liberals echoes the dangerous logic used by the court (what’s in the past is in the past!). Liberals “continue to blame the past,” he writes, inferring that times have changed. Liberals, black and white, seem drunk off their “obsession with racial slights real or imagined.” Essentially, this means that we talk too much about race. He then quotes Thomas who said to a crowd, oddly enough, despite what he wrote in his memoir, that America is more color sensitive now than during his time as a black child integrating into white schools in the deep South before the legal abolition of Jim Crow. “My sadness is that we are probably today more race-and difference-conscious than I was in the 1960s when I went to school … Everybody is sensitive,” Thomas said. Doubling down, Riley claims that we live “in an era when public policy bends over backward to accommodate blacks” and that even “King and his contemporaries demanded black self-improvement despite the abundant and overt racism of his day.” Once again liberalism’s best efforts to save black America have had a deleterious effect on the black psyche. We can’t even help ourselves. According to Riley, the key offender of liberalism’s stranglehold over the black community is none other than America’s first black president, Barack Obama. Citing a sliver of the president’s remarks following the acquittal of George Zimmerman for the killing of Trayvon Martin — “They understand that some of the violence that takes place in poor black neighborhoods around the country is born out of a very violent past in this country, and that the poverty and dysfunction that we see in those communities can be traced to a very difficult history” — Riley misconstrues the president’s empathy for liberal brainwashing. He writes: “Obama was doing exactly what liberals have been conditioning blacks to do since the 1960s, which is to blame black pathology on the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow laws. And the president is conditioning the next generation of blacks to do the same.” Riley calls the president’s words a “dodge” for his policy failures, a representation of the “left’s sentimental support [that] has turned underprivileged blacks into playthings for liberal intellectuals and politicians who care more about clearing their conscience or winning votes than advocating behaviors and attitudes that have allowed other groups to get ahead.” Another example of the left’s indoctrination of black minds. If this all seems like déjà vu, it should. Many of Riley’s criticisms echo the oft-cited talking points of the right wing. Which makes his polemic, one that excoriates liberals for “more of the same,” particularly laughable. It is not new ideas he yearns for, but old ones that conform with his limited pre-established political leanings. But on a deeper level, Riley’s invective sheds light on the twisted logic that continues to pervade Republican circles. He thinks that once the liberal spell is lifted, black liberation will be realized. That when blacks no longer drink the liberal Kool-Aid, believing in their status as victims, they will be made whole. Republicans, desperately trying to convince blacks to abandon the Democratic Party, have imparted the same messaging (evidence be damned): Liberals have made your lives worse; but we can save you. Rid yourselves of liberalism, and follow us down the road to salvation. But the truth is no political ideology can save black people from the tireless forces of racism. White supremacy knows no party or clique. American history has proven how resilient the virus of racism can be; even when blacks have been made equal in the eyes of the law, racism resurrects itself and spreads through the veins that gives life to the American ideals of freedom and liberty. This is history. And the Jason Rileys of the world can try to ignore it all they want. But they can only obfuscate what we feel all around us, that which we cannot separate ourselves from, that which we carry with us each day. As James Baldwin reminds us, “The great force of history comes from the fact that we carry within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do.” To tell ourselves otherwise is to subscribe to a much more troubling pathology than victimhood, which is to detach ourselves from who we are. Strangely, this is the path Jason Riley has chosen. And the sad part is none of us can save him.
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Similarly, the approach to Russia has been idiotic. NATO is essentially irrelevant insofar as US geopolitical interests are concerned, so it would have made far more sense to allow Russia a sphere of influence over the former Soviet Union, especially since both America and Russia have a shared interest in containing China. Confronting Russia over Ukraine forced Russia to align with China against the US.
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I wouldn't say Obama doesn't have a foreign policy... I'd say his policy is in direct opposition to the general welfare of the United States. I'd also say the world is more dangerous now that it was when he took office.
Wasn't that long ago he was talking about how safe the world had become. Perhaps what he meant is that it is now safe for the Islamic Extremist to resume operations.
This is one popular belief, and I think it stems from some sort of faulty insistence that the United States and president Obama caused the Arab Spring, which was, in reality, a phenomenon that experts had been long awaiting and predicting. Indeed, if anything, it was overdue in its coming (a testament to how well authoritarian governments can suppress a population. i'm wondering if it isn't more likely that he has the same policy across the board, but that we are missing information that he is privy to being that he's the president of the US. We've had this conversation a bit before, and I've never really seen you put together an outline of these inconsistencies in much detail, outside of pointing to Egypt and maybe Syria (which isn't inconsistent with traditional US foreign policy dealings with regards to Egypt). Israel I think is both one of his largest failures and one of his greatest inconsistencies, but that was always expected since our policy has pretty much always been a "realist" approach to Israel since Israel is such a realist state. But let's take a look at some of his major foreign policy decisions and see how they fit together under the ideological framework that I established in the first post: 1.) Iran: true to multilateral neoliberal form President Obama was both open to talking directly to Iran, and preferred to operate through international cooperation with Iran. As soon as he came into office he ended the Bush era practice of funding Sunni terrorist organizations in Iran such as Jundallah (a more classical realist approach to pressure mechanisms) and instead took a more multilateral approach through the utilization of both Russia, and Azerbaijan to put pressure on Iran (and to good effect) rather than following Israel's war drums and bombing the country. Likewise later on when Iran resurfaced as an issue his administration worked through international means to place very strict sanctions on Iran that lead to political change during the elections and remains a leverage tool. so engagement with Iran = pretty consistent. 2.) Somalia: one of President Obama's first policy moves overseas was to crack down on Somali piracy and Al Shabaab (al Shabaab of course being created during the employment of Bush era policies in the 2006 bombing and US backed Ethiopian invasion of Somalia and the destruction of the ICU: another very realist approach). Instead, with President Obama in Somalia we see a more multilateral approach again. We've leaned less on Ethiopia, and have brought Kenya and the African Union into the mix and have employed US forces in a limited engagement capacity in the region too with drones and US soldiers being used in small numbers to assist both the fight against Al-Shabaab and the fight against piracy, and both the Somali government and the issue of Somali piracy have improved under our engagement in the area. So Somalia = mostly consistent 3.) Libya: here is a great example of President Obama's foreign policy style. Very multilateral, very inclusive of international organizations, and coupled with limited military engagement from the US. We supported a domestic movement against an old US enemy (one who Reagan tried to assassinate), and we did it through both the UN Security Council, NATO, and the utilization of the Arab League, all with some engagement by the US but not nearly as heavy as what was seen in Afghanistan and Iraq under his predecessor. since then we have worked with successive new governments to help disarm militias and engage in state building with locals taking the lead (instead of the US since it wasn't under occupation). So Libya = mostly consistent. 4.) Mali: Our initial response to the coup was standard US pressure mechanisms, halting of AGOA eligibility, suspension of our MCC Compact, and heavy diplomatic pressure, and vocal opposition through international mechanisms: particularly the UN (which had the desired effects). The subsequent Tuareg rebellion in the northern part of the country (something we've seen happen multiple times) was a bit of a situational game changer as was the eventual inclusion of Salafi Jihadi groups and their hijacking of the rebellion (which is actually the very thing that caused it to fail). We worked through international and multilateral actors (particularly the AU and France) to combat this incursion with again US involvement on a limited scale. And it worked, a peace deal is ongoing (with our encouragement), though it is likely to remain unstable for some time; one of the important things to note though was US cooperation with France which was largely absent under the Bush Administration and reflects a broader US counter terror strategy in the Sahel and Maghreb that has never been stronger. So Mali = consistent. 5.)The DR Congo: One of President Obama's first acts and major focuses in office in foreign affairs was this conflict. President Bush had actually already paved the way for President Obama through the use of more neo-liberal tactics (which President Bush became more fond of towards the very end of his administration). To that end. President Bush worked through partners on the ground and utilized limited direct US engagement support to help combat the Lord's Resistance Army through Operation Lightning Thunder. This was happening as he was transitioning out of office and as President Obama was coming into office. President Obama seized on this framework and enhanced / strengthened it working with the Central African Republic the DR Congo, Uganda and South Sudan (countries not necessarily inclined towards one another, particularly Uganda and the DRC) to launch another wave of crackdowns that was ultimately successful in severely reducing the LRA presence in all areas except South Sudan (and now due to the increased civil war in the CAR, the LRA has regained stronger operational grounds there as well). Likewise we sent 100 US troops over to increase our military support initiated under Bush (and which Rush Limbaugh strongly criticized Obama for since we were sending soldiers over there to "kill Christians"). We also worked through the UN to strengthen and radically alter the UN mandate in eastern DRC. For the first time in Africa now the UN operation in the DRC was allowed to form an offensive unit to actively attack remaining rebel groups, which it did and the M23 rebel collapsed (the FDLR are next). This was coupled with strong US pressure against Rwanda and Uganda to reduce their material support for said rebels, and with a reform to conflict resource legislation here in the US to address economic factors of violence. The DRC still has a fair share of fighting ongoing, but it is far quieter now than it probably ever have been since independence. So DRC = Consistent 6.) Yemen: Largely a continuation and escalation of Bush era strategies with more attention placed on central government and institution building and federalization of Yemen. So Yemen = slightly less consistent. I think this rating though is the result of limited US options in Yemen in the face of our expenditure of political capital (both domestic and international) on other issues. AKA we've had to pick some of our battles and Yemen wasn't really one we chose. 7.) Central African Republic: we've responded with soft power pressures and support for AU and French operations while employing the use of sanctions on our end and pushing for a peace process (which is ongoing). CAR = consistent 8.) Nigeria: We've aided in Nigerian government capacity building, and helped (with France) to form a broader coalition of states against Boko Haram and related militias that has never existed before with unprecedented cooperation from both Chad and Cameroon, while maintaining a critical eye on Nigerian governmental abuses and while utilizing, once again, a limited US military engagement to support domestic efforts. Nigeria = consistent. 9.) South Sudan: Similar story, using regional and local actors to cobble together attempted peace processes while pressuring major actors through the use of sanctions and the international community. South Sudan = consistent, but also an area where we haven't expended the most political capital and attention. 10.) Israel: pretty straightforward power politics with a strong military twist, we've downplayed the nuances of the conflict while ramping up military spending and action. Very old school and very inconsistent with President Obama's normal foreign policy approaches, but fairly consistent with US traditional approaches to Israel. Israel= inconsistent. 11.) Egypt: We've been willing to engage for talks Egyptian political opposition groups like never before, which was a sharp break from President Bush's standing policy and is more neo-liberal, as was our adjustment of stances as local actors changed political entities within Egypt during the uprising. Which also happens to be pretty consistent with historical US policy in the region. where he takes a more classical approach is in the muted response to the coup against the Muslim Brotherhood and subsequent working relations with the Sisi government, a more realist and classical approach, but also one which is reflective of our priorities in the region which simply reflect working relations with Egypt at all costs (same as they are for Israel) due to their role in Israel / Palestine, international counter terrorism, Libya and Sudan, and the Suez Canal. All considered vital American strategic interests. that being said, we haven't been particularly warm with Egypt in the face of this forced tract. So Egypt = somewhat consistent / somewhat inconsistent but for good reason. 12.) Syria: Here president Obama tried to utilize his normal policy styles. He built a political coalition with France, Turkey and the UK (among others), but our action was talked down in congress, just as British action was talked down in their legislature. With the loss of our direct support and British support, French support dried up as well. Political capital via the Arab League had been expended in Libya and fatigue concerning such interventions had set in. So tactics had to change and that’s where the red line and the war drum beating came into play, a bit more of a realist style threat (a popular tactic in Israel for example) but it wasn’t taken too far, only to the point of encouraging Russian intervention and the loss of Syria’s chemical weapons, with some non-lethal aid and eventually some small arms munitions for chosen rebel groups. So once again, limited engagement, if not in exactly the way that President Obama wanted and while we did work through international and partner countries it once again, wasn’t in the way we wanted. Syria fell at a tough time for foreign policy execution and the complexities of it present a challenging point from which to engage in Syria now that it has lasted some time. Syria is also one of those conflicts where there are a lot of behind the scenes factors. So Syria = semi consistent (particularly at first), though limited. 13.) Iraq: A much more tricky country to analyze. President Obama inherited this mess (and it was / is a mess) from a previous administration that had relied upon not only a poorly constructed, but heavily damaging policy approach to occupation. As with some of Bush’s other policies though, he (and more specifically our generals such as General Petraeus) came to realize that the status quo wasn’t working and they skillfully developed the surge package which President Obama ended up utilizing. It was a much better piece of policy creation and while it increased troop numbers the major change was in our tactics. This surge represented a more neoliberal approach to Iraq and focused a lot on domestic actors and hearts and minds. Something which I think President Obama was more comfortable with but Iraq was also a war he had campaigned on to end despite the policy shift. The surge helped spark the Awakening which all but destroyed AQI, but the civil war in Syria coupled by the politically corrupt Maliki in office saved it. After our pullout, President Obama went back to the tactics that he was more comfortable with: international engagement and mechanism and pressures for reform within Iraq’s central government and institutions. Now we see a similar tactic being used in Iraq as we have seen in other conflict areas that President Obama has responded to, international engagement (particularly in pressuring regional countries like Saudi Arabia to target actors supporting the ISIS and Al Nusra) coupled with air strikes and limited ground support to supplement local actors while helping with containment through the utilization of Kurds and simultaneously pushing hard for Maliki to step down (which he eventually did). So Iraq: Somewhat consistent 14.) Russia: Pretty straight forward. President Obama has responded to this like many other conflict situations, high pressure through international institutions, the reliance on regional blocs like the EU through which we have expended a lot of political capital, and the enforcement of sanctions which has been the most up front we’ve been in opposing Russian interests since the Cold War (certainly a much stronger response than was seen in Russia’s war with Georgia). Before the Ukraine conflict we were happy to partner with Russia in nuclear arms reductions and successfully utilize Russian spheres of influence to pressure Iran. So our Russian policy = consistent. 16.) Burma: Burma’s opening up to the west I think has more to do with timing than anything else, never-the-less we have played it fairly well even if it has currently taken a back seat in our foreign policy focus. Daw Aung San Suu Kyi is part of a more open government now, the country is working on a widespread national ceasefire and peace treaty with multiple armed groups, is looking to federation which would represent additional governmental reforms, and has turned more away from China. The big disappointment is the loss in momentum concerning the domestic treatment of Rohingya, which after initial criticisms and pressure, we’ve quieted about considerably (though the violence has reduced as well). So Burma = Neutral in consistency 17.) China: I’m not extremely well versed in our China foreign policy and our overall ‘Pivot to Asia’ which has been a major foreign policy focus of President Obama’s non-conflict related foreign relations platform so I can’t comment too well on it outside of what I’ve seen in the south China Sea territory dispute where we have been very stern with China (by engaging in symbolism such as flying our unarmed bombers through disputed airspace that China insists is theirs, maintaining dialogue about these disputes, particularly as they relate to Japan and Philippines (I am less well versed in how we have been responding to China’s recent spat with Thailand). We saw this dedication in part during our hurricane relief efforts with the Philippines which made China look bad. China has always been one of those interesting and special cases in the foreign policy world. The language of the pivot seems pretty consistent with President Obama’s policy trends though, So China =  18.) North Korea: North Korea is a hard state to engage with. President Bush was slightly more open to working things out internationally with North Korea and then promptly ended those talks with his public “Axis of Evil” declaration (a huge international relations blunder that occurred in the midst of sensitive policy talks). That being said, President Obama has had to deal with a new North Korean regime and I’ve seen him deal quite well with it, if not in the way I think he would prefer to have engaged North Korea (but alas many of those options were taken off of the table before he stepped into office). That said, during the routine flare up in hostile language and action by North Korea, President Obama broke from US tradition of bribes and called Un’s bluff which forced him to back down after a period of making a show about it (the temporary closure of the joint North / South Korean manufacturing plant). So North Korea = neutral but well handled. 19.) Economic statecraft: The entire primary basis of President Obama’s first presidential term revolved around the new policy of economic statecraft which is straight out of the neo-liberal playbook and has been widely utilized in our engagement overseas, particularly in Africa and Asia. So very consistent. No denying that Obama has a consistent foreign policy. But I'm going to disagree that it's particularly effective or conducted in the best interests of the US. I'm also going to deny that Neo-liberalism is better as a means of engagement than realism. Especially for a powerful country. A realist response to Syria, based around letting Russia support Bashar Assad while providing occasional intelligence to assist Syrian government forces to target extremist groups would have been much more effective and beneficial to US interests. |
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was it right for obama to play golf right after?
If playing golf helps mister hussein obama come up with a legitimate plan to eradicate Islam from the planet, then yes, him playing was definitely a good thing. |
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Blacks are only 13% of the population. I didn't realize that. I think the Spanish population is much larger than that. The left doesn't want an honest discussion; never have, never will.
Even when failing to do so costs the lives of hundreds if not thousands of blacks each year. So you are equating a law enforcement officer who shoots an unarmed kid with a thug who shoots an unarmed kid and saying people really just shouldn't expect more of a law enforcement officer? Okay. Got it. Anyone who can punch and break an eye socket is not ''unarmed". Also, he was the thug, not the policeman. I don't especially like cops, either. But from everything that has been said, I question that he shot a person who was not threatening his life. |
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This is what murderous terrorists do... hamas has been pretty much getting a pass and there are many who are excusing their barbarous behavior... and for the most part, there are no consequences to their behavior... so they will kill anyone they want.... this is what murderous terrorists do...
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Blacks are only 13% of the population. I didn't realize that. I think the Spanish population is much larger than that. The left doesn't want an honest discussion; never have, never will.
Even when failing to do so costs the lives of hundreds if not thousands of blacks each year. |
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Juan Williams already tried to address the issue and he was shut down. This board tried to initiate an honest conversation on the issue and the lefties shut it down. Until the country as a whole can honestly address the problem the problem will continue.
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Most major religions and large denoms of our majority Christian population support their respective version of the sanctity of life, the exceptions are those which are heavily based or influenced by humanist tenets. It doesn't always follow that what the individual or majority of religions believe is immoral should be reflected in law....I don't ascribe to that view because there are lots of things which the government has no compelling interest to prevent heathens from doing if they are only harming themselves or other consenting adults. If someone wants to kill themselves, I wouldn't stand on "moral principle" to make that illegal per se because once they are dead, what in the world can you do to them that would matter? But the problem with suicide is that if it is not made illegal, then you have no authority to try to stop someone in process and get them help. Furthermore, assisted suicide (another euphemism) is not just the person offing themselves, it is the sanctioning of a government authorized doctor to kill you with your permission. So setting aside the morality, how do we logically reconcile that we need to keep suicide illegal so we can intervene to stop someone who wants to do it themselves with making suicide legal as long as it is someone else killing you after you beg for permission from Big Brother? That is about the screwiest justification of a "personal right" there is, not to mention compassion.
Very well stated. I'd only add that I lived with my mom while she died of lung cancer a few years ago. Nothing very gracious about it, but it did give us six months to discover two people neither of us knew existed before that. I really appreciate you sharing that, and that kind of experience is one of the immeasurable losses of assisted suicide. |
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