What the Obots think of anybody who disagrees with them

jgarry · Post by **jgarry** » Tue Apr 21, 2009 3:13 pm

What about our friend Grover Norquist and his cohort? How many of us think it be a good idea to bankrupt the federal government, to drown it like a little baby in a bathtub of red ink? How many of us think it will be a great idea to live in poverty? How many of us think a return to the great depression is sound, sane thinking.
Democrats are hardly perfect, but the GOP needs a serious retooling.

MSimon · Post by **MSimon** » Tue Apr 21, 2009 7:25 pm

jgarry wrote:What about our friend Grover Norquist and his cohort? How many of us think it be a good idea to bankrupt the federal government, to drown it like a little baby in a bathtub of red ink? How many of us think it will be a great idea to live in poverty? How many of us think a return to the great depression is sound, sane thinking.
Democrats are hardly perfect, but the GOP needs a serious retooling.

The Republicans (in general) rave on about culture war issues while many of them plus the Democrats are stealing us blind. Which is how we get a R Cong. Critter with a 98% conservative rating who voted for the bail out.

Norquist is right on the issue and wrong on the solution.

MSimon · Post by **MSimon** » Tue Apr 21, 2009 7:31 pm

"Lower taxes" is a religious mantra on the right that no longer pulls in anyone beyond the Ron Paul loons.

And the 50% of the nation that thinks the Tea Parties are a good idea.

http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_ ... _disagrees

There seem to be a lot of Ron Paul loons in the nation these days.

MSimon · Post by **MSimon** » Tue Apr 21, 2009 7:40 pm

The war was fought brilliantly, the victory was governed idiotically. I remember yelling at my radio when I heard Paul Bremer float the idea of disbanding the Iraqi army and kicking all the Bath party members out of government.

Post war insurgencies are a fact of life. Germany in 1919. Russia in 1917. The insurgencies post WW2.

Some times you just have to deal with the aftermath. Wars bring out armed political opportunists. Spain is still suffering from the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars. By the Spanish metric Iraq hasn't done too badly.

As to Bremer liquefying the Iraqi Army - it was already liquefied by the US Army. And it needed to be rebuilt along other than Hitlerian (Baath) lines. It cost us. It was the right thing to do.

ravingdave · Post by **ravingdave** » Tue Apr 21, 2009 8:02 pm

jgarry wrote:What about our friend Grover Norquist and his cohort? How many of us think it be a good idea to bankrupt the federal government, to drown it like a little baby in a bathtub of red ink? How many of us think it will be a great idea to live in poverty? How many of us think a return to the great depression is sound, sane thinking.
Democrats are hardly perfect, but the GOP needs a serious retooling.

If a baby sticks it's hand into a lit fire, the fire hurts. The baby feels pain and pulls it's hand out of the fire. More importantly, the baby REMEMBERS not to stick it's hand in the fire the next time.

A country is not a baby. But it behaves very much like one. As time passes, people who have learned hard lessons die, and people who have never learned hard lessons are born and grow to adulthood. It's like a baby that learns for awhile, then forgets only to get burned, and to learn again.

Economics is not fantasy. It obeys rules that are as very nearly inviolable as the rules of gravity. When you flaunt those rules, the facts of life punish you. The critics of John Maynard Keynes and FDR were absolutely correct. They said those ideas would result in a catastrophe in the long run, and it is coming to pass.

I think it will be a horribly sucky idea to live in poverty or go through a great depression, but I have this horrible feeling in my gut that it is unavoidable. I likewise think that nothing else will steer people back to rational economic thinking.

A national depression today would be far worse than the 1930s. Back then people were far hardier and self sufficient than they are nowadays. If we have something like a great depression in today's narcissistic Godless and self serving society, it will very likely become a blood bath. I see the government Nationalizing everything, (the way FDR attempted in the 1930s) and those who oppose will be re-educated or killed.

What to do to prevent it ? Repent from our economic Apostasy. (not gonna happen)

I predicted years ago that the government will attempt to inflate us out of debt in the simple minded and delusional notion that such a thing is possible, and I have now lived long enough to see the beginnings of exactly that.

David

ravingdave · Post by **ravingdave** » Tue Apr 21, 2009 8:25 pm

MSimon wrote:
The war was fought brilliantly, the victory was governed idiotically. I remember yelling at my radio when I heard Paul Bremer float the idea of disbanding the Iraqi army and kicking all the Bath party members out of government.
Post war insurgencies are a fact of life. Germany in 1919. Russia in 1917. The insurgencies post WW2.

Some times you just have to deal with the aftermath. Wars bring out armed political opportunists. Spain is still suffering from the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars. By the Spanish metric Iraq hasn't done too badly.

As to Bremer liquefying the Iraqi Army - it was already liquefied by the US Army. And it needed to be rebuilt along other than Hitlerian (Baath) lines. It cost us. It was the right thing to do.

In Germany we had overwhelming force. What was it about a million men just in OUR occupation army ? (not to mention the Russians, the British, and later the French. ) Even then, our de-Nazification program did not include de-Nazifying Germany. We grabbed and prosecuted the war crimes offenders, but we left everyone else pretty much in their current positions to carry on their jobs. We spread word that as long as people hadn't committed atrocities, they would be left alone. Over time, the German Government took over the responsibility of De-Nazifying. In this way, we minimized the effects of the German Insurgency.

While on the subject, I have personally discussed this with Several World War II army vets, (I do live next to an Army base, and half the town is Col. this and Cptn that. ) and this one Fellow that I see about every week tells me that His Artillery commander informed the mayor of a German City that they had captured that they would level the city to the ground if they continued to receive resistance from it. Nothing changed until they actually started bombarding the town with shells at which point the mayor showed up begging them to stop.

Needless to say, they didn't have any more trouble with insurgents in that town.

We don't have that kind of ruthlessness nowadays, and if we did they would be prosecuted by the U.S. Government.

Neither (Most of) the Iraqi Army or the Bathist in the Iraqi government were ideologues dedicated to resisting us UNTIL we became their enemy by firing them from their jobs and Making sure they knew their life would be economically miserable as long as WE were still around.

What turned out to work ? More force on the ground AND economic progress for the very people we screwed over the first time. (The sunnis/Bathists)

Picking an unnecessary fight with the people who had nothing to lose and knew where all the high explosives were stored was a dumb thing to do, and it was the result of listening to that now confirmed liar Ahmed Chalabi. (WMD etc.)

David

MSimon · Post by **MSimon** » Tue Apr 21, 2009 8:56 pm

In Germany we had overwhelming force. What was it about a million men just in OUR occupation army ?

So true. Except we didn't have a million men extra to spare. We barely managed 180,000 for a year during the surge. However, we were doing the right thing almost from the beginning. Training the New Iraqi Army. Which turned the tide in early 2008 by deciding (against American wishes) to go against Sadr's boys. It is one thing to get whupped by the Americans. It is quite another to get whupped by the locals. At that point insurgent morale (already on the ropes) collapsed.

And so we occupied Germany. What about France? Or China? Or Vietnam? Or Egypt? Or.....

I like the British attitude best - muddle through. And there is no way to be sure a different policy wouldn't have brought different and worse problems. We are dealing with humans here not austenitic steel. And worse - we are dealing with humans in opposition. They can be very creative.

MSimon · Post by **MSimon** » Tue Apr 21, 2009 9:02 pm

BTW suppose the Iraqi Amy - no respecter of human rights - stayed functional. Would that have been a long term good thing?

Corporate cultures are very hard to change. Sometimes going out of business is the only way. Rebuilding the Iraqi Amy from scratch was IMO a good thing. Expensive, but good.

MSimon · Post by **MSimon** » Tue Apr 21, 2009 9:07 pm

Suppose we kept the Iraqi Army intact and it reverted (as a core principle) to its old ways. You might wind up with a compliant Army and a restive well armed civilian population (we endured a war for this?).

Jccarlton · Post by **Jccarlton** » Fri Apr 24, 2009 12:19 am

jgarry wrote:What about our friend Grover Norquist and his cohort? How many of us think it be a good idea to bankrupt the federal government, to drown it like a little baby in a bathtub of red ink? How many of us think it will be a great idea to live in poverty? How many of us think a return to the great depression is sound, sane thinking.
Democrats are hardly perfect, but the GOP needs a serious retooling.

Yet it the Democrats with the long history of spend spend spend. massive monuments like the Apollo program. Massive entitlement programs that have bled generation after generation. Massive welfare programs that on bred dependence and increased poverty. Program after program the spent enormous sums of money, stealing money forever from the next generation. The problem is that they can't change there profligate ways. Like the French Bourbons they have forgotten nothing and learned nothing. Pelosi and Reid were bad enough. Whats coming is much worse. Obama looks to put all past attempts to progessivise america to shame. This chart tells the whole story:
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_4ify7vDXrDs/S ... madebt.jpg

Endless debt as far as the eye can see. Returning to the great depression is exactly where Obama is taking us, at a speed I would not have believed. Now who is dumping the baby in a bath of red ink?

TallDave · Post by **TallDave** » Fri Apr 24, 2009 3:08 pm

I remember yelling at my radio when I heard Paul Bremer float the idea of disbanding the Iraqi army and kicking all the Bath party members out of government.

This is one of the more persistent falsehoods out there.

First off, the Iraqi Army self-disbanded during the invasion; all the Shia conscripts just went home. Secondly, the Iraqi Army was a top-heavy sectarian institution built around loyalty to Saddam and not letting anyone else accumulate too much power; it had thousands of Sunni generals and discipline was not enforced by an NCO corps but by the ISI (try to imagine for a minute if the U.S. Army had no sergeants but instead discipline was maintained by a branch of the CIA). It was simply not a viable institution outside of a police state.

Secondly, the Baathists were and are extremely unpopular with the 80% of Iraqis who aren't Sunnis; leaving them in power would have been like leaving the Nazis in charge of France -- instant civil war. Quite a few Shia and Kurds are still of the opinion all the Baathists should be executed without trial.

The major mistake in the occupation was something much more basic: we didn't work with the tribal sheiks who were the real power brokers, and we gave too much credence to the idea that Iraqis should solve their own problems without our help. These errors allowed AQ to get established with Sunnis and JAM to become established in the Shia areas.

This all seems obvious in retrospect but at the time the U.S. was a great pains to not be seen as too heavy-handed, so our troops were basically hiding in giant bases with minimal contact in the population -- pretty much exactly the opposite of good COIN.

However, our commitment to democracy and basic rights eventually overcame those problems, once Petraeus acknowledged the mistake and made protecting Iraqis our top priority rather than "force protection." AQ and JAM were basically thugs and that quickly became obvious to all Iraqis. So he Sunni sheiks jumped at the chance to turn on AQ, and when Maliki sent the new Iraqi Army into Basra they were greeted with cheers. Iraqis have risked their lives to vote and overwhelmingly believe democracy is the best way forward for Iraq.

ravingdave · Post by **ravingdave** » Fri Apr 24, 2009 4:39 pm

TallDave wrote:
I remember yelling at my radio when I heard Paul Bremer float the idea of disbanding the Iraqi army and kicking all the Bath party members out of government.
This is one of the more persistent falsehoods out there.

First off, the Iraqi Army self-disbanded during the invasion; all the Shia conscripts just went home. Secondly, the Iraqi Army was a top-heavy sectarian institution built around loyalty to Saddam and not letting anyone else accumulate too much power; it had thousands of Sunni generals and discipline was not enforced by an NCO corps but by the ISI (try to imagine for a minute if the U.S. Army had no sergeants but instead discipline was maintained by a branch of the CIA). It was simply not a viable institution outside of a police state.

Secondly, the Baathists were and are extremely unpopular with the 80% of Iraqis who aren't Sunnis; leaving them in power would have been like leaving the Nazis in charge of France -- instant civil war. Quite a few Shia and Kurds are still of the opinion all the Baathists should be executed without trial.

The major mistake in the occupation was something much more basic: we didn't work with the tribal sheiks who were the real power brokers, and we gave too much credence to the idea that Iraqis should solve their own problems without our help. These errors allowed AQ to get established with Sunnis and JAM to become established in the Shia areas.

This all seems obvious in retrospect but at the time the U.S. was a great pains to not be seen as too heavy-handed, so our troops were basically hiding in giant bases with minimal contact in the population -- pretty much exactly the opposite of good COIN.

However, our commitment to democracy and basic rights eventually overcame those problems, once Petraeus acknowledged the mistake and made protecting Iraqis our top priority rather than "force protection." AQ and JAM were basically thugs and that quickly became obvious to all Iraqis. So he Sunni sheiks jumped at the chance to turn on AQ, and when Maliki sent the new Iraqi Army into Basra they were greeted with cheers. Iraqis have risked their lives to vote and overwhelmingly believe democracy is the best way forward for Iraq.

A difference of opinion is not a falsehood. The reason I was yelling at my radio is because I realized immediately that it was going to result in exactly what happened. All of my friends had to listen incessantly to my predictions of guerrilla warfare from the disenfranchised sunni's and bathists, and I knew that many Americans and Iraqis would die unnecessarily as a result of this decision.

Let me be blunt ugly. The shites are much stupider than the sunnis. This is why the 35% of sunnis could govern the 65% shias.

Yes the Iraqi army was a mess, but it represented employment for everyone in it, and if they would have received reassurances that they and their families would continue to be able to subsist on their military pay, then their immediate desire to kill us all would have been assuaged.

The Iraqi army could have been rebuilt by attrition of the worst offenders and the addition of competent and (more) loyal (to the new regime) officers and men.

The same could have been done with Sunni/Baathists in the government.

You may argue that this would have took too long with the insurgency raging about Iraq, but it is my contention that the action of throwing these people out on their ear is exactly what precipitated the insurgency. If we hadn't did what we did, there would have been no, or at least a dramatically reduced insurgency, composed primarily of Sadam Husseins "Dead enders" who were so deep in the old Administration that they could never be absolved of it's crimes.

Yeah, the whole Iraqi Army AND the Iraqi government were complicit in Sadam's crimes, but many acted our of fear for their own lives. From their perspective, being fired for doing what they HAD to do was just unfair, and of course it filled them with a terrible resolve for revenge.

If we had cut off the 5% worst offenders from the other 95% of bit players, we would have had the support of the 95% instead of their hatred and will to kill us.

Ergo, the Insurgency would have been weak and short lived.

Now you may not agree with my assessment, but I would not say that your opinion is a "falsehood." Hell, you might even be right, and I might even be wrong, but in any case, it is not satisfactorily determined beyond a reasonable doubt one way or the other.

I'm just saying, the way we did it with the Nazi's in GERMANY, (not France. That's a false analogy.) is the way we should have done it with the Baathists in Iraq. Give them a stake in the future of the New Government, and they will be far more willing to support it, or at least not fight against it.

David

JohnSmith · Post by **JohnSmith** » Fri Apr 24, 2009 7:06 pm

Love the title of this thread, and the content. Because, you know, as of yet I have seen a hundred threads Obama bashing, and very few in support. I've never seen an 'obot' attacking anybody over anything. Maybe I just hang around the wrong parts of the internet?
As of yet, I haven't seen him do anything different than any other politician. Where's your guys hatred of him stem from? Because you lay it on pretty thick around here.

MSimon · Post by **MSimon** » Fri Apr 24, 2009 7:15 pm

ravingdave,

Is it a possibility that no matter what we did we would have had a civil war on our hands for reasons Tall Dave (most recently) and I have mentioned?

You know Civil Wars of various strengths are not unusual in situations like post war Iraq. What Bremer did was only one way into that situation.

And it worked out to the good. Iraqis got a taste of their new masters and decided that how ever much they hated Americans they could work with them. Another thing that it got was an Army the Iraqis could respect. In the end Iraq will be more stable for the experience.

It may have been a good thing to get the civil war out of the way first. Even if that was not the plan. It may have saved 30 years of unrest. It may have also welded together the Iraqi Nation. We will never know.

The important thing is that the situation was retrieved before Bush left office. And not with helicopters leaving from the top of the American embassy.

MSimon · Post by **MSimon** » Fri Apr 24, 2009 7:32 pm

JohnSmith wrote:Love the title of this thread, and the content. Because, you know, as of yet I have seen a hundred threads Obama bashing, and very few in support. I've never seen an 'obot' attacking anybody over anything. Maybe I just hang around the wrong parts of the internet?
As of yet, I haven't seen him do anything different than any other politician. Where's your guys hatred of him stem from? Because you lay it on pretty thick around here.

He is wrecking the US economy. Ala Jimmy Carter and FDR.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/141659 ... 1416592229

BTW I didn't care much for his Admins idea of keeping an eye on vets as possible subversives. Of course if you are not a vet you might not take it personally.

Inflation will be hitting big time around 2010 or 2011.

Energy inflation for sure:

The entire premise behind a cap and tax energy proposal is to punish those who produce, thereby punishing those who consume, which by my quick math amounts to everyone in the United States. Unfortunately, the sadistic nature of radical environmentalism is the disproportionate impact on the poor. While there are some families in this country who can afford to be burdened by a $3,128 energy tax—the vast majority cannot.

Worse, ACES’s provisions to create a new green economy will steal jobs from many low to middle class Americans. In fact, a recent study of Spain’s renewable job program found that the U.S. can expect 2.2 jobs to be destroyed for every 1 “green” job manufactured and subsidized by the government. Ironically, the Institute of Energy Research notes that “according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), Spain’s annual emissions of carbon dioxide have increased by nearly 50 percent since the nation began its aggressive push to subsidize and support ‘green jobs.’”

http://www.examiner.com/x-268-Right-Sid ... il-23-2009

Other than that he seems like a nice guy. For a Chicago politician.