The missing thread on GOP and Tea(party) plans,probabilities and possibilities for 'Merica (and us)

al-Qa'bong wrote:

George Victor wrote:

"Obama: I'm a New Democrat"  Lord Palmerston, May 16 09

"Oh Bush! Obama! Oh my   Frustrated Mess Aug. 18/10

"Obamba! Oh Bush! Oh, my   Jingles, Dec. 6

"O My, another thread on Oblah-ma!  N. Beltov  Dec. 23?10

 

I haven't mentiioned yours here, al. No need, eh?    But you are still confusing "threads" and their content.  I cannot recall saying anything about Obamba.

 

 

 

It's in your opening post:

Quote:

A repository for all stories about the U.S. political right...as a healthy balance to the repetitive stories under thread titles with Oblah-ma, Obamba or any other variations on the name Obama, appearing here for well over a year.

"Obamba" isn't in any of the the thread titles, even the one you attribute to Jingles,  anyway.

Those threads I started all use "Obama."

 

I'm not trying to disrupt the thread, but to set the record straight.  If you're going to accuse others of being repetitive and falsify what actually happens here, expect someone to challenge you.

Look up the dates, al.      You are sucking wind here......oops...    careful George.

M. Spector wrote:

George Victor wrote:

Do you really believe what your are saying here?  That my call for criticism of Rush Limbaugh is support for his barf?

No, I don't believe that, and I didn't say that.

What I did say is that Obamapologists (I'll let you decide whether that includes you) are oblivious to criticism from the left, but highly responsive to criticism from the right. Indeed, they live in fear of what the right has to say, even going so far as to make excuses for not doing anything that would make the right unhappy; whereas they couldn't care less what the left is saying. 

Nope, not me.  Consult my threads for the past three years.  Any sign of "fear of what the right has to say", anywhere? Any sign of fear of what ANYONE has to say, Spector (except mods who threaten to cancel one's posting privileges) ?  Any idea of what you are on about, here?

George Victor wrote:

"Obama: I'm a New Democrat"  Lord Palmerston, May 16 09

"Oh Bush! Obama! Oh my   Frustrated Mess Aug. 18/10

"Obamba! Oh Bush! Oh, my   Jingles, Dec. 6

"O My, another thread on Oblah-ma!  N. Beltov  Dec. 23?10

 

I haven't mentiioned yours here, al. No need, eh?    But you are still confusing "threads" and their content.  I cannot recall saying anything about Obamba.

 

But are you sure you are not trying to trash this thread, al?    America from a sociological and historical perspective...a change being as good as a rest.  And with someone having promised to shut me down if I'm not polite to you, I'm really working at being kind.  Gentle. Understanding of your concern that the president's failures and weakness be given the full monty.

They're all there al.    Have fun with yourself.

"The Latest Obama Thread" needs your in-depth rhetoric, al.  Guess you haven't noticed, but you are really coming across as obsessive, here, your postings have nothing to do with the invitation to attack the American right wing...although with friends in high places, who needs to stick to convention, eh?

Look around you al.  It's pretty clear what's missing in commentary here. Sarah isn't sacrosanct, surely. Not since Tucson.

But with the Hamiltonian (federalist) and Jacksonian (states rights) historical issue already being aired, here, let's explore it a bit farther: Again, from a very up-to-date (if somewhat suspiciou) source:

Walter Russell Mead: Obama's Carter Syndrome

Source: Foreign Policy (1-4-10)

[Walter Russell Mead is Henry A. Kissinger senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World. He blogs at The-American-Interest.com.]

Neither a cold-blooded realist nor a bleeding-heart idealist, Barack Obama has a split personality when it comes to foreign policy. So do most U.S. presidents, of course, and the ideas that inspire this one have a long history at the core of the American political tradition. In the past, such ideas have served the country well. But the conflicting impulses influencing how this young leader thinks about the world threaten to tear his presidency apart -- and, in the worst scenario, turn him into a new Jimmy Carter.

Obama's long deliberation over the war in Afghanistan is a case study in presidential schizophrenia: After 94 days of internal discussion and debate, he ended up splitting the difference -- rushing in more troops as his generals wanted, while calling for their departure to begin in July 2011 as his liberal base demanded. It was a sober compromise that suggests a man struggling to reconcile his worldview with the weight of inherited problems. Like many of his predecessors, Obama is not only buffeted by strong political headwinds, but also pulled in opposing directions by two of the major schools of thought that have guided American foreign-policy debates since colonial times.

In general, U.S. presidents see the world through the eyes of four giants: Alexander Hamilton, Woodrow Wilson, Thomas Jefferson, and Andrew Jackson. Hamiltonians share the first Treasury secretary's belief that a strong national government and a strong military should pursue a realist global policy and that the government can and should promote economic development and the interests of American business at home and abroad. Wilsonians agree with Hamiltonians on the need for a global foreign policy, but see the promotion of democracy and human rights as the core elements of American grand strategy. Jeffersonians dissent from this globalist consensus; they want the United States to minimize its commitments and, as much as possible, dismantle the national-security state. Jacksonians are today's Fox News watchers. They are populists suspicious of Hamiltonian business links, Wilsonian do-gooding, and Jeffersonian weakness.

Moderate Republicans tend to be Hamiltonians. Move right toward the Sarah Palin range of the party and the Jacksonian influence grows. Centrist Democrats tend to be interventionist-minded Wilsonians, while on the left and the dovish side they are increasingly Jeffersonian, more interested in improving American democracy at home than exporting it abroad.

Some presidents build coalitions; others stay close to one favorite school. As the Cold War ended, George H.W. Bush's administration steered a largely Hamiltonian course, and many of those Hamiltonians later dissented from his son's war in Iraq. Bill Clinton's administration in the 1990s mixed Hamiltonian and Wilsonian tendencies. This dichotomy resulted in bitter administration infighting when those ideologies came into conflict -- over humanitarian interventions in the Balkans and Rwanda, for example, and again over the relative weight to be given to human rights and trade in U.S. relations with China.

More recently, George W. Bush's presidency was defined by an effort to bring Jacksonians and Wilsonians into a coalition; the political failure of Bush's ambitious approach created the context that made the Obama presidency possible.

Sept. 11, 2001, was one of those rare and electrifying moments that waken Jacksonian America and focus its attention on the international arena. The U.S. homeland was not only under attack, it was under attack by an international conspiracy of terrorists who engaged in what Jacksonians consider dishonorable warfare: targeting civilians. Jacksonian attitudes toward war were shaped by generations of conflict with Native American peoples across the United States and before that by centuries of border conflict in England, Scotland, and Ireland. Against "honorable" enemies who observe the laws of war, one is obliged to fight fair; those who disregard the rules must be hunted down and killed, regardless of technical niceties.

When the United States is attacked, Jacksonians demand action; they leave strategy to the national leadership. But Bush's tough-minded Jacksonian response to 9/11 -- invading Afghanistan and toppling the Taliban government that gave safe haven to the plotters -- gave way to what appeared to be Wilsonian meddling in Iraq. Originally, Bush's argument for overthrowing Saddam Hussein rested on two charges that resonated powerfully with Jacksonians: Hussein was building weapons of mass destruction, and he had close links with al Qaeda. But the war dragged on, and as Hussein's fabled hoards of WMD failed to appear and the links between Iraq and al Qaeda failed to emerge, Bush shifted to a Wilsonian rationale. This was no longer a war of defense against a pending threat or a war of retaliation; it was a war to establish democracy, first in Iraq and then throughout the region. Nation-building and democracy-spreading became the cornerstones of the administration's Middle East policy.

Bush could not have developed a strategy better calculated to dissolve his political support at home. Jacksonians historically have little sympathy for expensive and risky democracy-promoting ventures abroad. They generally opposed the humanitarian interventions in Somalia, Bosnia, and Haiti during the Clinton years; they did not and do not think American young people should die and American treasure should be scattered to spread democracy or protect human rights overseas. Paradoxically, Jacksonians also opposed "cut and run" options to end the war in Iraq even as they lost faith in both Bush and the Republican Party; they don't like wars for democracy, but they also don't want to see the United States lose once troops and the national honor have been committed. In Bush's last year in office, a standoff ensued: The Democratic congressional majorities were powerless to force change in his Iraq strategy and Bush remained free to increase U.S. troop levels, yet the war itself and Bush's rationale for it remained deeply unpopular.

Enter Obama. An early and consistent opponent of the Iraq war, Obama was able to bring together the elements of the Democratic Party's foreign-policy base who were most profoundly opposed to (and horrified by) Bush's policy. Obama made opposition to the Iraq war a centerpiece of his eloquent campaign, drawing on arguments that echoed U.S. anti-war movements all the way back to Henry David Thoreau's opposition to the Mexican-American War.
Like Carter in the 1970s, Obama comes from the old-fashioned Jeffersonian wing of the Democratic Party, and the strategic goal of his foreign policy is to reduce America's costs and risks overseas by limiting U.S. commitments wherever possible. He's a believer in the notion that the United States can best spread democracy and support peace by becoming an example of democracy at home and moderation abroad. More than this, Jeffersonians such as Obama think oversize commitments abroad undermine American democracy at home. Large military budgets divert resources from pressing domestic needs; close association with corrupt and tyrannical foreign regimes involves the United States in dirty and cynical alliances; the swelling national-security state threatens civil liberties and leads to powerful pro-war, pro-engagement lobbies among corporations nourished on grossly swollen federal defense budgets.

While Bush argued that the only possible response to the 9/11 attacks was to deepen America's military and political commitments in the Middle East, Obama initially sought to enhance America's security by reducing those commitments and toning down aspects of U.S. Middle East policy, such as support for Israel, that foment hostility and suspicion in the region. He seeks to pull U.S. power back from the borderlands of Russia, reducing the risk of conflict with Moscow. In Latin America, he has so far behaved with scrupulous caution and, clearly, is hoping to normalize relations with Cuba while avoiding collisions with the "Bolivarian" states of Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia.

Obama seeks a quiet world in order to focus his efforts on domestic reform -- and to create conditions that would allow him to dismantle some of the national-security state inherited from the Cold War and given new life and vigor after 9/11. Preferring disarmament agreements to military buildups and hoping to substitute regional balance-of-power arrangements for massive unilateral U.S. force commitments all over the globe, the president wishes ultimately for an orderly world in which burdens are shared and the military power of the United States is a less prominent feature on the international scene.

While Wilsonians believe that no lasting stability is possible in a world filled with dictatorships, Jeffersonians like Obama argue that even bad regimes can be orderly international citizens if the incentives are properly aligned. Syria and Iran don't need to become democratic states for the United States to reach long-term, mutually beneficial arrangements with them. And it is North Korea's policies, not the character of its regime, that pose a threat to the Pacific region.

At this strategic level, Obama's foreign policy looks a little bit like that of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. In Afghanistan and Iraq, he hopes to extract U.S. forces from costly wars by the contemporary equivalent of the "Vietnamization" policy of the Nixon years. He looks to achieve an opening with Iran comparable to Nixon's rapprochement with communist China. Just as Nixon established a constructive relationship with China despite the radical "Red Guard" domestic policies Chinese leader Mao Zedong was pursuing at the time, Obama does not see ideological conflict as necessarily leading to poor strategic relations between the United States and the Islamic Republic. Just as Nixon and Kissinger sought to divert international attention from their retreat in Indochina by razzle-dazzle global diplomacy that placed Washington at the center of world politics even as it reduced its force posture, so too the Obama administration hopes to use the president's global popularity to cover a strategic withdrawal from the exposed position in the Middle East that it inherited from the Bush administration.

This is both an ambitious and an attractive vision. Success would reduce the level of international tension even as the United States scales back its commitments. The United States would remain, by far, the dominant military power in the world, but it would sustain this role with significantly fewer demands on its resources and less danger of war.

Yet as Obama is already discovering, any president attempting such a Jeffersonian grand strategy in the 21st century faces many challenges...

Posted on Monday, January 4, 2010 at 10:34 AM 

Konrad Yakabuski, the Globe and Mail's man in Washington, who usually serves up a conservative view of American goings-on, was not impressed by Sarah Palin's eight-minute Facebook video on Wednesday, even though it "had an undeniably presidential feel to it...(which) served only to heighten fear among the GOP establishment that their hectorer-in-chief is serious about running for the party's nomination in 2012."

Most bothersome about the posting, he said, "was the us-versus-them tone. Instead of bringing Americans together in a time of great tragedy, she did the opposite. She could have answered her critics with grace. She chose rancour.

"It showed that, in Ms. Palin's Manichean world view, there is never a moment of truce."

A quick google search for Yakabuski's use of Manichean produced this: "The most crucial feature of neoconservatism is its Manichean worldview, wherein the Earth is pitted in an urgent struggle between purely good and purely evil nations. As George W. Bush famously told then Sen. Joe Biden: 'I don't do nuance.'"
Jacob Bronsther; What Do Neocons Have to Do With Obama?; The Christian Science Monitor (Boston, Massachusetts); Sep 29, 2009.

I think we tend to forget this "most crucial feature" of what is happening south of the 49th...and more quietly - but just as determinedly - here in the north.  It tends to be lost sight of in Manichean discourse.

What a hodge podge of historical events, eh?  Mind-boggling, actually!

And that's what happens to one's mind when one gets caught up in mystifying accounts of our history, as seen in post #38. 

Yep, the Munroe Doctrine of the early 19th century, the marines walking into Central America to protect United Fruit, Montezuma, Tripoli, etc. etc.  However, I believe that a majority of Americans were reluctant to go to Europe again and FDR had to be devious....Lend-Lease, etc. But events after Dec. 7, 1941 just grew a military machine...and only Ike got excited about it because politically it was a loser. The 1930s folk liked the work it provided.  Been that way ever since.

The "pattern"  became pronounced. And I don't see an end in sight.

Try to imagine an American president making this speech today:

"This world in arms is not  spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its
laborers, the genius of  its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of
one modern heavy bomber  is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.
It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000  population. . .
. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of  wheat. We pay for
a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed  more than 8,000 people.
. . . This is  not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening
war,  it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron." - President Dwight  Eisenhower
 The "Chance For Peace" speech April 16, 1953