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The meeting of the armchair quarterbacks...  


6/30/2009 12:58 pm
 Looks like the Prez is confounding the right once again. Their response to the Iranian demonstrators was all over the place. Their off balance and throwing out all kinds of foolish critiques as to what posture he should be taking. However the grownups that are still left in the party and actually know something about foreign policy say that he's taken the right tact. But once again the children, poor little things, are boo-hooing. People like Dick Lugar and Henry Kissinger are actually applauding the President and say that his posture is the right one to take. Not to mention the real journalistic minds on the right as well. I'm talking about George Will and Peggy Noonan who warn that the nay sayers are wrong, "silly" and shouldn't be criticizing what he's doing because he's taking the "right course."

I mean really now, what do they want him to do? Bomb, bomb, bomb... bomb, bomb Iran?!? Last week the Prez spoke out in favor of the demonstrators. He also said "the last thing that I want to do is have the US be a foil for those forces inside Iran who would love nothing better than to make this an argument about the US. What we can do is bear witness and say to the world that the incredible demonstrations that we've seen is a testimony to what Dr. King called 'the ark of the moral universe.' It's long but it bends toward justice." Not only that but if his detractors could see past their venom they would know that Iran has already tried to use his statements to insist that the US is fermenting problems within their county. And that's the last thing that the Iranian demonstrators need.

However the wing-nuts on the right feel that nothing that this President does is correct. Congressman Dana Warbacker of California said "I think that if Mr. Obama continues to have this type of attitude we're going to see things get very bad very quickly. Already the North Koreans have challenged him and they realize that he's a cream puff." LOL! John McCain said "on this issue I don't believe that the President is taking the leadership that is incumbent of an American President." Whew! Well what would you have him do Mr. Bomb, Bomb Iran? I mean what should we do? Shall we just bomb the bastards and get it over with? Double Whew!!

Mike Pence of Indiana said "when Ronald Reagan went before the Brandenburg gate he did not say Mr. Gorbachev that wall is not any of our business." Ahh, here we go again the Ronald Reagan orgy continues. Would someone please hip these people to the fact that Reagan is dead and will not be resurrected. Look, it's clear that the Prez has sided with the demonstrators, we've already seen that. But it doesn't really matter cause they've got nothing and children will be children. Lindsey Graham said "their basically asking us to speak up on their behalf. I appreciate what the President said yesterday but he's been timid and passive." "timid and passive" huh - how asinine! Apparently Graham hasn't been monitoring what's been coming out of Iran. The twittering and blogging, etc. I would suggest that he change the channel from FOX Noise for a change. Yeah they've been a few students that have called out for the Prez. But the real organizers of the protest know that our intervention would mean death to their movement.

McCain sounded off again and said "I don't consider it medaling when you stand on the side of the principles that made our nation the greatest nation in history." Guess what John boy... IRAN ISN'T OUR NATION!!! Hello, standing up for American principles in Iran doesn't do any good! More McCain: "I'd like to see the President be stronger than he has been, although I appreciate the comments that he made yesterday. Ahh, I think that he ought to have America lead." Iowa Senator Chuck Grassly said "I believe that we could be more forceful than we have. If America stands for democracy and all of these ahh, demonstrations are going on in Tehran and other cities over there and people don't think that we really care, then obviously people are going to question whether we really care about our principles." Okay Grassly, you've convinced me! LETS DECLARE WAR AND BOMB THE BASTARDS!!!

Former Reagan Sec. of education and now talk radio host Bill Bennett said on CNN "this is very disappointing as far as I'm concerned. This is the President to whom the whole world was looking. Remember when Obama speaks the young people of the world listen. This is a President that's supposed to be about hope and the future. This is a guy that was a community organizer. He missed it, he missed the opportunity. He was feckless, he was pusillanimous." What the!?! P-U-S-I-L-L-A-N-I-M-O-U-S. Damn Bill, you sent me to the dictionary on that one. Gee, thanks for adding to my vocabulary btw, I owe you one...

Ahh, little Barakie Obama, just an itty bitty community organizer. Yeah, just diminish him and make fun of community organizing like the two losers Rotten Rudy and the Sarahcuda did at the GOP dog & pony show last August. Yeah, and good luck with that too. Community organized himself right into the White House. LOL! You know what I say peeps - let em keep it coming, cause the American people are not as stupid a people as these people think we are, we're keeping score and it's obvious to all who the real grownups are.
Come check out Ginger's Blog. A little brain food!!
Fire BreathingLIBERAL!!
honestjohn4u
3174 posts 

6/30/2009 2:38 pm

 The best things he can do to undermine the Iranian regime would be undermined by public disclosure. I quit listening to head Senate whiner Kelsey Graham years ago but I will defend him now. Kelsey had his parent die at a young age so he has an excuse for not knowing how to behave like an adult.
I Swami Johnny see's all, knows all, tells very little.


classyginger replies on 6/30/2009 6:53 pm:
And what a whiner he is...
bluenfree
2474 posts

6/30/2009 8:32 pm

 There's a reason they lost ...
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed man. - Winston Churchill


classyginger replies on 7/1/2009 11:42 am:
And rightfully so!
Baltasar45
7905 posts 

6/30/2009 10:34 pm

 Joe Klein of Time magazine, June 23, 2009 at 10:29 am:

I've been receiving a steady stream of favorable emails from Iranian-Americans regarding my appearance on Larry King last night. They're delighted that I made it clear that Iran is different from the other countries in the region--better educated, more sophisticated, with far greater rights for women (although not nearly enough). And they also appreciated the fact that when King asked me what John McCain should do right now, I said, "Be quiet."

The Washington Post has a piece today about the efforts of some Republicans to make hay out of the situation in Iran. McCain, who spent the entire 2008 election making misleading statements about the nature of the Iranian government (I wonder if he still thinks Ahmadinejad is more powerful than the Supreme Leader), has been at the forefront of this. It is very unseemly. I have yet to hear what possible good it would do for the President of the United States to encourage the protesters, except to give the Iranian regime a better excuse for killing more of them. McCain's bleatings are either for domestic political consumption or self-satisfaction, a form of hip-shooting onanism that demonstrates why he would have been a foreign policy disaster had he been elected.

To put it as simply as possible, McCain--and his cohorts--are trying to score political points against the President in the midst of an international crisis. It is the sort of behavior that Republicans routinely call "unpatriotic" when Democrats are doing it. I would never question John McCain's patriotism, no matter how misguided his sense of the country's best interests sometimes seems. His behavior has nothing to do with love of country; it has everything to do with love of self.

Again, the crucial fact about the protesters is this: they may hate the Khamenei-Ahmadinejad regime--who wouldn't?--but that doesn't make them particular fans of the United States. I have yet to meet an Iranian who does not believe that the United States gave poison gas to Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war, gas which injured thousands upon thousands of Iranian men, who still live, incapacitated, in the shadows of that society. (Indeed, the attention Ahmadinejad has paid to the Iran-Iraq war veterans and their families is a major source of his extensive support among the Iranian working class.)

The protesters admire our freedom, but they are appalled--and insulted--by our neocolonialist condescension over the past 50 years. The reformers, and even some conservatives, consider Ahmadinejad the George W. Bush of Iran--a crude, unsophisticated demagogue, who puts a strong Potemkin face to the world without very much knowledge of what the rest of the world is about. This was an anology that came up in interview after interview, with reformers and conservatives alike.

Certainly, Bush the Younger, McCain and the rest of that crowd have absolutely no idea who the Iranian people are. The are not Hungarians in 1956. They do not believe they live in an Evil Empire. They still support their revolution. They shout "Allahu Akbar" in the streets, which was the rallying cry of 1979. They are proud of their nuclear program, even if many have doubts about the efficacy of weaponizing the enriched uraniam that is being produced. They want greater freedom, to be sure. And they believe that the Khamenei-Ahmadinejad forces--and the militarized regime they have empowered, the millions of basiji and revolutionary guards--is a profound perversion of that revolution. They are right. They deserve our prayers and support. But they don't need grandstanding from an American President, and they certainly don't need histrionics from blustery old John McCain.
Norwegian and sometimes blue, but I am not a dead parrot.


classyginger replies on 7/1/2009 11:43 am:
Great input Baltasar. And thanks for that article that you sent me too.
rx_for_sex
236 posts

7/9/2009 4:46 pm

 Dvldog and havingfun - perhaps most of concern in both your responses and their critique of Obama's supposedly weak response, is the implicit sense that the President of the USA, and by extension the US as a nation, has an inherent right or duty to intervene in other nations affairs . Even if, as has been repeatedly pointed out here and elsewhere, the likely response to such intervention, even if only in the form of a stern warning or words of support, would be to undermine the protester's support within Iran, increased lashing out by the Iranian authorities against the democracy protesters, and uniting both the progressives and authoritarians in Iran against the "foreign meddlers" - just as has happened in Iraq.

This is not without good reason - Iranians still remember that the US, along with Britain in 1953, plotted to depose their elected and popular Prime Minister, Dr. Mohammed Mossadegh, in favour of the oil-business friendly, but despotic and oppressive Shah. Leading to 25 years of tyranny, and to the rise of the "Islamic Revolution" that has subsequently kept up authoritarian tendencies, combined with ongoing antipathy to the US. Thus, the past meddling of the US in Iranian has denied the US in the present any moral authority, or welcome, within Iran. Recognizing this, Obama has been wise to be circumspect in his remarks.

The United States is a great democracy, but in the past, it has extensively supported despots and tyrants when it suited US economic and geopolitical interests - and that fact has much to do with why the States and Americans are unwelcome, if not despised in parts of the world, like Iraq and Iran. Sometimes its pure irrationality, but in the case of Iran, there are real reasons why they don't like America, even if they are old reasons.

A worst case scenario, would be for US rhetoric and/or intervention to help push Iraq and Iran into each other arms and help create an Islamic super-state, united in part by antipathy to the US.

up4anything7021
1 post

7/16/2009 1:21 am

 The people of Iran deserve the right to fight for their own freedom. Why would we want to take that away from them? Something like freedom is much more meaningful when it is desperately wanted and then hard earned as opposed to when it is handed to them.

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