Because Trump 2.0

[sunday]

2 hours ago, rmgill said:

Did any of that matter for those who voted for Biden and the other adults?

Their vote was found to be not needed, after a vigorous campaign of ballot stuffing, vote harvesting, and the like.

Really, Ryan, I am amazed you still think you live in a country with a fair and straight electoral process. Especially in Georgia, with the duplicate shenanigans of the Senate seats.

[rmgill]

Oh, I think we will be looking more closely this go around and with the state law changes, we will be more aware. 

 

And its not ‘ballot stuffing’, its ‘vote fortifying’.

Edited September 14, 2021 by rmgill

[17thfabn]

8 hours ago, nitflegal said:

The voting population that actively supported candidates who wanted to end the war and who did not support more supposedly popular candidates who were pro-continuation.

Biden an Trump were both in favor of ending US combat involvement in Afghanistan. Were any of the Democrat also rans in favor of continuing the war? 

Edited September 14, 2021 by 17thfabn

[rmgill]

One could also say that Truman was in favor of ending WWII. Imagine if we’d counter signed the surrender agreement on the Battleship and the Japanese broke the terms. You think we’d have just pulled out and gone home? No, we’d have resumed hostilities until the Japanese begged like peasants before a Daimyo.

There were specific things that needed to be enforced and which were not done so against the Taliban. one can easily make a case for ending the war but not if it included a US surrender at terms the taliban demanded. 

[Stuart Galbraith]

Just as a matter of interest, how many Republican Presidential candidates said they were in favour of continuing with the Afghan war?

If Republicans are going to slam Biden for ending the war on bad terms, rightly, they really need to demonstrate they had an alternative. Because it seems the only alternative was how quickly they were going to pull troops out, not that there was any political possiblity of any remaining.

[sunday]

7 hours ago, rmgill said:

Oh, I think we will be looking more closely this go around and with the state law changes, we will be more aware. 

 

And its not ‘ballot stuffing’, its ‘vote fortifying’.

Stay close to the news on the California recall. There are reports of shenanigans already.

[nitflegal]

8 hours ago, 17thfabn said:

Biden an Trump were both in favor of ending US combat involvement in Afghanistan. Were any of the Democrat also rans in favor of continuing the war? 

Not really, I was referring to the Republican candidates. 

[MiloMorai]

3 hours ago, sunday said:

Stay close to the news on the California recall. There are reports of shenanigans already.

If you can't win legitimately throw muddy waters to cast doubt on the validity of the election. According to the polls Newsom is clearly leading.

[rmgill]

6 hours ago, Stuart Galbraith said:

Just as a matter of interest, how many Republican Presidential candidates said they were in favour of continuing with the Afghan war?

Republicans seem to be more interested in national security and less about being "Nice". 

As it stands now, do you think the Afghan war is over now? There are Americans there still, stuck. Are Americans still involved? 

6 hours ago, Stuart Galbraith said:

If Republicans are going to slam Biden for ending the war on bad terms, rightly, they really need to demonstrate they had an alternative.

Again. If the terms of the armistice are NOT adhered to, the right decision is to effect corrective action that might be continuation of hostilities. 

The failure is not in seeking an end of the war. The failure is in failing to enforce the terms when they are violated. 

 

6 hours ago, Stuart Galbraith said:

Because it seems the only alternative was how quickly they were going to pull troops out, not that there was any political possiblity of any remaining.

Arguably, Trump would have responded to Taliban transgressions differently than Biden did. We can't know what he would have actually done. But frankly, I'd have preferred the risk of Trump over Biden in this regard. 

[MiloMorai]

Why was there so many Americans still in A-stan? Trump said May and Biden Aug 31, so why the wait to the last minute to leave? 

[Stuart Galbraith]

53 minutes ago, rmgill said:

Republicans seem to be more interested in national security and less about being "Nice". 

As it stands now, do you think the Afghan war is over now? There are Americans there still, stuck. Are Americans still involved? 

Again. If the terms of the armistice are NOT adhered to, the right decision is to effect corrective action that might be continuation of hostilities. 

The failure is not in seeking an end of the war. The failure is in failing to enforce the terms when they are violated. 

 

Arguably, Trump would have responded to Taliban transgressions differently than Biden did. We can't know what he would have actually done. But frankly, I'd have preferred the risk of Trump over Biden in this regard. 

Staying in Afghanistan isnt about being nice. Yeah, sure I think the Afghans got the shaft, im not happy about that.  But what worries me far more is the inability to take the temperture of the security situation there now.

Ask yourself this question, why is it nobody in the 1990's knew what Al Qaeda was up to in Afghanistan? Because we were not there. Withdrawing ourself is not likely to produce a better result just because we have drones, because you just saw what happened to the ISIS guy who turned out to be an aid worker. That is the future of over the horizon strikes, hitting the wrong people.

They Taliban broke the terms of the armistice BEFORE the US withdrew. But Biden still withdrew. Im not remotely optimitistic its going to be any better now that you arent in the country.

We cant know Trump would have done that. We can know he would have withdrew quicker, which probably yes, would have have been better because it would have been in the winter. You have no idea he would have been butch to the Taliban, that is a supposition based on what he says. He said a lot of things, and some of them were even true.

If we are talking preferences, Id have prefered Ronald Reagan, at least he knew when to saddle up and start filling boot hill. Or Bush senior. At least he knew that you only got out when the job was done.

[rmgill]

No, Democrats being all peace and love is about being nice.

 

Trump was more right on how to handle Iran than Biden has been. Biden is a continuation of the Obama foreign policy. So I expect US tax payers will be supplying funds to the Taliban in the form of cash payments. 

Everything else is you stating the obvious for why we should have stayed in some way shape or form, essentially agreeing with the Jacksonians and Hamiltonians. 

[NickM]

2 hours ago, rmgill said:

Republicans seem to be more interested in national security and less about being "Nice". 

As it stands now, do you think the Afghan war is over now? There are Americans there still, stuck. Are Americans still involved? 

Again. If the terms of the armistice are NOT adhered to, the right decision is to effect corrective action that might be continuation of hostilities. 

The failure is not in seeking an end of the war. The failure is in failing to enforce the terms when they are violated. 

 

Arguably, Trump would have responded to Taliban transgressions differently than Biden did. We can't know what he would have actually done. But frankly, I'd have preferred the risk of Trump over Biden in this regard. 

Part about what you said about not being 'nice': I am reminded way back in 2001, 'everyone was with us'==but on this other blog I infested I was constantly hearing about how Dubya 'squandered' that goodwill...apparently not enough "handwringing introspection" and too much finding the guys who did this and killing them.

[Stuart Galbraith]

Dubya squandered his goodwill on Iraq. The subsequent support by NATO for operations in Afghanistan shows nobody was unduly worried about that war.

[nitflegal]

2 hours ago, MiloMorai said:

Why was there so many Americans still in A-stan? Trump said May and Biden Aug 31, so why the wait to the last minute to leave? 

I had a chance to dig into it with some medical organizations.  I don't know about other organizations but here is what I have been told.

1) key point, there is no wifi in Afghanistan.  Many of those volunteer people have access at best to a Sat phone and many areas those only work if you climb a mountain.  So they are not working with current and updated information at all.  

2) Many of the medical personnel (probably others, my sample set is skewed towards them) are jaded, they have been told that the Allies are pulling out multiple times and it never happened.  Many of them at the beginning did pull out and watched the projects or patients that they were working on fall apart while they were gone.  One friend told me that she had done that when she was working with an 11 year old girl with a high risk pregnancy ( don't ask, the details are way worse than you are probably imagining).  They withdrew when Obama announced the withdrawal of combat troops in 2014.  She went back in and the girl had miscarried and was subsequently beaten to death.  Those people are not leaving unless they have no choice.

3) They have been officially told that the Afghan military was capable of resisting the Taliban and was trained and stable.  They believed it.  All those cheerful intelligence reports from our alphabet agencies and military?  That's what these people were being fed as well.  They believed them.  

4) worst of all, they had been repeatedly assured that when the Allies pulled out that they would not be at risk or left behind.  So even if it all went to shit they wouldn't be forgotten so it became a calculated risk.  I have a French former colleague and he is beside himself with rage at the US because we pulled the rug out from under our allies.  According to him and a friend in the UK I don't think the average USAsian has any clue how angry our allies are at Biden and us.  We f*cked them so hard and fast we should have put it up on PornHub and charged money for the video.  To our shame, the UK, French and Germans (and Japanese, though that's second hand maybe information so could be wrong) sent military and secret squirrel folks in throughout Afghanistan to get those folks out while the US has not.  Demonstrably has not as my French colleague has shared that French guys went in and pulled their citizens out of a region and their US colleagues (different village 30 miles away) have still not been heard from in the US but they had been talking via courier while they were still on the ground so they weren't dead when Kabul fell at least.  Their families have not heard from them. 

I'm really tired of this bullshit rape defense that they were asking for it because their metaphoric skirts were too short.  You had a bunch of people in a shitty part of the world trying to help people and our government and military left them to die so Biden could get a photo-op on 9/11.  

[Stuart Galbraith]

4 minutes ago, nitflegal said:

I had a chance to dig into it with some medical organizations.  I don't know about other organizations but here is what I have been told.

1) key point, there is no wifi in Afghanistan.  Many of those volunteer people have access at best to a Sat phone and many areas those only work if you climb a mountain.  So they are not working with current and updated information at all.  

2) Many of the medical personnel (probably others, my sample set is skewed towards them) are jaded, they have been told that the Allies are pulling out multiple times and it never happened.  Many of them at the beginning did pull out and watched the projects or patients that they were working on fall apart while they were gone.  One friend told me that she had done that when she was working with an 11 year old girl with a high risk pregnancy ( don't ask, the details are way worse than you are probably imagining).  They withdrew when Obama announced the withdrawal of combat troops in 2014.  She went back in and the girl had miscarried and was subsequently beaten to death.  Those people are not leaving unless they have no choice.

3) They have been officially told that the Afghan military was capable of resisting the Taliban and was trained and stable.  They believed it.  All those cheerful intelligence reports from our alphabet agencies and military?  That's what these people were being fed as well.  They believed them.  

4) worst of all, they had been repeatedly assured that when the Allies pulled out that they would not be at risk or left behind.  So even if it all went to shit they wouldn't be forgotten so it became a calculated risk.  I have a French former colleague and he is beside himself with rage at the US because we pulled the rug out from under our allies.  According to him and a friend in the UK I don't think the average USAsian has any clue how angry our allies are at Biden and us.  We f*cked them so hard and fast we should have put it up on PornHub and charged money for the video.  To our shame, the UK, French and Germans (and Japanese, though that's second hand maybe information so could be wrong) sent military and secret squirrel folks in throughout Afghanistan to get those folks out while the US has not.  Demonstrably has not as my French colleague has shared that French guys went in and pulled their citizens out of a region and their US colleagues (different village 30 miles away) have still not been heard from in the US but they had been talking via courier while they were still on the ground so they weren't dead when Kabul fell at least.  Their families have not heard from them. 

I'm really tired of this bullshit rape defense that they were asking for it because their metaphoric skirts were too short.  You had a bunch of people in a shitty part of the world trying to help people and our government and military left them to die so Biden could get a photo-op on 9/11.  

Spot on.

[nitflegal]

2 hours ago, rmgill said:

No, Democrats being all peace and love is about being nice.

 

Trump was more right on how to handle Iran than Biden has been. Biden is a continuation of the Obama foreign policy. So I expect US tax payers will be supplying funds to the Taliban in the form of cash payments. 

Everything else is you stating the obvious for why we should have stayed in some way shape or form, essentially agreeing with the Jacksonians and Hamiltonians. 

I'll ask a simple question that if Republicans had any ounce of courage and capability they would have already asked and answered; where is the list of Americans left behind and why is it not running at the end of every newscast.  I looked at GOP.com.  No list.  Plenty of banners asking for money and clips from Youtube.  Where is the list of 100+ names?  Where are the heart-wrenching biographies of some of them?  Where is the video on their daughter or parents tearfully asking who is going to get the US citizen out?  Where are the families of those left behind escorted by Republican elected officials outside the capitol and white house?  

[BansheeOne]

Because it wouldn't be a smart thing to do practically and politically, particularly after having criticized that the US handed lists of Americans in Kabul to the Taliban for the purpose of escorting them to the airport? That would be my guess. 

[Ivanhoe]

2 hours ago, Stuart Galbraith said:

Dubya squandered his goodwill on Iraq. The subsequent support by NATO for operations in Afghanistan shows nobody was unduly worried about that war.

https://no-pasaran.blogspot.com/2004/10/legend-of-squandered-sympathy.html

Quote

In the last two months … we have heard much of the legend of the squandered sympathy. According to this legend, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 the US enjoyed the heartfelt sympathy of the world, only to see this capital of goodwill frittered away by the successive faux pas of an inept and arrogant Bush administration and then definitively exhausted by the launching of an illegitimate war on Iraq in defiance of “world public opinion.”

 

Quote

 

In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, countless private individuals in western Europe undoubtedly felt sympathy with the victims and many saw fit to express it in small symbolic acts, such as the laying of flowers before the American embassy in Paris. Given the horror of the attacks, such reactions were, so to say, only human. What was more unusual and hence noteworthy, however, was that at the same time the attacks seemed to elicit from the very start a sort of paroxysm of — as an Austrian friend of mine aptly put it — anti-American “ventilating”. In the major media, moreover, the expressions of hatred and contempt for America quickly came to eclipse those of sympathy. An especially conspicuous case in point is provided by the influential French daily Le Monde.

This is ironic, since the legend of the squandered sympathy draws much of its inspiration and seeming plausibility from the headline of the front-page editorial that ran in Le Monde the day after the attacks: “We Are All Americans”. An article that appeared in the New York Times one year later made allusion to this seemingly well-intended, if rather bizarre, affirmation, only then to note that “the same writer” who coined it, Jean-Marie Colombani, had in the meanwhile ascertained that the solidarity it was supposed to express had been largely dissipated. It even seemed to Mr. Colombani that just a year on “we have all become anti-American” (New York Times, September 12, 2002). [I.e., before the Iraq war was even decided upon!]

 

 

https://no-pasaran.blogspot.com/2021/09/never-forget-europes-reactions-to-9-11.html

 

Quote

Befuddled, I headed out into the corridor and called my parents, and after answering, my mom said I should talk to my dad. I listened incredulously as my father explained that planes had been deliberately flown into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and that both Twin Towers had collapsed.

Needless to say, I headed back to the dining car in another state of mind, totally closed off and unable to communicate with anyone.

At one point, three or four members of some state-owned company (they may have been EDF) entered the dining car. Although they were discussing the day's events, they were obviously heading to Paris to demonstrate against the government, and during their conversation, I overheard one of them making a joke (sic). With a snicker, he said "Ils l'ont fait exprès pour saboter notre manifestation" (They [obviously meaning the Americans] did it on purpose, in order to sabotage our demonstration). Alhough the others barely laughed at what was obviously an instance of sophisticated humor à la française (smiles were in order, though), the comment should give a better idea of the real state of friendship harbored towards America then the presumed one extant in the myth of the squandered sympathy.

 

 

 

 

[sunday]

Looks like French Leftists are, like the Spanish ones, creatures of hate.

[Stuart Galbraith]

Well, Europe isn't French, despite De Gaulles best efforts.

This is an alternative perspective that suggests it was indeed Iraq that was the problem.

 https://time.com/4112746/paris-attacks-us-september-911-terrorism/

[nitflegal]

1 hour ago, BansheeOne said:

Because it wouldn't be a smart thing to do practically and politically, particularly after having criticized that the US handed lists of Americans in Kabul to the Taliban for the purpose of escorting them to the airport? That would be my guess. 

Dammit, I had a whole head of steam built up and you threw facts and reason at me.  Jerk.

[rmgill]

2 hours ago, nitflegal said:

I'll ask a simple question that if Republicans had any ounce of courage and capability they would have already asked and answered; where is the list of Americans left behind and why is it not running at the end of every newscast.  I looked at GOP.com.  No list.  Plenty of banners asking for money and clips from Youtube.  Where is the list of 100+ names?  Where are the heart-wrenching biographies of some of them?  Where is the video on their daughter or parents tearfully asking who is going to get the US citizen out?  Where are the families of those left behind escorted by Republican elected officials outside the capitol and white house?  

First of all. OPSEC. Duh. 

There is stuff happening back channel. The folks getting out on the Pineapple Express weren't going to announce that to the world so that the Taliban or anyone else had intel on who was who. 

[rmgill]

26 minutes ago, Stuart Galbraith said:

Well, Europe isn't French, despite De Gaulles best efforts.

Good will you say? Sorry, you know what my response to British Leftist over things like this is? It violates all manner of probity on this board. 

https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/news-photo/an-effigy-of-u-s-president-george-w-bush-is-toppled-at-news-photo/2747797

Stuart, you want to talk about good will? Talk to your countrymen. 

[sunday]

31 minutes ago, rmgill said:

First of all. OPSEC. Duh. 

There is stuff happening back channel. The folks getting out on the Pineapple Express weren't going to announce that to the world so that the Taliban or anyone else had intel on who was who. 

https://bayourenaissanceman.blogspot.com/2021/09/afghanistan-update-3.html

 

27 minutes ago, rmgill said:

Good will you say? Sorry, you know what my response to British Leftist over things like this is? It violates all manner of probity on this board. 

https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/news-photo/an-effigy-of-u-s-president-george-w-bush-is-toppled-at-news-photo/2747797

Stuart, you want to talk about good will? Talk to your countrymen. 

Yeah, bunch of classy chaps; https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-22145306