OBAMA Speech in Cairo was a 10+ AMAZING !!!

[harpo]

BBW, it's easy to find articles critical of Obama; if you hadn't noticed, a lot of people have had very fixed and very negative views of him from the start.

Personally I would be ashamed of rubbing shoulders with the attack-dogs of the right - it does you no credit.

 

[Recoleta Carolina]

I wouldn't use the snide phrase with regards to myself as a die hard Obama fan. Here is the difference between the "sides" here. I am willing to give the man the benefit of the doubt and more than a few months to cut through the political muck in hopes of seeing his ideas come to fruition. You are not. Like Rush L., you are more interested in dredging up esoteric opinion pieces that support the view you already hold, and express your flagrant desire that he will fail in his efforts, then cut and paste them here. That is the only difference expressed in this thread.

It doesn´t sound like you are relaxing in Buenos Aires anymore.

 

[Recoleta Carolina]

BBW, it's easy to find articles critical of Obama; if you hadn't noticed, a lot of people have had very fixed and very negative views of him from the start.

Personally I would be ashamed of rubbing shoulders with the attack-dogs of the right - it does you no credit.

What has ever given you the impression that bigbadwolf is an attack dog for the right? I have never gotten that impression. He just backs up his opinions with facts based on published articles which is more than I can say for cheerleaders of the left. The cheerleaders claim to be advocates of freedom of speech.... that is, of course, until you disagree with their point of view. Then, their true "sensitivity" comes across loud and clear.

 

[HDM]

RC, as has been noted several times before, with the exception of your number one fan Pericles, you have an extremely didactic and abusive tone when you comment here, and I think this colors what you post. In spite of Pericles's lone defense of what a wonderful person you are, I, and a number of others who have commented about it, find you kind of nasty and angry. So you may be a split personality, just peachy wonderful in person, and a wacked out harpy on the Internet, but the Internet is all I have from which to form opinions of you.

Indeed, I am relaxing and having a grand and wonderful time living in Buenos Aires. What possibly do you read here that would give you a different impression? Of all the cities in the world where I have lived, Buenos Aires is among the finest. I don't want to spend the rest of my life here, but there are a million worse places to spend a few years, and I have been to a lot of them. What does my position that President Obama might be given a bit of a benefit of the doubt and maybe just a bit more than a few months to accomplish his serious tasks have to do with my life in Buenos Aires? I think it was just an excuse for you to make a crude and senseless remark, because you don't like my online persona -- which is all you know about me.

As far as Wolf's comments. There is nothing we can know about him but what he writes here to make any sort of judgement about his political inclinations. He surfs the Internet to find opinions that agree with his, and then cuts and pastes them here. This is a talent? He can profess whatever he likes, but we have only what he writes and how he writes it. What is clear is that he is seriously going about the job of slamming Obama at every opportunity, that he shows not the slightest inclination to cut the guy just a little slack to work his way through a brutally entrenched political system as he tries to get something of his agenda accomplished, and goes rather ballistic when it doesn't happen in 24 hours.

All I have said, all harpo as said, for that matter, is give the president a fair chance to do what he says before you start kicking at him. I am willing to give him a chance. You are not. That makes you a Rush Limbaugh clone, like it or not.

The poster you both leapt in to thank previously is just a thin thread away from making the same kind of anti-Obama threatening nonsense that you can find posted by the guy who said that Obama was a puppet of the Jews as he went into the Holocaust museum and started shooting yesterday. I do not know why you were thanking this guy. You should wonder why you were thanking him.

I am a proud capital L liberal. What are you asking for? A battle of cut and paste? I could spam this site for months cutting and pasting opinion pieces that I like. And for what? Try thinking for yourself, trying some bit of critical and logical thinking. It might open your eyes ... but probably not.

Now, get onto your keyboard and start slinging invectives ... which is what every wonderful, nice, polite person does.

 

[jp]

Question for the "nothing changes they are all the same" brigade...

Do you think the notable political events of the last 20-30 years were inevitable then? That everything that happened would have happened anyway, regardless of who was in charge?

It just seems a ridiculous idea to me. Buts thats all you can really surmise from the belief that no matter who is currently in charge "nothing changes"

Perhaps its worth looking at what happens over the course of a decade instead of complaining that there hasn't been a social and economic revolution during the last few months....

 

[Recoleta Carolina]

RC, as has been noted several times before, with the exception of your number one fan Pericles, you have an extremely didactic and abusive tone when you comment here, and I think this colors what you post. In spite of Pericles's lone defense of what a wonderful person you are, I, and a number of others who have commented about it, find you kind of nasty and angry. So you may be a split personality, just peachy wonderful in person, and a wacked out harpy on the Internet, but the Internet is all I have from which to form opinions of you.

Indeed, I am relaxing and having a grand and wonderful time living in Buenos Aires. What possibly do you read here that would give you a different impression? Of all the cities in the world where I have lived, Buenos Aires is among the finest. I don't want to spend the rest of my life here, but there are a million worse places to spend a few years, and I have been to a lot of them. What does my position that President Obama might be given a bit of a benefit of the doubt and maybe just a bit more than a few months to accomplish his serious tasks have to do with my life in Buenos Aires? I think it was just an excuse for you to make a crude and senseless remark, because you don't like my online persona -- which is all you know about me.

As far as Wolf's comments. There is nothing we can know about him but what he writes here to make any sort of judgement about his political inclinations. He surfs the Internet to find opinions that agree with his, and then cuts and pastes them here. This is a talent? He can profess whatever he likes, but we have only what he writes and how he writes it. What is clear is that he is seriously going about the job of slamming Obama at every opportunity, that he shows not the slightest inclination to cut the guy just a little slack to work his way through a brutally entrenched political system as he tries to get something of his agenda accomplished, and goes rather ballistic when it doesn't happen in 24 hours.

All I have said, all harpo as said, for that matter, is give the president a fair chance to do what he says before you start kicking at him. I am willing to give him a chance. You are not. That makes you a Rush Limbaugh clone, like it or not.

The poster you both leapt in to thank previously is just a thin thread away from making the same kind of anti-Obama threatening nonsense that you can find posted by the guy who said that Obama was a puppet of the Jews as he went into the Holocaust museum and started shooting yesterday. I do not know why you were thanking this guy. You should wonder why you were thanking him.

I am a proud capital L liberal. What are you asking for? A battle of cut and paste? I could spam this site for months cutting and pasting opinion pieces that I like. And for what? Try thinking for yourself, trying some bit of critical and logical thinking. It might open your eyes ... but probably not.

Now, get onto your keyboard and start slinging invectives ... which is what every wonderful, nice, polite person does.

Unreal. When I stopped posting because I found people such as yourself to be insulting, rude, crude, and incredibly shallow some people wanted me to start posting again. So, you are mistaken.

Secondly, you think you know it all. Who is Rush Limbaugh? I have never listened to him in my life.

I am not a political person per se but I do have alot of common sense. I find common sense a quality seriously lacking in most people that I know today who define themselves as liberal. And, by the way, what is the difference today between a liberal and a conservative? I would really like to know.

 

[HDM]

Unreal? What, may I ask, was your intent with the comment directed to me that I am not "relaxing in Buenos Aires anymore?" That was totally out of left field, and had nothing at all to do with anything I have written here. So why did you think it necessary to post a comment like that? Is it just in your nature to do things like that? If you read back over the comments people have made in response to you and about you, I think you will see that many, let's say most, correspondents here are offended by your tone and attitude. Why do you think Pericles found it necessary to keep coming to your defense, saying that he had actually met you and you were just perfectly sweet? Do you have a conspiracy theory to explain it ... they are all against you? If you are getting glowing praises in private, who would know? The only person who publicly expressed a wish that you post again was a person who made it clear that it was because you are an entertainment, because you start fights. In private messages, maybe everybody thinks you are just dandy. But who would know?

But enough of that. I will answer your question, since you apparently do not have access to even a dictionary.

Look the words up.

Liberal: "open to new behavior or opinions, willing to discard traditional values, favorable to or respectful of individual rights and freedoms, favoring maximum individual liberty in political and social reform. (I am one of these.)

Conservative: holding to traditional attitudes and values and cautious about change or innovation, typically in politics or religion, sober and conventional. (I am not one of these.)

Does that help?

Adding my own opinion to the standard definitions, Liberals tend to favor government used to protect the rights of the weak and the defenseless, they favor taxation to fund programs that contribute to the general good of all the citizens in a country -- not taxation intended to reward only the richest while punishing the needy, which is a typical Republican approach. (If you don't want to pay taxes, then fight your own fires, police your own neighborhood, put up your own traffic signals, leave the trash lying beside the roadways, pay for your own explorations ... ad infinitum.) Liberals believe in individual rights and that it is one of government's key tasks to serve and protect those rights. Liberals believe that a government which does not care for the least and the weakest of its citizens is an immoral sham. We just barely survived 8 years of one of those.

I am mystified regarding what you could possibly mean by the term "common sense." Because what you write is consistently illogical, unreasonable, ill-conceived, and, by and large, reflective of a heartless philosophy. If that is what you mean by common sense, then you are welcome to it, and one can only hope it is a odd, shrinking, off-brand notion.

You should listen to Rush Limbaugh. He can state far better than you can what you are trying to say here. His current agenda is his claim that he wants Obama to fail, that he wants the president of the United States to fail with every single one of his ideas and programs. And he doesn't want to wait a year. He wants him to fail right now! That must remind you of what you and Wolf write here. Obama hasn't fulfilled every campaign promise within the first few months, so he is a liar and a failure. Jesus! The Bush-Chaney regime fulfilled none, not one, not a shred of one, single campaign promise in eight years! Rather than fulfill any of them, most were abandoned and replaced by wild substitutes. Have you all so quickly forgotten Bush's platform promises? Name one, any one, even a small one, that came to pass.

Obama may indeed be just another political hack. The difference between us is, I am willing to give him a year to see what happens. You are not. For you, it's immediate or its failure. I think that is probably a reflection of your personality, and there is nothing I can do to help you there.

 

[bigbadwolf]

Question for the "nothing changes they are all the same" brigade...

Do you think the notable political events of the last 20-30 years were inevitable then? That everything that happened would have happened anyway, regardless of who was in charge?

It just seems a ridiculous idea to me. Buts thats all you can really surmise from the belief that no matter who is currently in charge "nothing changes"

The change is coming from external pressure -- not from the internal dynamic of whether Democrat or Republican gets voted in. External armed resistance, external economic competition, external powers like China asserting themselves more prominently in global economic affairs. The United States itself is reactionary in the extreme.

The US is a military empire, and this structure has its own momentum, its own inertia. It will ultimately collapse (or bring the world down with it) because it becomes unsustainable -- not because some young, ignorant and photogenic president with the gift of the gab declaims about "hope" and "change."

The US president therefore acts within tight constraints. He cannot by himself change the fundamental structure and policies of the country -- and he is not hired to do so. Those policies come from a tight oligarchic group -- which the president may or not be part of. This is not to say that different shades of opinion -- even factions -- do not exist in this oligarchy. It is only to emphasise that the president alone does not determine this (and he may not even be part of the ruling group that does). Thus a Reagan could pull American troops out of Lebanon in 1985, after 200 dies when they got blown up -- but he could not suddenly adopt a peaceful policy towards the rest of the world. Likewise Obama has little room to manoeuvre -- the strategic and aggressive impulse that drove the US into involvement in the Middle East remains in place. Obama is just a pretty face to make it more palatable.

Eisenhower referred to the "military-industrial complex." It probably goes beyond this. It is a United States whose attitude towards the rest of the world is bellicose, militaristic, and interventionist. No figurehead of a president is going to change this.

 

[bigbadwolf]

Following up to my last post, there a couple of articles which hammer home the point I'm trying to make about there not being a dime's worth of difference between te two main parties. First, the Obama administration's policy on eschewing control of executive pay but coming down hard on autoworkers, an article here:

Neither Geithner nor any other Obama administration official has explained why it is wrong and “counterproductive” to limit the multi-million-dollar salary and bonus packages awarded to bank executives, but absolutely necessary to slash the wages, pensions and health benefits of workers at General Motors, Chrysler and their supplier plants.

The Obama administration is a right-wing capitalist government pursuing a deliberate and sweeping attack on the American working class. Its social program finds its clearest class expression in this dichotomy: foreswearing any limits on CEO and executive compensation, while demanding sacrifices by workers and an across-the-board cut in “consumption”—i.e., in the living standards of working people.

And second, an article on the strategic impulse that drives American intervention in the Greater Middle East:

But what Clinton's effusion lacked in originality it compensated for in accuracy. Azerbaijan is as strategically situated as any nation in the world within the current contest between Western plans for global military domination and control of energy resources and contrasting efforts by other nations to secure a peaceful and multipolar international order.

This is realpolitik and goes beyond the toothy smiles and glib words of reassurance which seem to satisfy so many here.

 

[harpo]

What has ever given you the impression that bigbadwolf is an attack dog for the right? I have never gotten that impression. He just backs up his opinions with facts based on published articles which is more than I can say for cheerleaders of the left. The cheerleaders claim to be advocates of freedom of speech.... that is, of course, until you disagree with their point of view. Then, their true "sensitivity" comes across loud and clear.

This is the exact opposite of what I said! It's a bit depressing when someone replies to your posts without having bothered to read them. Of course BBW is from the Marxist/Leninist left - THAT is why I suggested he should be ashamed of rubbing shoulders with the extreme right.

Of the old cliche that the extremes of left and right have much in common, I will leave others to judge.