The Obama Years- A GOP love story

[CRedskinsRule]

President Obama is about to give a statement on it. Whether it will be Hallmark condolences and fluff, or substantive and confirmable actions will let us further this discussion, I would think.

Edit:
I would give the President a decent mark. I think he addressed several points. I don't think it went far enough, but I can also accept that he wasn't going to.

[Chico23231]

Interesting tidbit of the plane crash...did anyone hear how the President first heard about the incident? Him and Putin were on the phone together yesterday morning about the sanctions and Putin mentioned it to Obama as the convo was ending. Just amazing.

Also amazing is the rumor the plane black boxes are already in Russia. why is that?

[Chico23231]

BBC News - MH17 crash: Ukraine releases alleged intercepts

Pretty damning evidence.

Cossacks are an ethic group basically bred for military combat. They pretty much come out the womb ready to fight. Kinda badasses

[tshile]

The evidence is piling up as to who did it... the only important remaining question to me is whether or not it was an accident.

If they misidentified a plane in a war zone and took action, then we should be looking to bring charges to those responsible and whatever punishment the international courts can do.

If it was intentional then it's going to be hard to separate Russia from the people that pushed the trigger... things could get quite messy...

[CRedskinsRule]

Sometimes headlines are misleading, but in this case it's a direct quote from the Prime Minister of Turkey, and a bit crazy for a President who came in to make the US more "likeable" in the world

I no longer talk to Obama: Turkey's Erdogan

[tshile]

Originally Posted by CRedskinsRule

Sometimes headlines are misleading, but in this case it's a direct quote from the Prime Minister of Turkey, and a bit crazy for a President who came in to make the US more "likeable" in the world

I no longer talk to Obama: Turkey's Erdogan

When you look at the information that's come from 'insiders' recently, including books, it's not all the surprising.

This president seems to be... absent when it comes to foreign policy issues.

[HailGreen28]

[NC_Skins]

I get a chuckle out of the people for bashing Obama for how's he's handled the plane being shot down. Let's revisit history to back in the Cold War when Russia shot down a Korean plane. How did the glorious Ronald Reagan handle this? I'll let Jon Stewart sum this up.


https://screen.yahoo.com/comedy-cent...0755.html?vp=1

[Slingin Sammy 33]

Originally Posted by NC_Skins

I get a chuckle out of the people for bashing Obama for how's he's handled the plane being shot down. Let's revisit history to back in the Cold War when Russia shot down a Korean plane. How did the glorious Ronald Reagan handle this? I'll let Jon Stewart sum this up.


https://screen.yahoo.com/comedy-cent...0755.html?vp=1

You and Stewart must have no historical knowledge of Reagan's economic, military and political actions that ultimately destroyed the USSR. Let's also remember the USSR then and now are completely different. Reagan didn't want to launch into a full scale war with the Soviets when he knew the economic pressure, along with the US military build-up and threat of SDI were working to destroy the USSR....without the sacrifice of tens of thousands of American lives that would've been lost in an all-out war with them.

Contrast Reagan's actions prior to KAL 007 with Obama's open-mike statement to having more "flexibility" to work with Putin and the USSR after the 2012 election and you see the result is an aggressive Russia that has no fear whatsoever of a strong US response to their aggressive actions in the region. US weakness only emboldens our enemies and those that want to expand their power through evil and aggression against their neighbors.

[Chico23231]

Originally Posted by Slingin Sammy 33

You and Stewart must have no historical knowledge of Reagan's economic, military and political actions that ultimately destroyed the USSR. Let's also remember the USSR then and now are completely different. Reagan didn't want to launch into a full scale war with the Soviets when he knew the economic pressure, along with the US military build-up and threat of SDI were working to destroy the USSR....without the sacrifice of tens of thousands of American lives that would've been lost in an all-out war with them.

Contrast Reagan's actions prior to KAL 007 with Obama's open-mike statement to having more "flexibility" to work with Putin and the USSR after the 2012 election and you see the result is an aggressive Russia that has no fear whatsoever of a strong US response to their aggressive actions in the region. US weakness only emboldens our enemies and those that want to expand their power through evil and aggression against their neighbors.

SS33 you sum it up well. Reagan was extremely strong against Russia, I thought everybody knew that...

[NC_Skins]

Originally Posted by Slingin Sammy 33

You and Stewart must have no historical knowledge of Reagan's economic, military and political actions that ultimately destroyed the USSR. Let's also remember the USSR then and now are completely different. Reagan didn't want to launch into a full scale war with the Soviets when he knew the economic pressure, along with the US military build-up and threat of SDI were working to destroy the USSR....without the sacrifice of tens of thousands of American lives that would've been lost in an all-out war with them.

Contrast Reagan's actions prior to KAL 007 with Obama's open-mike statement to having more "flexibility" to work with Putin and the USSR after the 2012 election and you see the result is an aggressive Russia that has no fear whatsoever of a strong US response to their aggressive actions in the region. US weakness only emboldens our enemies and those that want to expand their power through evil and aggression against their neighbors.

First off, I'm merely commenting about Reagan's/Obama's response to a plane shot down. I don't recall formulating a stance that Reagan was weak with Russia, but I can guarantee you that he would not have done ANYTHING about the invasion of Ukraine. Did they do anything with Afghanistan? Nope. Well, they did train and fund Mujahideen fighters, which end up turning around and being some of the same guys that caused 9/11, but that's another story.

Nobody, and I mean NOBODY (Reagan/Romney/Bush/etc) would be sending troops to Ukraine to fight off an invading Russian army. First off, we can't afford it. We are to our eyeballs in debt, and simply cannot afford another war anytime soon. Secondly, Russia still has nukes, and no matter how bad we could wipe the floor with Russia, at the end, would you trust a lunatic like Putin with his finger on a nuke? Nope.

Also, I'd say the USSR had more to do with their collapse than Reagan or the US. The USSR invested all their money into military instead of opening up the economy and letting it flourish. (which is what we did) Hey, it's kind of the route we are heading down now.

Putin has brought some prosperity back to Russia, but he's still a old KGB man with dreams of a unified USSR. The bad news for him is even if he did get back the USSR, it will NEVER EVER reach the might they once had. All Putin is doing now is cutting economic strings to his country and eventually the oligarchs in Russia will turn on him.

I'm no Obama supporter, but I'm not sure what you all expect Obama to do? At the end of the day, Ukraine isn't a valued resource for us so the juice isn't worth the squeeze.

[tshile]

Originally Posted by NC_Skins

I'm no Obama supporter, but I'm not sure what you all expect Obama to do? At the end of the day, Ukraine isn't a valued resource for us so the juice isn't worth the squeeze.

This has been my question from the start.

When you finally get people to stop speaking in grand and ambiguous terms you find out not very many people have any actionable ideas that's are all that different than what is currently going on.

It's growing tiring watching how people react to this stuff in the media (politicians and talking heads) and how so many people latch onto it and join in...

[tshile]

Dianne Feinstein publicly said today that the world would probably very much appreciate an increase in President Obama's attention...

I'm far from an Obama basher... but when your own party leaders are publicly calling you out for not giving two craps about foreign policy issues... after gate's book, and other things that have been leaked to the media...

Pretty bad.

PS - Anyone taking this to mean something about Kerry/Clinton? You want one of them in the oval office after all this?

[tshile]

I think the point was he took 4 days before making a national address and those on the right lambasted obama for not saying anything (some in this thread...) less than 24 hours citing... regan's response as an example of how to handle things.

in his own memoirs he says he was sad to have had to deal wait it - because he was looking forward to the last 3 days of his vacation.

that aside...

iraq warned of isis in august of 2013. in january 2014 isis captured fallujah and Obama responded by clearly not taking it seriously.

this entire administration has continued to drop the ball in foreign policy issues.

[CRedskinsRule]

Reagan's era dealt with wired phones, newspapers, and commodore 64s(well maybe IBM mainframes) not high speed video feeds, instantaneous news feeds from multiple sources, and Intel computers dealing with terabytes of data.