The new forums will be named Coin Return (based on the most recent
vote)! You can check on the status and timeline of the transition to the new forums
here.
The Guiding Principles and New Rules
document is now in effect.
The New (and On Notice) Obama Thread
Posts
"Back in my day there wasn't any of this fancy nation building crap! We just burnt 'em down and let the people already living here rebuild. I tells ya Jimjom, war was better when it was fought in trenches. Those were a real man's war, where you had to hike fifteen miles uphill both ways through barbed wire, anti-personal landmines, and machine gun nests if you wanted to take a dump; and you always had to take a dump because you know what we ate in those day?! Maggots and mud. Pea soup if we were lucky."
--
Anyway, I think Obama is going to come out of his presidency looking good overall. Most of his disappointments can be chalked up to Congressional nitwittery, and some of his successes are historic (Obamacare, ending two wars, financial reform, gay rights). His foreign policy leaves something to be desired, but it still marks an improvement over the previous War on Terror tactics.
You can debate the finer points, but having become politically aware during the Bush years, it's a massive and welcome change just to have good news each day as often as bad.
I don't think it's imaginary and didn't say it was. I think your personal interpretation that deems collateral with drones illegal but perfectly fine to send in thousands of troops who do the same thing on a far larger scale is grotesquely flawed.
Well, specifically, the first President to publicly support gay rights, ending DADT, and his executive order relating to hospital visits and the like come to mind. Actual significant actions on Obama's part. I'm not crediting him with even a majority of the legal/social changes that have been happening.
I don't think he really led so much as he made sure to keep up with where the country was, maybe inching a bit ahead but not too much to fuck things up.
Which is a damn sight better than we've had since....ever?
I'd hoped that he would have been leading the sea change rather than jumping on board after Biden more or less accidentally forced his hand, but sure, that's not really the only way to interpret things.
They can't filibuster, but they can still make the process take forever.
I personally think it's pretty amazing what Obama has accomplished given the unprecedented Republican obstructionism he's been presented with.
So yeah, there are some things I wish Obama still had the political capital to do. Unfortunately, he doesn't. Right now, with the Republicans in control of the House, the best thing Obama can do for the next Democrat to win the nomination is to not fuck something up or overdraw on his political capital before he's out of office. If he tried to push too much through right now, it would play well into GOP messaging that he's forcing unwanted legislation on Americans, and that's a narrative that works to get a Republican in office during the next election.
Obama's job right now is to play the long game, and leave a good contrast to W's presidency, so that come November 2016 voters remember, "Bush = R = Bad, Obama = D = Good".
If that seems like an oversimplification to you, that's because it is. If you think most voters have your sophisticated and nuanced view on policy and awareness of the political climate, you would be sorely mistaken.
You keep assuming for some reason that I think Iraq and Afghanistan were legal. I have at most only implied that they were illegal. Since you keep bringing it up, I know at least that Iraq was obviously illegal under well-established international law regarding what constitutes a valid cause of war, and you'd be very hard pressed to find a respectable, non-partisan legal expert who will tell you otherwise.
I linked you to a pretty broad, deep, and thorough set of documents wherein virtually every serious legal expert to research the question has agreed that drone strikes, as applied in targeted killings in Pakistan and Yemen, are certainly illegal too. I walked you through the legal test that leads to that conclusion with citations and approachable factual examples.
And as I pointed out and linked, the closest thing to a plausible legal defense made by a respected legal expert has been, "Well, the best thing I can say is that while Obama has been using drones in targeted killings of very questionable legality, and while most of my peers disagree with me, I think that Obama could make the program legal if he were to clean it up."
So I'm still scratching my head over what could possibly convince you to engage with any of these legal issues instead of dismissing them as "just opinions".
To Evigilant's post a couple pages back you said, and I quote:
So were the tens of thousands killed in the Gulf War a proportional response?
The Iraqi Intelligence Service was a civilian entity so I guarantee you plenty were killed there.
Operation Deliberate Force had a couple dozen casualties.
Operation Desert Fox had upwards of 2,000 casualties
Operation Allied Response had another few thousand.
And then everything from 2001 you consider illegal.
Which leaves... Two attacks both in '98 that fit your requirement of "proportional response" since they don't bother listing the casualties. Maybe three if you decide to count the intelligence center. Out of Eleven. Otherwise the rest were obscenely one sided attacks with a ton of civilian casualties. And these were just events including Tomahawk missiles I might add.
Your argument that this is a new occurrence is still empty.
it is very clear that he didn't lead this, at all. Remember when he didn't support it in 2008? Remember when his position was "evolving" as public discourse and activism drove the narrative?
On this issue, Obama has been either opposed or behind the curve for most of his Presidency.
It's good to see that he felt driven to make some positive changes though. Late to the party is better than never showing up.
Obama basically put the presidential seal on the already existing movement. He didn't lead from the front, but he didn't do anything to stop the change and once it started tipping he jumped on it and helped make it "official".
Basically what you want from a politician if you don't want them to be leading the crusade.
As you quoted me saying, the majority ("preponderance") of those things were either plainly legal or else are plausibly legal.
If you are sincerely interested in what is or is not legal on that list, please PM me and I would be happy to have that discussion, but I am getting tired of derailing the thread on the basis of your insistence that I write you a treatise on the things that you don't understand about a body of the law that you do not believe to meaningfully exist.
You are fighting the fairly presented hypo and the large body of evidence supporting the conclusion that the hypo fairly reflects the illegality of Obama's actions. It is hard to escape the opinion that you are doing this because the facts and the law do not line up with your preconceptions.
I'd have to go back and check but IIRC most of his "opposition" was of the soft sold "My personal beliefs" style that all but the most liberal libs had in 2008. The kind where he was certainly not pushing for any laws on the matter like bans, which were what the actual opposition was pushing at the time, but may have been in favor of civil unions. (There is also the cynical political side view where he clearly wanted 2008 to NOT be about social issues at the ballot box.)
My intuitive read on it has always been that this isn't an issue that is really important to him in either direction when compared with other issues that he thinks are more pressing.
He was pretty obviously just flat out lying in order to not frighten off older independents. Nobody backslides on gay rights, and he was for marriage when he first ran for state Senate. (or the national Senate? One of those)
I mean, that's not an ideal thing for him to do, but there it is.
Which is an amazing change to happen over six years.
That I can see, they neither opposed nor supported it ~6 years ago? Link would be appreciated.
http://voices.yahoo.com/same-sex-marriage-stands-barack-obama-hillary-1467159.html?cat=9 is where I found it. I was mostly confirming my memories though, so I didn't worry about checking credibility or anything.
Yeah, sure. "accidentally"? You really believe that shit?
Biden was testing the waters. When it came out good, Obama jumped in.
Yeah, there's plenty of evidence that Obama was pro-gay-rights but softened his position to win the election. His stance evolved backward and then forward as a consequence of political viability.
Three out of eleven is not the majority champ. The majority were ridiculously one sided with a bunch of civilian casualties. But because something something drones Obama is in the wrong. If you're sincerely interested in actually making a point maybe you should actually provide any facts at all to back up your statements.
It's pretty important that people remember that Obama has never really sold himself as the liberalist, libby, lib liberal that ever liberaled. I think that has mostly be the right's doing. I tend to expect people that primarily use rightwing sources to get suckered by that element of the media, but it seems a fair number of progressives have fallen for it to. Also worth noting again, that it's very unlikely that Presidents McCain or Romney would have been any better on progressive issues and would probably have done worse, as far as, most liberals are concerned. Finally, people tend to assign the POTUS more power than they have and just ignore that Congress has a function in US government.
List of things I've not been happy with:
-The bailout could have been handled better, I feel like banks should have been forced to break up a little because if they were too big to fail, then they were likely to big to begin with.
-On that note, I feel like he could have done more in the way of trust busting.
-Focused too much on the debt and deficit.
-As hinted earlier, I feel like drones could be handled better.
List of things I've been happy with:
-Putting aside concerns with expansion of some of the shit Bush has done, he has made some stuff more transparent.
-Has done a fairly good job patching up the reputation hit that the USS took, courtesy of the Bush admin.
-Has done a reasonably good job of advocating for the need to take climate change seriously and doing what he can to help in that area.
-Has been doing a good job advocating for fixing the inequality issue in this country and doing what he can to help in that area.
-ACA isn't perfect, universal healthcare would have been better, but given how dysfunctional Congress is (fuck the filibuster), it's an improvement.
-Has been pretty cool when it comes to science.
-Despite all the shit the GOP has given him, he has done a fairly solid job of not giving them anything to use against him because I know I'd be livid dealing with the current crop of asshole tea partiers and "think of the poor, disadvantaged rich people" types sitting in both the House and the Senate.
But if we're going to discuss it, let's not be snarky douchenozzles about it.
Hint hint.
frankly the politics don't matter, his actions have been helpful, especially in driving the African American community's views on gay marriage
Sure he didn't take any risks in 2008 when he was running by doing it then, but so what? The opposition party's view on homosexuals is one step above Russia's
"Path of least resistance" has been a great 4 word description of the Obama administration. They push and prod and help the US in the direction they feel is best, but wont force anything through.
Edit: Changed "Is a" to "Has been a" since they seem to be getting more forceful lately. Probably has something to do with not having to run for office again or something.
Yeah no it wasn't perfect so it was worthless, maaaaaaan.
It's a pretty good strategy, period. The President cannot drag the country to where he or she wants it.
No. However, they do sometimes have to show that they aren't GOP-lite. That supports the narrative that both parties are identical. Change doesn't happen in a vacuum. Someone has to pull the country to the left and it won't be the GOP who does it.
They've only been in a position to force things through for like 6 months of his entire term of office. And that period still relied on Ben Nelson and Lieberman [Edit: and Baucus] to not be assholes.
So.