Sorry, but I can't share that optimism about Obama. For me, he's scary for the reasons laid out in this piece.

Frankly, I'm of the opinion that Obama could get us all killed.

Just my humble opinion...

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Eeryone should send Cyberella a greeting card. She has so quickly transformed from "Obama, the Muslim" rhetoric to "Obama, the extremist Christian" one.

Nice transition.

I wish Darwin's monkey granddaddy could have been transformed that quickly.

Love.

Barack the scrooge.

According to his latest tax return Barack gave less that 1.0% to charity, but he wants you and I to give more and pay more in taxes. Typical leftwing hypocracy.

But then the Cheny's who made 8.8million gave 78% of their income to charity totalling 6.8million. Hmmm, more evidence that conservatives are more compassionate and giving than anyone on the left.

The liberals talk a good game, but are short on actions.

Never trust a liberal, never! They will try to make you feel guilty while they themselves are the biggest offenders and misers to be found anywhere.

Maybe we should take a little poll of liberals and conservatives on this forum to see who gave the most to charity in the last year?

Noooo, it would never work, liberals couldn't be trusted to tell the truth.

The difference between Barack and Dick is that Dick has the blood of few hundred and thousands people on his hands, while Barack promises to end that hysteria of killing outside the national security borders.

I guess that concerns American people more than how much Barack has given away.

Dick is the main architect of a wrong, based-on-lies war. That's big enough a sin to wipe away all the millions he has given away.

The world do not accept the "peace at home at the expense of wars in the world" rhetoric and the American people, being responsible citizens, are not fooled by the tears of the crocodile. Nobody cares about that goddamn millions given away by a would-be passionate-conservatism maniac who has directly killed thousands of Americans and innocent people.

I give you facts and you give me hate speech and rhetoric. As I said in another post, words are cheap and that actions speak louder than words. Barack Hussein Obama may be good with words but, he is short on actions.

He is even softening his stand on troop withdraws. He now saws that he would not make any drastic troop reductions in Iraq, but that some would definately be coming home. Some are already coming home and the troop levels could be back to pre-surge levels by June or July. Sooo, Barack isn't saying much is he?

What action speaks louder than killing the innocent?



YouTube - Dick Cheney is a Killer

Yeah--bla, bla, bla--going to get us out of Iraq. Yeah, you bet. During war time, & if you were around during the 10 year Viet Nam war, like I was. Every single politician running for office would make the same claim. "I am going to get us out of Viet Nam." They never did, until so much pressure was put on Nixon, that he finally did it.

The consequences were horrific. Friendly Vietnamese hanging off our helicopters in an effort to leave the country before they were murdered. 1 million people slaughtered after our departure.

I think Obama & Hillary remember Viet Nam. They know the consequences they face, if this same thing happens. You think the world has a low opinion of us now? What until they see CNN headline news, with Iraqi women & children being lined up & shot on the streets of Bagdad, because we just had to leave. And we had to leave early, & before the country was stable.

If this were to happen, what do you believe the chances are of a second term, for either of the democrat front runners? I would say zero to none.

The democrat party would love all you voters, to believe their Iraq rhetoric. But when the rubber meets the road, they are looking for a 2nd term in office, & they would never risk that with innocent blood in the streets of Bagdad for all the world to see.

Regardless if it is Hillary or Obama, count on being in Iraq, for a very long time.

In fact, the only candidate who has been honest about Iraq, is John McCain.

Look, you can call Bush and Cheney murders if you want, but that's nothing more than your opinion, hate speech, and rhetoric.

Whatever happened to that wonderful concept of innocent until proven guilty in a court of law, not the court of your opinion?

Well, actually Johnson made the claim in 1964 that he wasn't going to get us INTO Viet Nam.

After him, we only had one president in office during the war, and he DID get us out of it. Although admittedly it took him a bit longer than was originally hoped. (He could have done it sooner, politically. It wasn't Nixon's war to begin with, nor any Republican's. He'd have been a hero if he had, and probably would have served out his two terms without resigning, because the war issue and the protests were what sent him around the paranoid bend, resulting in Watergate.)

The question arises, though, whether any of that would have happened if Johnson hadn't gotten us into the war in the first place. (I definitely blame him more than Nixon for that mess.) I doubt it very much. Years of terrible war, and from the Vietnamese perspective it certainly was terrible, with casualty rates that were appalling, harden a people and lead to viciousness that they would not normally perpetrate. Had Ho taken over the country in 1965 or 1966, absent U.S. escalation, or better yet in 1956 if the unification elections had been held as promised, we'd almost certainly have seen a kinder, gentler, less radical Vietnam. Still not a liberal democracy, of course, and still allied with the Soviets to some extent, but the slaughter wouldn't have taken place.

Once we escalated and made it our war, there was no way to prevent some level of brutality. We were not going to win, period. We just didn't have enough at stake to make it worth the price to us. The Vietnamese, on the other hand, had everything on the line, and were willing to pay any price whatsoever. A protracted war of attrition is always a contest of will, and we didn't have the will -- nor should we have.

The longer we stayed, the worse the aftermath. Same in Iraq.

I think that the world will blame us for going in to begin with, not for pulling out. That is, after all, what happened in Vietnam. There were a few committed cold-warriors who felt the way you seem to, but they were distinctly in a minority.

We will have to leave before the country is stable, if we wait a hundred years. The country will never be stable so long as we're occupying it. As in Vietnam, we have no way to win this war, and for the same reason. I knew that the minute we sent the troops in. I knew we could beat Saddam's military, sure -- but that was the easy part. What we're trying now is the impossible part.

The longer we wait, the worse the aftermath will be.

I think you are seriously exaggerating the appeal of the Iraq war cause to the American voters. Anyone who would blame Obama or Clinton (or McCain for that matter), instead of Bush, for that outcome, would not vote for Obama or Clinton's reelection anyway. (McCain's another story, though -- but I don't think he has a prayer of winning this year.)

You could be right, stupidity being eternal. However, you could also be wrong. And I sincerely hope, and so should we all, that you are wrong.

Back to Obama:

I think he'll be the next President.

I don't think he'll be a good one, but I believe he'll be the next one...

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It wasn't Johnson that got us into Viet Nam, it was JFK. Johnson escalated the war. Actually, when Nixon started his daily bombing of Hanoi, the Viet Cong have admitted, that they were 1 or 2 days away from surrendering. The reason Nixon stopped bombing: American public pressure.

I think about every American agrees, that we should have never fought in Viet Nam, & I believe that we could have taken care of Sadam in another way, versus boots on the ground, & country re-building of Iraq.

I don't agree that the longer we stay, the worse consequences we will see, after departure. Just human nature--time heals about everything. Including, the tribal infighting between Sunni's & Shiete's. If they have to work together to form a government, then eventually they will have to form bonds with one another.

This is the whole problem. We do have experience, & that experience came from Viet Nam. I don't believe Obama or Hillary for that matter will risk the consequences of a failed Iraq, that in turn, could easily turn into a regional war. And yes, with our media today, & instant replay & camera's everywhere, I don't believe the world would forgive the United States for a bloody massacre of innocent Iraqi civilians, upon departure. Regardless if one wants to blame just one man, President Bush, the entire congress of the United States voted for this invasion. And the majority of Americans were right behind, believing that there were weapons of mass destruction to gather up.

When I say "got us into Vietnam," I mean got us into the war, as an American war. The trail of our involvement in one form or another goes all the way back to Truman, or maybe even FDR, but as late as the Kennedy administration we only had a small force of military advisers and special forces there. It was LBJ who sent in the infantry and turned it into an American war.

What do you mean by "surrendering"? We weren't even asking North Vietnam to "surrender" in the sense that Germany or Japan did in WWII, we were asking certain concessions and a peace treaty. And that is what we got in the end. Also, I don't believe Nixon ever did stop bombing North Vietnam until that happened.

Hanoi's goal was to get U.S. troops out of the country. If that could be accomplished, defeating the South Vietnamese Army would be easily doable. Hanoi had no intention of honoring the peace terms once U.S. forces were gone, and of course everyone knew that. Short of occupying North Vietnam, which wasn't even on the table, the only way to prevent what happened was to go on occupying South Vietnam perpetually. It is true that Nixon brought the troops home because of American public pressure; that's essentially what I meant by saying that we lacked the will to win, and in my opinion were right to lack that will.

I think that's true. Saddam was already a spent force after the Gulf War.

The problem is that as long as we're there, the healing can't begin. The tribal infighting is only part of what's going on. We also have Al-Qaeda operating in Iraq now, which they never did much under Saddam, and their target is us, not the Iraqis, although they don't seem to mind taking out innocent bystanders. Bunch of nutjob jerks. Any government supported by the U.S. is going to be seen as an American puppet (probably with truth) and isn't going to hold a lot of popular support. Which is not to say Iraq could have a government without us that would hold popular support, their problems aren't all of our making by a long shot.

I don't know if there is any solution, honestly, other than to divide the country. It's a unified country now only because British power there had those boundaries and after the British left it was held together by a ruthless tyranny.

But anyway, w/r/t U.S. elections, the important question is how the debacle will be perceived. Let's say Obama wins this year. If he does, it will be on a promise to pull us out of Iraq. That's not unlike Nixon's promise to end the Vietnam War in 1968. Nixon waited until he'd been reelected and took a lot of flak for that, but his natural constituency was on the other side of the issue, whereas Obama's isn't. The people who loathed Nixon for prolonging the war loathed Nixon anyway, but Obama would be alienating his own base. I just don't think he'll be able to play it safe by waiting until he's in his second term. I think that would just about guarantee he wouldn't have a second term.

If he keeps his promise and pulls us out, yes, the aftermath is likely to be nasty, but the people who'll blame him for that are the ones who don't want us to pull out and those people are unlikely to vote for him this year anyway.

Couldn't understand what you actually mean, Steve, by that "next" phrase. Not in Nov. 2008?

And why does this "Thoughts on Obama" thread draws so much attention? Would it be the same if I opened a thread named, "Thoughts on HCR"?

Is it because he is different? Because, he is black? Not bringing anyone under suspicion, is this great attention of ours a sign of racism?

There are other threads that draw just as much attention if not more. It has nothing to do with the fact the Obama is black, and everything to do with the fact that he has no experience. That his actions before and while a senator have shown nothing but more partisan liberal leftwing ideology. He is attempting to portray himself as a moderate, someone who can bridge the differences between democrats and republicans, liberals and conservatives. But his voting history in the senate shows him to be one of most liberal senators and one who voted with his party 96% of the time. Not the record of someone trying to find middle ground and bring people together.

But some people fall for his smooth talking ability, just like they did for old slick Willy. But if you have a rational probing mind, then your not going to listen to someone's rhetoric without examining their history.