FT

*****CHUCKLE*****

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRuCPS_-_IA

*****CHUCKLE*****

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NshQKDfFPlw

*****CHUCKLE*****

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3cQNkIrg-Tk

*****CHUCKLE*****

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dXR5Dk8YNw

Happy
People who LOVE their country

I'm sorry you people are too stupid to face reality.

Floridatexan wrote:
I'm sorry you people are too stupid to face reality.

LOL! Coming from an individual who is obsessed with a long gone President that's just too funny! Talk about too stupid to face reality.

Yep it's always FT and Z saying I am obsessed with
Obama, but at least he is still on the job screwing things up. W has been gone 5 years and 9 months.

gatorfan wrote:

Floridatexan wrote:
I'm sorry you people are too stupid to face reality.

LOL! Coming from an individual who is obsessed with a long gone President that's just too funny! Talk about too stupid to face reality.

What part of WAR CRIMINAL escapes you? What part of DESTROYING THE ECONOMY do you not understand? Every single time Bush opened his mouth, he was LYING. Same for "POPPY". They're all lying SLIME.

War criminal?
What does that make Obama
Then?

Floridatexan wrote:

gatorfan wrote:

Floridatexan wrote:
I'm sorry you people are too stupid to face reality.

LOL! Coming from an individual who is obsessed with a long gone President that's just too funny! Talk about too stupid to face reality.

What part of WAR CRIMINAL escapes you?  What part of DESTROYING THE ECONOMY do you not understand?  Every single time Bush opened his mouth, he was LYING.  Same for "POPPY".  They're all lying SLIME.

Your hypocrisy is astounding but expected given your ignorance of reality. I have yet to see you hammer Obama on ANY issue including those where his actions and policies were identical Bush. Which are many by the way. Those two are far more alike than different so remember that every time you holler about long gone Bush.

ROFLMAO (again)

gatorfan wrote:

Floridatexan wrote:

gatorfan wrote:

Floridatexan wrote:
I'm sorry you people are too stupid to face reality.

LOL! Coming from an individual who is obsessed with a long gone President that's just too funny! Talk about too stupid to face reality.

What part of WAR CRIMINAL escapes you?  What part of DESTROYING THE ECONOMY do you not understand?  Every single time Bush opened his mouth, he was LYING.  Same for "POPPY".  They're all lying SLIME.

Your hypocrisy is astounding but expected given your ignorance of reality. I have yet to see you hammer Obama on ANY issue including those where his actions and policies were identical Bush. Which are many by the way. Those two are far more alike than different so remember that every time you holler about long gone Bush.

ROFLMAO (again)

That's because Obama is black.....not biracial.

Sal wrote:

gatorfan wrote:

I have yet to see you hammer Obama on ANY issue including those where his actions and policies were identical Bush. Which are many by the way. Those two are far more alike than different so remember that every time you holler about long gone Bush.

Don't be ridiculous.

We were told by Hillary just weeks ago that the Obama philosophy is, "Don't do stupid shit.".

Clearly, the Bush administration had a philosophy that was the polar opposite of Mr. Obama's.

Not if you're able to objectively examine results and ignore the rhetoric. The results are unmistakably similar.

PkrBum wrote:

Sal wrote:

gatorfan wrote:

I have yet to see you hammer Obama on ANY issue including those where his actions and policies were identical Bush. Which are many by the way. Those two are far more alike than different so remember that every time you holler about long gone Bush.

Don't be ridiculous.

We were told by Hillary just weeks ago that the Obama philosophy is, "Don't do stupid shit.".

Clearly, the Bush administration had a philosophy that was the polar opposite of Mr. Obama's.

Not if you're able to objectively examine results and ignore the rhetoric. The results are unmistakably similar.

Care to elaborate?

Patriot act / extension and ndaa

Erosion of civil liberties / erosion of civil liberties (including assassination and indefinite detention of citizens)

Information gathering on citizens / information gathering on citizens

Medicare prescription / obamacaid

Lax border security / lax border security

Iraq / Iraq surge and poorly planned exit

Afghanistan war / afghanistan war

Gitmo / gitmo

bombing muslim nations / bombing more muslim nations

Feed the mic / feed the mic

No trade reform / no trade reform

Extraordinary economic and monetary interventions / evolutionary economic and monetary measures

Cozy collusion w big corps, banks, wall st / cozy collusion w big corps, banks, wall st

And much more if I had been keeping a list.

PACEDOG#1 wrote:Happy
People who LOVE their country

No doubt there are pictures of Nazi Germans, Fascist Italians, and Imperialist Japanese families showing the same, stupid, self-satisfied smiles.
And all of them passionately loving their countries.

So what?

PkrBum wrote:Patriot act / extension and ndaa

Erosion of civil liberties / erosion of civil liberties (including assassination and indefinite detention of citizens)

Information gathering on citizens / information gathering on citizens

Medicare prescription / obamacaid

Lax border security / lax border security

Iraq / Iraq surge and poorly planned exit

Afghanistan war / afghanistan war

Gitmo / gitmo

bombing muslim nations / bombing more muslim nations

Feed the mic / feed the mic

No trade reform / no trade reform

Extraordinary economic and monetary interventions / evolutionary economic  and monetary measures

Cozy collusion w big corps, banks, wall st / cozy collusion w big corps, banks, wall st

And much more if I had been keeping a list.

Great comment! Of course you realize the flaws relate to Bush and Obama. Why do we keep electing such assholes?

by Wordslinger Today at 12:45 pm
PACEDOG#1 wrote:
“
Happy
People who LOVE their country
”
No doubt there are pictures of Nazi Germans, Fascist Italians, and Imperialist Japanese families showing the same, stupid, self-satisfied smiles.
And all of them passionately loving their countries.

So what?
----
I'm sure you know lots about it.

From FORBES in 2012:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/lorenthompson/2012/09/05/compared-with-bush-obamas-defense-record-looks-real-good/2/

Last week, Mitt Romney became the first Republican presidential nominee since 1952 to leave America’s warfighters out of his acceptance speech. He didn’t even mention the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Only days later, President Obama delivered his last weekly address before the Democratic National Convention, and took the opposite approach: the entire address was about the sacrifices made by U.S. warfighters in recent conflicts, and how much the nation owes them in return.

What explains this striking reversal of roles in the remarks of the Republican and Democratic standard-bearers? Isn’t national security supposed to be a strong point for the GOP, and a weak one for the Democrats? Not anymore. For the first time since the Vietnam War ended, Democrats have a better story to tell on defense than Republicans do.

The reason why is that Mr. Obama’s predecessor in the White House, George W. Bush, did a thoroughly incompetent job of managing the military and defending the nation. Obama’s national-security record looks much better in comparison. That isn’t a partisan assessment, it’s the way history will remember the two presidents. But it also isn’t necessarily the way voters see them today, because the press of current events tends to obscure just how bad Bush’s tenure as Commander in Chief was, and how good a job Obama has done of fixing the military problems he inherited.

So as the Democratic National Convention unfolds, let’s take a little trip down Memory Lane and recall why Republicans have little incentive to bring up the subject of defense in the presidential campaign. This isn’t just an academic exercise, because Governor Romney has embraced many of the same policies and personalities that defined the Bush defense posture. And like candidate Bush a dozen years ago, Romney probably doesn’t grasp where those policies and personalities might take the nation.

When George W. Bush was inaugurated in 2001, he inherited a nation at peace. The peace looked so durable that military leaders were projecting a “strategic pause” lasting 20 years. Bush proposed in his signature campaign speech that the Pentagon take advantage of the lull in tensions to “skip a generation of technology” in order to construct “a new architecture of American defense for decades to come.”


The $291 billion defense budget that the Clinton Administration left him amounted to only 3% of the economy. But America’s economy was so big at the end of Clinton’s presidency — 32% of global output — that the budget represented a third of worldwide military spending. America thus seemed destined to dominate the global scene for the foreseeable future.

Eight years later, as Bush prepared to leave office, U.S. military spending had ballooned to nearly half of the global total, but America’s share of economic output had fallen to less than a quarter. The nation had suffered the most traumatic attack by a foreign enemy in its history, and seven years after the event the terrorist leaders who launched that attack were still at large. America’s military had come very close to suffering defeat at the hands of ill-equipped insurgents in Iraq, and the war in Afghanistan had become the longest in U.S. history.

Some conservatives have attempted to construct a revisionist narrative of this period minimizing Bush’s responsibility for everything that went wrong. But an honest assessment of his record reveals a chronicle of fundamental mistakes that left the nation far weaker than anyone could have imagined on his inauguration day.

The most basic flaw was an inability to grasp the nature of threats facing the nation, what military professionals might call “situational awareness.” Bush’s campaign speech made little mention of terrorism, and despite numerous warnings after taking office, he was slow to respond to the challenge posed by Al Qaeda. Once the 9-11 attacks occurred, though, the administration switched from distraction to obsession, greatly overestimating the danger (I heard defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s top military advisor say Al Qaeda was more dangerous than the Soviet Union had been).

The Bush Administration’s understanding of threats did not improve much with time. It spent a lot of time worrying about Iranian and North Korean missile capabilities that never materialized, while repeatedly misjudging conditions in the places where it chose to initiate military action. It failed to accurately assess the threat, or lack of threat, posed by Saddam Hussein. It failed to correctly interpret the meaning of early insurgent activity in Iraq. It failed to understand the importance of unconventional enemy tactics such as the use of improvised explosive devices.

Lack of awareness led to a second flaw, lack of preparedness. Secretary Rumsfeld told the 9-11 commission he could not recall addressing any aspect of terrorism prior to 9-11, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said he received no taskings on the subject. Observers noted a similar lack of preparedness in the intelligence community and Department of Justice. This problem too did not go away after 9-11. The Bush Administration wasn’t any more prepared to deal with a protracted insurgency in Iraq in 2003 than it was to deal with Hurricane Katrina in 2005.


A third Bush defect was the failure to develop strategic concepts suited to emerging threats. On the one hand, Bush’s advisors clung to fashionable ideas about “military transformation” long after it should have been obvious that needs had changed. On the other hand, the administration chose to interpret the terrorist challenge through the filter of Cold War experiences, and thus turned what should have been a focused counter-terror campaign into a nation-building crusade in Southwest Asia. Its grandiose goals transformed a manageable challenge into Mission Impossible.

A fourth problem apparent during much of Bush’s tenure was weak management of military institutions. Wars are always messy affairs, but Bush’s subordinates at the Pentagon did a poor job of running even routine processes on the home front. Billions of dollars were spent on technology initiatives irrelevant to overseas contingencies, while the equipment inventories of the military services were neglected until they became decrepit. Military pay and benefits were allowed to drift far out of alignment with civilian compensation rates, so much so that their skyrocketing costs endangered the viability of the All Volunteer Force.

By 2008, the $291 billion defense budget left to Bush by Bill Clinton had grown to a staggering $666 billion annually, contributing to a near doubling of the national debt on Bush’s watch. But the vast increase in spending on national security had produced surprisingly meager results. Osama bin Laden was still at large, Afghanistan was threatened by a resurgent Taliban, and Iraq was awash in sectarian violence. The military had gotten bigger, but its ability to defeat unconventional adversaries was very much in question, while its capacity to deter state-based threats had eroded due to inattention.

George W. Bush’s disastrous run as Commander in Chief was the main reason why Barack Obama was elected president in 2008. Obama saw that voters wanted out of Iraq, and promised them the early cessation of combat operations that other candidates were reluctant to offer. But he proposed far more, describing in his own signature campaign pronouncement on national security the new architecture of American defense that Bush had failed to deliver. It was an architecture designed to be more sustainable than Bush’s barely coherent posture, both in fiscal and political terms.


Obama and his advisors understood that the nation-building aspects of the Bush strategy were too ambitious given the cultural divisions and corruption in Afghanistan and Iraq. Recognizing that Iraq never should have been invaded in the first place, Obama focused on stabilizing the military situation sufficiently to facilitate an early U.S. withdrawal while doubling down in Afghanistan where the decade-long crisis had begun. However, he imposed a strict timetable on the surge of forces into Afghanistan, because he knew the American public would not support an endless U.S. presence there.

The core objective of the new administration was to destroy the Al Qaeda network that had perpetrated the 9-11 attacks, a goal that the Bush Administration had been distracted from by its ill-conceived campaign in Iraq. That led Obama to step up drone attacks on terrorist elements sheltering in Pakistan despite the political fallout, a move that produced impressive results. Obama also assimilated a key lesson from the Bush years: unconventional enemies are often best countered with unconventional responses, which in the case of terrorists means using special forces often and imaginatively.

The clearest indication that Obama’s approach worked was the killing of Osama bin Laden last year in his Pakistani sanctuary. There again, the president was willing to risk political fallout in order to eliminate a global symbol of terrorism. The Bush Administration’s failure to accomplish that objective during its tenure was a continuous reminder to extremists everywhere of how successful terrorism could be, so Obama’s ability to finally dispatch bin Laden was an important milestone in the war on terror.

Obama’s willingness to take big risks isn’t the only unexpected feature of his style as Commander in Chief. He has also been willing to stick with policies adopted by his predecessors when they seemed to make sense. The U.S. approach to Iran, for instance, hasn’t changed much under Obama. And Obama confounded critics by keeping defense spending high rather than using the Pentagon as a piggybank to balance the budget the way Bill Clinton did. But there have been major changes in the internal composition of the military budget as costly weapons programs inherited from the Bush years were scaled back.

The main thrust in Obama-era management of the military, under both Robert Gates and Leon Panetta, has been to get better results for all the money being spent. Numerous efficiency moves have been launched within the military establishment aimed at saving money or improving performance, and while they haven’t all panned out, they demonstrate a focus on results that often seemed to be lacking in the Bush years. It is too soon to say whether the administration’s new “Asia-Pacific” strategy is a major change, but it’s pretty clear that in other ways, President Obama has made America’s military a more effective instrument of national policy.