Bin Laden dead!

motokid wrote:

Of course this is a feather in Obama's cap.

As is being posted all across the internet:

Bush spent 6 years pursuing bin Laden and failed miserably. Including dropping the ball big time in Afghanistan and getting hugely distracted by all things Iraq.

Obama has been president for less than 2 years and bin laden is now dead.

Oh yes, the opinions on the Internet - where Obama is more popular abroad than he is at home, and where it is amusingly easy to find many, many websites which have been claiming for years that Bin Ladin has been dead for many years now and the US is just using him as a boogeyman so they can pursue their evil, capitalist war for all the oil in Afghanistan. Some of which have now swiftly switched without even a moment of embarrassment to congratulating Obama for pulling this off.

The same "dropping the ball big time in Afghanistan" crowd who apparently are too thick to realize that the US never stopped it's efforts in Afghanistan, never had less than 50% of all Coalition troops in Afghanistan, and never stopped providing support to other countries like Canada to enable them to continue fighting there as well. I think half those morons don't even realize the US wasn't the only country in Afghanistan, nor that Canada and Britain have had the most volatile areas of Afghanistan the entire time that "Bush was dropping the ball". That's just how the operational areas of the country got sliced up.

Quote :

This is something that will bolster Obama's ratings. Without doubt.

A minor blip, perhaps. Anything that will stick? Not hardly - especially as he continues along his merry Marxist way spending future generations' money and fuel prices continue to go through the roof while he throws roadblocks in front of drilling and exploration, and the US dollar continues to take a beating.

Obama's problem is that all those foreigners don't get to vote in the US, so all the love he's getting from above just because he's Obama isn't going to help at the polls - just like it didn't at the midterms, when many of those same websites were railing against American voters for being so stupid as to vote in all those Republicans when Obama was sent to be their savior.

Quote :

Certainly not with a core group of haters, but those people didn't elect him anyway.

That "core group" would be the ones whose votes caused the Republican sweep in the mid terms.

Quote :

Obama made the right call at the right time. The entire operation was a very high risk move to make.
Obama has to receive credit. He made the right call.

Can you explain what the "very high risk" was? What other call was there to make when a SF, Delta, JTF2, whatever team tells you they have eyes on the guy you've been looking for.

Obama wasn't one of the guys in cam paint riding in a Pave Hawk. No risk there.

If he'd been gone once they got there, would he have held a press conference to announce "I nearly got him but while I waited for a week he slipped away"? No, not hardly.

If they had ended up killing a bunch of civilians but come up empty, would that have been risky? Well, Obama has Predators on missions every night in Pakistan, hunting down terrorist leaders and often killing a bunch of civilians who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time (and while I'm in the military I kind of have a problem with that). Would he get any more criticism for this failed mission than a Predator strike with civilian casualties? I don't think so.

The Pakistanis might have been pissed? Do you not think he offered them something after the fact to keep the leadership from badmouthing the US anyways? Do you think we're not already paying them something to ignore the activities of the Taliban Hunt Club within Pakistan's borders? In fact, isn't it just barely possible that the Pakistanis ratted Obama out in exchange for some deal the CIA offered them? Money, military aid, whatever?

I just don't see any compelling risk. I see a President who simply did what he was supposed to in defending the nation, no more and no less.

motokid wrote:

And I'm gonna throw the bullshit card if I may.

Had a republican president been in charge today, regardless of the economy and other financial issues, I believe the conservatives here would be strutting about quite proudly.

And I'll call bullshit in return. Why is it that people can't seem to grasp that the president can come and go, but the guys on the ground, doing the work remain on the mission and the objective as long as it is in force?

You shouldn't have to be in the military to figure that out. I've seen governments change before, during, and after tours, and on the ground the only thing that changes is if budgets dry up or the new government decides to terminate an operation. We don't change the guys who are in their positions, change how we train, change how we operate, etc. There's a lot of lessons learned in how we do the business, and we don't change that just because a new guy got the top job.

Quote :

Let's remember, Obama did not create most of the mess we are in today, he inherited it.

You mean like the Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac mess brought to us by Democrats like Barney Frank, who rebuffed both George Bush's and John McCain's efforts for those institutions to quit giving mortgages to those who couldn't afford to pay them, all the way back to about 2003?

Here's two clips for those interested. Republicans and Democrats talking about Frank & Freddie - on CSAN, no background commentary:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxMInSfanqg

And a FOX story on the issue. You can hate FOX if you like, but I'd be interesting in anyone saying that's not the timeline of what happened, and that's not what the Bush presidency warned about, going back as far as April 2001 and repeatedly after that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMnSp4qEXNM&feature=related

Of course, the Democrats also controlled Congress from the 2007 election onwards - and with that, control over budgets and spending.

Did Obama inherit it? Yep, just like Bush got stuck with Barney Frank, Fannie, and Freddie - but it is apparently his fault, not the Democrats who controlled it. Obama certainly did nothing to stop it, never spoke out against it, etc. In fact, he pretty much helped it along as much as any other Democrat and not a few Republicans.

Sometimes I wonder if the "Obama inherited this" apologists believe that there was never a Democrat in Washington during the Bush presidency. And one of the reasons his popularity is falling and the midterms turned out as they did is you can only get by for so long blaming the other guy for your economic policies and their outcome. Obama and his supporters continuing to blame Bush is simply something most voters aren't interested in listening to anymore.

Quote :

I'd have to say that if given the choice of 4 more years of Obama, or 4 more years of Bush most would pick Obama.

Democratic pollster Doug Schoen doesn't agree with you. Or didn't in polling late last year anyways that appeared in US News and World Report, when he posed that exact same question. His polling indicated that voters prefer Bush over Obama, don't want to see another term for Obama, want the Republicans in control of Congress, and favor extending all the Bush tax cuts.

Is it still the same situation today? I don't know, but I doubt very much soaring gas prices since he took office and a falling dollar (all Bush's fault, of course) have increased his popularity.

Quote :

I also have to question how McCain would have done anything differently.

He would have done exactly the same thing about Bin Ladin. As far as what the Democrats did with Fanny & Freddie and Obama supported, McCain was one of the voices calling for much more regulation of Fanny & Freddie. But McCain isn't exactly a conservative anyways.

Quote :

But certainly there's no republican I can think of over the last 20 years that would stand above Obama at this time as a BETTER choice to have in office.

So forget calling Obama a "failed" president - because BUSH set the bar for "failure".

Yeah, look what he did to Fanny & Freddie - snuck into Barny Frank & Pelosi's offices and twisted their arms while nobody was looking to force them to continue on their chosen course, even while he was publicly warning about that. Now how clever was that!

Jammed the budgets the Democrats passed under his presidency down their throats, even though they controlled Congress. How he ghost wrote those budgets and forced them to do that, we don't know yet, but we know he did it.

And that's just what the US needs at this time in history - a committed Marxist who wants to run around the world apologizing to everyone about his country, play basketball, golf, and follow the teachings of his mentors and friends Frank Marshall Davis, Bill Ayers, Saul Alinsky, et al.

Bush was pretty mediocre, but Obama is going to replace Jimmy Carter as the worst president the US has ever had. It is going to take a long time to dig out after he's gone.

Quote :

If you don't like Obama that's fine, but give him credit for making the right choice regarding bin Laden.
Give him credit for doing something that was highly risky.
Give him credit for giving the go-ahead for this mission.

He deserves a special pat on the head for doing no more and no less than any US president should have done that day, with that information?

No, you don't get a gold star beside your name just because you did your job.

And you don't get credit for "risk" when the only risk involved was to the guys in the Pave Hawks.

Quote :

Then, start another thread about who might be a better choice in 2012. Just don't say "anybody". That's a cop out.

No, it's just a matter of reality that anybody else will, at the very least, do less harm than a committed Alinsky Marxist increasingly trying to put more and more power in the hands of the federal government, while engaging in a course that the CBO has assessed as leading to unsustainable debt.

Do the Republicans have anyone with charisma like Obama - and particularly anyone whose charisma will negate the attacks the media will launch in defense of Obama? Not at this time.

But unless the Republicans cock it up badly, as things continue as they are, Obama is a one term president. Blaming Bush and "Big Oil" isn't going to work four years after you were first elected.