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| Biden's Fantasy World | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: Oct 5 2008, 09:35 PM (187 Views) | |
| George K | Oct 5 2008, 09:35 PM Post #1 |
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Finally
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Biden's Fantasy World Sarah Palin may not know as much about the world, but at least most of what she knows is true. In the popular media wisdom, Sarah Palin is the neophyte who knows nothing about foreign policy while Joe Biden is the savvy diplomatic pro. Then what are we to make of Mr. Biden's fantastic debate voyage last week when he made factual claims that would have got Mrs. Palin mocked from New York to Los Angeles? [Biden's Fantasy World] AP Start with Lebanon, where Mr. Biden asserted that "When we kicked -- along with France, we kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon, I said and Barack said, 'Move NATO forces in there. Fill the vacuum, because if you don't know -- if you don't, Hezbollah will control it.' Now what's happened? Hezbollah is a legitimate part of the government in the country immediately to the north of Israel." The U.S. never kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon, and no one else has either. Perhaps Mr. Biden meant to say Syria, except that the U.S. also didn't do that. The Lebanese ousted Syria's military in 2005. As for NATO, Messrs. Biden and Obama may have proposed sending alliance troops in, but if they did that was also a fantasy. The U.S. has had all it can handle trying to convince NATO countries to deploy to Afghanistan. Speaking of which, Mr. Biden also averred that "Our commanding general in Afghanistan said the surge principle in Iraq will not work in Afghanistan." In trying to correct him, Mrs. Palin mispronounced the general's name -- saying "General McClellan" instead of General David McKiernan. But Mr. Biden's claim was the bigger error, because General McKiernan said that while "Afghanistan is not Iraq," he also said a "sustained commitment" to counterinsurgency would be required. That is consistent with Mr. McCain's point that the "surge principles" of Iraq could work in Afghanistan. Then there's the Senator's astonishing claim that Mr. Obama "did not say he'd sit down with Ahmadinejad" without preconditions. Yet Mr. Biden himself criticized Mr. Obama on this point in 2007 at the National Press Club: "Would I make a blanket commitment to meet unconditionally with the leaders of each of those countries within the first year I was elected President? Absolutely, positively no." Or how about his rewriting of Bosnia history to assert that John McCain didn't support President Clinton in the 1990s. "My recommendations on Bosnia, I admit I was the first one to recommend it. They saved tens of thousands of lives. And initially John McCain opposed it along with a lot of other people. But the end result was it worked." Mr. Biden's immodesty aside, Mr. McCain supported Mr. Clinton on Bosnia, as did Bob Dole even as he was running against him for President in 1996 -- in contrast to the way Mr. Biden and Democratic leaders have tried to undermine President Bush on Iraq. Closer to home, the Delaware blarney stone also invited Americans to join him at "Katie's restaurant" in Wilmington to witness middle-class struggles. Just one problem: Katie's closed in the 1980s. The mistake is more than a memory lapse because it exposes how phony is Mr. Biden's attempt to pose for this campaign as Lunchbucket Joe. We think the word "lie" is overused in politics today, having become a favorite of the blogosphere and at the New York Times. So we won't say Mr. Biden was deliberately making events up when he made these and other false statements. Perhaps he merely misspoke. In any case, Mrs. Palin may not know as much about the world as Mr. Biden does, but at least most of what she knows is true. |
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A guide to GKSR: Click "Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... " - Mik, 6/14/08 Nothing is as effective as homeopathy. I'd rather listen to an hour of Abba than an hour of The Beatles. - Klaus, 4/29/18 | |
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| Ben | Oct 5 2008, 09:48 PM Post #2 |
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Senior Carp
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That opening sentence is absolutely correct and I would QFT if I knew how to work BBcode stuffs, I've forgotten. The rest of the article is well-written, but I'm not sure anyone needed any more evidence that Biden is clueless and his campaign runs on misrepresentations of facts. Edit: But on the other hand, building a mountain of evidence and watching the Obama fans here try to ignore it is entertaining
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- Ben "Playing 'bop' is like playing Scrabble with all the vowels missing." - Duke Ellington bennieloohoo@gmail.com Or you can just PM me.
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| jon-nyc | Oct 6 2008, 02:05 AM Post #3 |
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Cheers
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I assumed he meant Syria when I was watching the debate. Its interesting to note that the journal doesn't credit the US with that, I don't seem to remember them running editorials at the time in disagreement with all the conservatives in and out of the administration who took credit for it. I must have been sick that day. Re the surge comment, that left me scratching my head at the time. He may have had some logic behind it, but he sure didn't share it with his audience. And I've posted often on the Obama 'sit down with our enemies' comments. Ben - you know what I found entertaining? Watching Palin urinate all over herself time after time in interviews, without any conservatives here defending or even commenting on her performance. The best they could do is try to scold us for having such a good laugh at the Governor's expense. |
| In my defense, I was left unsupervised. | |
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| Daniel | Oct 6 2008, 02:14 AM Post #4 |
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HOLY CARP!!!
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I assume that one of those 5 AP courses you're taking is English. Please read every word of the following short article in Rolling Stone about McCain: http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/233..._maverick/print If this doesn't put your comments about Obama supporters into perspective, nothing will at this time. You seem to live in an environment where people "just know" all these bad things about Obama and Biden, so much so that you don't seem to feel it necessary to back up the things you say. Please consider this an observation, rather than a personal criticism. I think you could think more deeply about the issues before making comments like the ones you've made in this thread about Obama supporters. Sometimes it's not good to generalize. |
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| Daniel | Oct 6 2008, 03:10 AM Post #5 |
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HOLY CARP!!!
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Palin’s Alternate Universe By BOB HERBERT, NYT Published: October 3, 2008 Sarah Palin is the perfect exclamation point to the Bush years. We’ve lived through nearly two terms of an administration that believed it could create its own reality: “Deficits don’t matter.” “Brownie, you’re doing a heckuva job.” “Those weapons of mass destruction must be somewhere.” Now comes Ms. Palin, a smiling, bubbly vice-presidential candidate who travels in an alternate language universe. For Ms. Palin, such things as context, syntax and the proximity of answers to questions have no meaning. In her closing remarks at the vice-presidential debate Thursday night, Ms. Palin referred earnestly, if loosely, to a quote from Ronald Reagan. He had warned that if Americans weren’t vigilant in protecting their freedom, they would find themselves spending their “sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was like in America when men were free.” What Ms. Palin didn’t say was that the menace to freedom that Reagan was talking about was Medicare. As the historian Robert Dallek has pointed out, Reagan “saw Medicare as the advance wave of socialism, which would ‘invade every area of freedom in this country.’ ” Does Ms. Palin agree with that Looney Tunes notion? Or was this just another case of the aw-shucks, darn-right, I’m-just-a-hockey-mom governor of Alaska mouthing something completely devoid of meaning? Here’s Ms. Palin during the debate: “Say it ain’t so, Joe! There you go pointing backwards again ... Now, doggone it, let’s look ahead and tell Americans what we have to plan to do for them in the future. You mentioned education, and I’m glad you did. I know education you are passionate about with your wife being a teacher for 30 years, and God bless her. Her reward is in heaven, right?” If Governor Palin didn’t like a question, or didn’t know the answer, she responded as though some other question had been asked. She made no bones about this, saying early in the debate: “I may not answer the questions the way that either the moderator or you want to hear.” The problem with Ms. Palin’s candidacy is that John McCain might actually win this election, and then if something terrible happened, the country could be left with little more than an exclamation point as president. After Ms. Palin had woven one of her particularly impenetrable linguistic webs, Joe Biden turned to the debate’s moderator, Gwen Ifill, and said: “Gwen, I don’t know where to start.” Of course he didn’t know where to start because Ms. Palin’s words don’t mean anything. She’s all punctuation. This is such a serious moment in American history that it’s hard to believe that someone with Ms. Palin’s limited skills could possibly be playing a leadership role. On the day before the debate, the commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, Gen. David McKiernan, made an urgent appeal for more troops, saying the additional “boots on the ground,” as well as more helicopters and other vital equipment, were “needed as quickly as possible.” The morning after the debate, the Labor Department announced that the employment situation in the U.S. had deteriorated even more than experts had expected. The nation lost nearly 160,000 jobs in September, more than double the monthly losses in July and August. Conditions are probably worse than even those numbers indicate because the government’s statistics do not yet reflect the response of employers to the credit crisis that has taken such a hold in the last few weeks. Where is the evidence that Governor Palin even understands these complex and enormously challenging problems? During the debate she twice referred to General McKiernan as “McClellan.” Neither Ms. Ifill nor Senator Biden corrected her. But after Senator Biden suggested that John McCain’s answer to the nation’s energy problems was to “drill, drill, drill,” Ms. Palin promptly pointed out, as if scoring a point, that “the chant is ‘Drill, baby, drill!’ ” How’s that for perspective? The credit markets are frozen. Our top general in Afghanistan is dialing 911. Americans are losing jobs by the scores of thousands. And Sarah Palin is making sure we know that the chant is “drill, baby, drill!” not “drill, drill, drill.” John McCain has spent most of his adult life speaking of his love for his country. Maybe he sees something in Sarah Palin that most Americans do not. Maybe he is aware of qualities that lead him to believe she’d be as steady as Franklin Roosevelt in guiding the U.S. through a prolonged economic downturn. Maybe she’d be as wise and prudent in a national emergency as John Kennedy was during the Cuban missile crisis. Maybe Senator McCain has reason to believe that it would not be the most colossal of errors to put Ms. Palin a heartbeat away from the presidency. He’s got just four weeks to share that insight with the rest of us. |
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| John D'Oh | Oct 6 2008, 03:14 AM Post #6 |
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MAMIL
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Most. :lol: :lol: :lol: |
| What do you mean "we", have you got a mouse in your pocket? | |
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| Klaus | Oct 6 2008, 03:23 AM Post #7 |
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HOLY CARP!!!
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A logician will immediately recognize the trivial solution to the competency problem: It is best to know nothing, because if you know nothing, then everything you know is true. |
| Trifonov Fleisher Klaus Sokolov Zimmerman | |
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| Radu | Oct 6 2008, 03:30 AM Post #8 |
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Senior Carp
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![]() ------------------------------------------------------------ "Whenever I hear of culture... I release the safety-catch of my Browning!" The modern media has made cretins out of so many people that they're not interested in reality any more, unless it's reality TV (Jean D'eaux) | |
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| jon-nyc | Oct 6 2008, 03:32 AM Post #9 |
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Cheers
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Perhaps as a corollary to that, Klaus... It occurred to me that Palin has an advantage when the pundits disect the debate and check for false or misleading statements. The vast majority of her sentences aren't well-formed enough to contain anything that could be called an assertion. That also gives her a degree of immunity. |
| In my defense, I was left unsupervised. | |
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| John D'Oh | Oct 6 2008, 04:16 AM Post #10 |
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MAMIL
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If the best your supporters can come up with is 'she doesn't know much, but most of what she does know is true' then you're pretty much screwed. Come on guys - you've got over 200 million people and this is the best you can come up with? Yes, yes, I know she's charming and attractive, but so is my 7 year old son. Sadly, he was born in Canada, so he's not eligible to help you out. The American born 4 year old has got more sense than to try. |
| What do you mean "we", have you got a mouse in your pocket? | |
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11:15 AM Jul 11