The who will you be voting for Poll and Discussion Thread

[Plow]

This is a hawk.






This is not.

[Plow]

And your horse shit about it being the "2nd most aggressive blah blah" is as absurd and intentionally misleading as "this is the worst recovery since the last time we had an economic collapse this bad!"

[Plow]

OMG HE INHERITED 2 WARS AND GOT OUT OF ONE AND IS IN THE PROCESS OF GETTING OUT OF THE OTHER BUT NOT FAST ENOUGH, WTF STOP BEING SUCH A WARMONGER

[Andalusian girls]

oh oh right i'm talking to plow

[Plow]

oh oh right i'm talking to someone that doesn't fall for my bullshit and I have no legit argument

k

[Andalusian girls]

sorry your youtube arguments were so mind-boggling stupid i resorted to to the hominem

five times as many drone strikes as Bush in half the time for an effective rate of ten times as often. international, supra-semi-or illegal assassinations of foreign citizens into countries we are not at war with generally undertaken without their approval. a withdrawal plan from Iraq that, again, was Bush's plan. verbatim. wasn't any more hawkish or dovish than Bush it literally was what Bush was doing and would have done. a huge surge into Afghanistan and a time-table that, again, puts us into the country for six years.

you say he's "in the process of getting out", if you want to get out it doesn't take six years. if you want to get out you don't surge in. he wants to win, he's spoken at length about how Afghanistan is the good war, the war we should always have been fighting, the war Iraq distracted us from. nothing too dovish. then add Guantanamo not being closed despite him saying he would, consistently threatening Iran and Syria with military force while inflicting damaging sanctions upon the former, and military intervention in an entirely domestic dispute in Libya.

for the record i agree with most of Obama's foreign policy, it's largely been smart and effective and i wish it was even more proactive in the case of Syria, but to pretend it isn't aggressive is delusional. the hundreds and hundreds of drone strikes alone would make it aggressive.

[Plow]

why am I not surprised that the guy arguing that "we won't trade with you or give you free money if you don't stop doing this bullshit" is actively choosing war over diplomacy is also going to stand by and repeatedly spew his arguments that fighting a war we were already in, and getting out of another but not instantly the moment he got control with no care for future situation, are hawk moves

[Demosthenes11]

I don't understand how anyone can view continuous drone bombings that kill thousands of people as anything but an act of war.

[Andalusian girls]

why am I not surprised that the guy arguing that "we won't trade with you or give you free money if you don't stop doing this bullshit" is actively choosing war over diplomacy is also going to stand by and repeatedly spew his arguments that fighting a war we were already in, and getting out of another but not instantly the moment he got control with no care for future situation, are hawk moves

it's almost as though you're trying to say something

[Plow]

I don't understand how anyone can view continuous drone bombings that kill thousands of people as anything but an act of war.

wait wait wait

you're telling me that in fighting a war

he's committing acts of war?


this is my shocked face

[Plow]

fine, you want full neo-ism? here ya go

people gave lots of shits about Bush's drone policy

and Obama is quite hawkish. intervention in Libya + troops deployed to Africa to go Kony-hunting,

Neither of these implies a desire to go to war. In fact, both are efforts to prevent war, i.e. peacekeeping efforts.

a massive surge of troops and material into Afghanistan and a time-table for withdrawal that will have him committing us to 6 years of warfare in the country,

He didn't start a war here. He's not actively seeking ways to extend a war here. He's fighting a war he was handed. As I said, you're trying the "worst recovery since the last huge collapse" approach. If you want to argue that he hasn't tried diplomacy, or that you think instantly withdrawing all troops and approaching it exclusively through diplomacy would be a more effective means of dealing with Afghanistan, go right ahead.

Yeah, didn't think so.

following the Bush plan literally to the letter regarding withdrawal from Iraq,

In what way is using an established, thoroughly considered withdrawal "hawkish"? Because it was already ready to go for him?

I won't bother arguing what McCain would have done here, but if he had come in, followed said plan, and gotten us out of Iraq while leaving at least a reasonably stable situation behind, I think we'd all have been pleasantly surprised. We certainly wouldn't have pulled retarded shit like saying following the established pullout process was "hawkish."

crippling and extensive sanctions targeting Iran with the threat of a military strike ever present.

Did you know hawkish is in dictionaries now? Feel free to go look it up. It means the same thing it always has-- preferring military action over diplomacy.

You just described literally the exact opposite in attempt to portray Obama as hawkish.

Sorry, I'm sure it sucks when your strategy of "pretend to know what you're talking about, and pretend to be honest and respectful about it, and you can convince BG the sky is purple, or at worst get them to agree it's blurple" doesn't always stand up, but no.

You're outright lying through your teeth here and you know it. Diplomatic action with a war in the background as an absolute last resort is the exact opposite of what you're claiming it to be.

over five times as many drone strikes into foreign nations as Bush engaged in,

Yes, the number of counter-terrorism actions that avoid starting actual wars is clearly an indicator of his hawkishness.

Should I bother pointing out that you're including drone strikes in a country we're actually at war with? Or that the vast majority of the rest are in the utterly anarchic highlands around said country.

the assassination of a U.S. citizen without subjecting him to due trial,

Very war-mongery...

Guantanamo Bay still open.

Even more so.

he doesn't want to bomb Iran or intervene in Syria so he looks sane or moderate compared to some, and he inherited a lot of this mess, but he's still engaged in the second most muscular and aggressive deployment of American power abroad since Viet Nam (Dubya leading naturally)

So, you're telling me the guy that took over in the midst of 2 wars, massive uprisings worldwide related to both political development and economic hardship, and as big an underground war *AGAINST* us as ever, has had to engage in a lot of wartime actions?

Hey, guess what?

This is my shocked face.



I'd do the rest of your posts on this page but you're apparently not bright enough to grasp what I was saying so you just repeated the same shit a couple more times anyway.

[Demosthenes11]

wait wait wait

you're telling me that in fighting a war

he's committing acts of war?


this is my shocked face

oh are we at war with pakistan?

[Kuya]

I don't understand what plow's issue is.

[Plow]

oh are we at war with pakistan?

There's a few ways you can look at the pakistan actions. It's the one aspect I'd say is pretty brutal/hawkish. But it can be argued as not so, as well.

Look at it from this perspective:

We're definitely at war with the taliban and al quaeda. Pakistan is definitely, at the very least, letting them pitch a tent in the backyard, if not letting em sleep on the couch.

So, your choices are:

Leave them be. This is obviously the most peaceful approach.

Come to an agreement with Pakistan to allow you to fight said forces inside their territory. This is of course given the conclusion that diplomacy with the taliban and aq has failed. (protip: it has) I'm pretty sure this is what Obama aimed for, but it never officially happened and it's awfully hard to say how things went behind the scenes between the two countries under Bush or Obama.

Force Pakistan's hand-- they're not going to fuck with us militarily as long as we keep it... reasonable. (I hate to use that word to describe killing people.) This is basically what's happened now. It's pretty hawkish, and risky, at least until it basically became clear that Pakistan was going to allow it. Obama personally can point at Bush's escalation in his final year to argue he wasn't actually being so brash, but again since nothing official has happened it's a hard argument to support.

Insane hawk strategy... an ultimatum to a nuclear country to stop fucking around with the wrong crowd or we're coming in and taking control. If Cheney had truly been the one pulling all the strings, we probably would have seen this.


I'll admit, I didn't realize quite how high the numbers have gotten in Pakistan, but again, it certainly appears to be a continuation of a war that's already going on, and is avoiding actual troops on the ground in a full on confrontation with Pakistan itself.

[Plow]

I don't understand what plow's issue is.

A president that prefers war to diplomacy is a bad, bad thing. See: Bush.

Obama is not that.

[Acevalefor]

I don't understand what plow's issue is.

It's easy. Someone called Obama hawkish then proceeded to cite supporting material that was completely opposite of hawkish (not even sure if there is an antonym there).

[Kuya]

A president that prefers war to diplomacy is a bad, bad thing. See: Bush.

Obama is not that.

If your problem is with the moral judgements attached to the words, then simply cease seeing the word hawkish as bad so it doesn't conflict with your idea of Obama as inherently good.

It's easy. Someone called Obama hawkish then proceeded to cite supporting material that was completely opposite of hawkish (not even sure if there is an antonym there).

Obama's foreign policy with regards to the Middle East has been mostly aggressive.

[Andalusian girls]

as stimulating as pedantic forays into the unavian definition of hawkish can be substitute aggressive, muscular, oriented to violent military action and aggressive diplomacy that threatens war and engages in what historically is perceived as a belligerent act of war in sanctioning another country if you need to

what supporting material is the opposite of aggressive, hawkish, muscular, oriented to violence, etc exactly ? the massively increased amount of drone strikes ? the surge into Afghanistan ? the military intervention in Libya ?

[Andalusian girls]

and dovish is the antonym

[quannum]

are we at war with somalia, yemen or pakistan? or are we just taking air quality samples with our drones?

is our cold war with iran a war?