Obama wins Nobel Peace Prize. What?

[genlock]

Yassir Arafat?

[Ace Purple]

I had felt that Obama winning the award was "too early" for him, but that Maddow clip was great at illustrating the reasons for it happening from a timing standpoint.

[AmpedNow]

Nobel committee = socialist circle jerk.

Obama's foreign policy accomplishments:

He ran off to the Czech Republic and Egypt tripping over himself to tell the world how much America sucks, and apologizing for our "arrogance".

On the same day North Korea defied the UN and the world by launching several missile tests, he's in Prague talking about nuclear disarmament of the United States.

He goes to Cairo begging for forgiveness from the Muslim world. Meanwhile, the Taliban is once again taking over in Afghanistan, Al-Queda is still threatening to kill Americans by the thousands, and Osama bin Laden is still at large.

He caves in to Russia's demands, by scrapping years-long plans for missile defense systems in Estonia and Poland, basically turning his back on these once-staunch U.S. allies, leaving them and all of Eastern Europe hanging out to dry to an Iranian missile attack, or a hostile takeover by Putin.

He all but tells Israel that they will have to go it alone with a preemptive attack on Iran's nuclear facilities, even though its illegitimate president threatens to wipe them off the map almost daily. A threat Israel considers so serious, that it has reportedly had high-level discussions of the Samson Option, should they deem it necessary.

He is silent while thousands fight and die in the streets of Iran for freedom against a tyrannical government who rigged the election process.

Despite all of this, he all but concedes that Iran will eventually become a nuclear power -- a situation that so dramatically changes the geopolitics in the Middle East, that many other countries in the region will also scramble to get "the bomb", in order to counteract the Iranian power vacuum. In effect, it will trigger a Middle East arms race.

At home, he turns on our own CIA, leaving agents wide open to allegations of abuses committed under the Bush administration.

He is playing politics in Afghanistan, refusing to commit despite "mission failure" warnings from General McCrystal.

He is clearly still in campaign mode, still running against George W. Bush and trying to undo everything he ever did as fast as he can.

I'm convinced that Obama hates him, and all conservatives on a cellular level. As a result, Washington and the American people has become so bitterly polarized, that nothing of meaning can get done.

For all of this, and things he has yet to do, he certainly deserves the Nobel Peace Prize.

[Lester]

Excellent recap.

In a nutshell, he won for the same reason Gore did.... he's not Bush. (And Carter's win was for bashing Bush.)

If McCain had won, and the VMA fiasco didn't go down like it did, we'd be bitching about Kanye's win right now.

[Bob Campbell]

I love fantasy. Amped, you should write an entire novel. That was funny stuff. Especially the part about the missile defense system, since we don't have one to give anybody anyway.
Lester, didn't Carter win the prize before Bush was pres? Reagan's first term wasn't it? No, 2002, but it was really more of a make up for not giving it to him when he brokered the Israeli-Egyptian peace accord with Begin and Sadat.

[Hoosier Daddy]

Obama Derangement Syndrome is alive and well with our resident Dittoheads.

[fearpeddler]

whatever... I wasn't a fan before he was president....

[Lester]

Obama Messiah Syndrome is alive and well with our resident libs.

I just want to know what he did to deserve it... and why he should have won it over any of the other candidates...

[genlock]

"We're going to have to, if you're very old, we're not going to give you all that technology
and all those drugs for the last couple of years of your life to keep you maybe going for
another couple of months. It's too expensive...so we're going to let you die."

Robert Reich
Obama Economic Advisor
Sec of Labor /Clinton Admin

[Hoosier Daddy]

I'll actually give you a speech made up entirely, almost on the spur of the moment, of what a candidate for president would say if that candidate did not care about becoming president. In other words, this is what the truth is and a candidate will never say, but what a candidate should say if we were in the kind of democracy where citizens were honored in terms of their practice of citizenship and they were educated in terms of what the issues were and they could separate myth from reality in terms of what candidates would tell them:

"Thank you so much for coming this afternoon. I'm so glad to see you and I would like to be president. Let me tell you a few things on health care. Look, we have the only health care system in the world that is designed to avoid sick people. And that's true and what I'm going to do is that I am going try to reorganize it to be more amenable to treating sick people but that means you, particularly you young people, particularly you young healthy people...you're going to have to pay more.

"Thank you. And by the way, we're going to have to, if you're very old, we're not going to give you all that technology and all those drugs for the last couple of years of your life to keep you maybe going for another couple of months. It's too expensive...so we're going to let you die."

"Also I'm going to use the bargaining leverage of the federal government in terms of Medicare, Medicaid---we already have a lot of bargaining leverage---to force drug companies and insurance companies and medical suppliers to reduce their costs. What that means, less innovation and that means less new products and less new drugs on the market which means you are probably not going to live much longer than your parents. Thank you."

The speech was made in September 2007, two years before Obama's election.
Reich was speaking to students and faculty at UC Berkeley about the many problems with funding our current health care system.
Don't cut and paste to get the one-sided political result you want from a speech.

[genlock]

Liberals taught mee to cut and paste out of context.
They try to teach me to lie.

See you at Vern's visitation.

[Hoosier Daddy]

It's just that I've heard that one before. Over a year ago, to be exact. It was a FOX hatchet job with 10 second sound bytes bookended with 20 minutes of conservative speculation about how liberals wanted to kill everyone over 60. I did some research and found the speech was nowhere near the paradigm FOX tried to paint. I know ... imagine that. I'm not a huge Robert Reich fan, but he didn't say what some people have accused him of saying.

I'm trying to work it out to attend Vern's services. It's about a 4 hour drive, but I really need to go. I have been sick about not stopping by or calling Vern when I was in the (Huntington) area. I just don't get down that way much anymore. Too many irons in the fire. Too many schedule conflicts. Vern was a very good friend from years back, and 56 is way too young of an age to lose him.

[genlock]

As long as the "out of context" thing is adored on msnbc and cbs, et al, It will be standard on Fox.
You still bat left and throw left.

[AmpedNow]

I love fantasy. Amped, you should write an entire novel. That was funny stuff. Especially the part about the missile defense system, since we don't have one to give anybody anyway.

You're right... It doesn't exist. It was a planned system to be completed at an uncertain future date. Its purpose was to protect Europe from stray ICBMs launched from Middle East -- namely, Iran, or even Pakistan, should the Taliban ever take over that country.

For all we know, it may have never been completed in reality. But the proposal alone provided enough leverage to keep Iran and even Russia in check. Why do you think Putin raised so much hell about it?

The number one rule to foreign policy is, you don't give up something for nothing. Obama just conceded an enormous amount of geopolitical leverage to Russia in hoping that they will cooperate with us in dealing with Iran, with no guarantees that they will. In fact, it's been almost a month since the announcement, and I have yet to hear or Russia severing any of their arms agreements with Iran.

Meanwhile, Putin is on record saying he envisions a "United Russia", once again rejoining all of the breakaway republics, by force if necessary. We seen this tension on full display last year in Georgia. Do we not think this will happen again? -- esp since Obama further enabled Putin's vision by leaving Poland and the Czech Republic virtually defenseless.

Obama actually got it right the first time when he first became President, when he told Russia that if they wanted to see the missile defense scrapped, then they need to help get Iran's nuclear program in check first. This gave me hope that he's not totally naive.

Fast forward a few months, and he turns this into a political peace offering to the anti-war Left, sacrificing two strong U.S. allies in the process. Way to go, bobblehead... I guess anything that was a Bush proposal just cannot be taken seriously.

I certainly hope that five years from now, we're not watching an emboldened Russia ravaging Eastern Europe killing thousands of innocents, or even worse, a nuclear Iran threatening to wipe London and Paris off the map, while we look back at this moment and think, "Yep...that was the game changer."

Obama Derangement Syndrome is alive and well with our resident Dittoheads.

No, I'm a realist. I don't see any benefit to the "Obama Doctrine" of appeasement so far. There can be real world consequences to this stuff.

[Tom Taggart]

Regan and the first Bush understood the value of a carefully calculated bluff. While it was popular to mock "star wars," the Soviets never could be sure that we couldn't launch those space-based weapons. The Soviet generals always knew they were behind the U.S. in avionics, but believed they could prevail on the ground in Europe with their massive army and tank forces.

The Soviet Army's plan for conquering Europe was based on the Blitzkrieg--and an acute awareness of the strengths and weaknesses of the U.S. Air Force. The attack would come during the winter, when our air force would be grounded by weather. The Red Army's massive tank force would burst out of East Germany, through the "Fulda Gap," overrunning Western air bases in West Germany. From these captured air bases, Red Army helicopters would leap-frog further into the west, while the infantry, backed by the tanks, would mop up.

By the late '80's, after a succession of increasingly uninspired and senile party bosses, Gorbachev became General Secretary in 1985 and launched the reform movement known as "perestroika." The Generals, and the politburo, bought into the Western bluff, and realized we had unlimited resources to out-build and out-engineer the Soviet military program.

Hence, as the Warsaw pact block fell apart, the Soviet Army did an orderly retreat back into Mother Russia.

The first Iraq war actually foreshadowed the end of the Soviet Union.


During the first Iraq war, Hussein had many of these modern T-72 tanks in his army, many equipped with East German made laser range finders, on par with Western electronics. Only one problem. The American tanks could shoot about 500 yards farther than the the T-72's. As demonstrated by a night battle in the desert where American forces decimated Iraqi army tanks.

The Soviet Army generals watched CNN very carefully, and knew the game was up. Six months later when regressive Communist deputies seized the "White Palace" or Russian Parliament in opposition to perestroika, while (then) Moscow mayor Boris Yeltsin climbed up on a tank to rally protesters, the Soviet Army sat outside Moscow, waiting out the attempted coup.

The Generals knew the game was up, the old Soviet Union could not compete with American technology.

Putin realizes the same thing, Bush II was following the path of his father and Reagan by proposing the base anti-missile missiles in Poland as a veiled warning not to try to reassert Russian influence over the former eastern bloc.

Obama, the innocent naif that he is, doesn't understand this.

[genlock]

Excellent analysis.

[Jet Black]

Excellent analysis.

[fearpeddler]

I was reading today that the "supreme leader" of Iran is in a coma and possibly near death... wonder if they'll give credit to obama for that too....

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite? ... 2FShowFull

[Bob Campbell]

Amped said,
You're right... It doesn't exist. It was a planned system to be completed at an uncertain future date. Its purpose was to protect Europe from stray ICBMs launched from Middle East -- namely, Iran, or even Pakistan, should the Taliban ever take over that country.

Actually, it was to protect them from Russia. That's why Russia was so pissed about it.

[Hoosier Daddy]

Excellent analysis.

Yeah, except the Soviet Union doesn't exist anymore.

Details, details ...