Sarah Palin, Republican Vice Presidential Candidate

[Charismatic]

Silenus, I like the fact that you like to type out Barack's full name.

[Tyche]

You drink too much damn Pepsi.

It's been established that conservatives are coke drinkers.

[Silenus]

I am hardly a schill for McCain. I described him as non-conservative, old-school party politics at its worst. Like what gave us Bob Dole.

But to say his experience has been overshadowed by Obama is some serious Kool-aid drinking. You were kidding, right?

If we are the richest nation in the world right now, how does that make us infallible? Wouldn't the opposite be more likely? That we would be too busy in the rat race to notice what some tin horn dictator is doing on the other side of the world until it becomes relevant to our interests?

We can't find Obama. Oops, Osama. We think we might know which hemisphere he's in. We stiffed people that turned over bad guys instead of paying ransoms that we promised. We pissed off Pakistan. We do a lot of things wrong.

Are you really surprised that satellite intel was gathered but nobody could correctly source it? The lack of humint in the CIA is legendary; millions of pictures, three dudes that speak a little Arabic.

But if it makes you sleep better at night blaming bad old George Bush and Dick Cheney (HALLIBURTON!!!) because the real terrorists, the islamofacists that would cut off your head and put the video on youtube as a recruiting poster, go for it.

[Beckwin]

you are so fucking retarded.

i hope you get shot.

why do we have a military littered with little neocon propagandist faggots like yourself? all you aim to do is make war to fulfill your bloodlust while fucking up everything else for the rest of us. great job.

mccain is an angry old man who is still bitter about losing vietnam so he's trying to overcompensate in trying to claim everything about iraq is a victory. he should've died in hanoi imo; the american people would be much better off.

[aurik]

I love it when people say "Hussein" or "BHO" when referring to Obama. This cheap appeal to xenophobia makes it very easy for me to dismiss them. It is essentially playing the race card, and you know what, I live in 2008, not 1950.

[aurik]

And you're on the edge of trolling again.

[archibaldcrane]

I think that's why republicans like to sort of break the war in half when talking about it.

I think it's more because the pre-surge "war efforts" in Iraq are an embarrassment of forced intelligence failures, flawed foreign policy, and counter-productive terrorism fighting.

Republicans like to break the war in half so that they can conveniently forget about the first half and just say "see? we did good!"

[Beckwin]

john SIDNEY mccain talks about bombing the people of iran for fun, gee i fuckin wonder why the whole middle east hates us. THANKS JOHN

he also is intent on saber-rattling when it comes to russia, even though he's in the pocket of georgia and gave them false assurance leading up to georgia's military action in s. ossetia. the man is a warmonger plain and simple.

simple would describe his vp as well. instead of picking anyone with a clue, he went for a clueless fundie who wants women to pay for their own rape kit and claims she's an expert on russia because she can see them from her house. what a dumb fucking cunt, last I checked if mccain really wanted to court the vagina vote there was elizabeth dole and hutchinson and condi rice, three competent republican females. but mccain has no judgment as we can see the palin pick is backfiring and america is seeing all over the nightly news how dumb she is.

[Olo401]

Saying, oh, yeah, the surge worked, big deal

The escalation didn't do shit - Iraqis still have sporadic electrical power and basic services, and their political leaders are no closer to any kind of meaningful legislative breakthrough than they were two years ago.

It was the changes in the attitude of our military and how they interacted with the Iraqis (i.e. stop treating them like animals i.e. Abu Ghareb) that made a difference. It was the Awakening - Iraqis getting sick of being used by Al Qaeda and getting tired of us being in their country - that made the difference. The number of troops doesn't matter. It's how they treat people that does.

[Elvis]

But if it makes you sleep better at night blaming bad old George Bush and Dick Cheney (HALLIBURTON!!!) because the real terrorists, the islamofacists that would cut off your head and put the video on youtube as a recruiting poster, go for it.

Who is sympathizing with the TERRORISTS?

You're such a fucking tool. This bullshit rhetoric is so 2003.

I am advocating that we understand why people hate us so much. It's not because they hate/envy our freedom and liberty, and our tears of democracy. It's because we fuck up their country and kill their people - indiscriminately.

[Silenus]

you are so fucking retarded.

i hope you get shot.

why do we have a military littered with little neocon propagandist faggots like yourself? all you aim to do is make war to fulfill your bloodlust while fucking up everything else for the rest of us. great job.

mccain is an angry old man who is still bitter about losing vietnam so he's trying to overcompensate in trying to claim everything about iraq is a victory. he should've died in hanoi imo; the american people would be much better off.

I'm out now, thanks. I was under fire back in '90-91.

It is odd that most of the military is conservative, considering that most of them are pretty poor. Odd how values and principal can outweigh demagogery.

Oh, and I quoted this because someone said I was unraveling earlier and this made me lol.

[Tyche]

I think it's more because the pre-surge "war efforts" in Iraq are an embarrassment of forced intelligence failures, flawed foreign policy, and counter-productive terrorism fighting.

Republicans like to break the war in half so that they can conveniently forget about the first half and just say "see? we did good!"

Well that is absolutely correct, but, correlate it to sports (I love correlating politics to sports!). If the Patriots play the Sandpeople and the gameplan for the first half is to stop the tenacious RB that the Sandpeople have, and you do but are still getting beat, you have to change gameplans. The second half you make adjustments and it's almost like a different game. Same game, yes, same results, no....It's a really general correlation, and you're completely right in your assertions, but I also understand why you can sort of break the war in half. Did anyone catch McCain tell Obama that he didn't know the difference between a tactic and a strategy. It's sort of that deal. They had a strategy going in, and succeeded at that strategy, but that didn't win. Tactics had to be adjusted.

[Silenus]

People hate us because of many things. Principal among the reasons in Islamofascist land is our love of Israel. Chief, though, would be our refusal to bend our knee to sharia law.

And dude, either banninate me or not. Your pitiful attempts at curbing my meaningful and insightful rhetoric have failed. I'm not trolling. I just don't agree with you. Get over it. Most people don't agree with you. Just here, on this particular website, most do, and some pretend to.

See how that works?

[Xno Kappa]

why do we have a military littered with little neocon propagandist faggots like yourself? all you aim to do is make war to fulfill your bloodlust while fucking up everything else for the rest of us. great job.

He more then likely was a fob ranger who never once left the wire and never saw reality. Pushing paper safely in his happy little green zone while quick as shit to wear a combat patch when he got back to the states. No different then the same idiot privates who wanna "get some action" and then freeze the fuck up when shit hits the fan.

There's a lot of these in the army unfortunately, little faggots who've done absolutely nothing down-range yet wanna be cool so they bullshit up a storm to their friends. Repeating stories they hear from soldiers who DID do something while insinuating they were part of it all.

[Beckwin]

too bad you didn't catch a SCUD in the mouth.

most of the younger/lower ranks in the military are liberal and obama has more active-duty military donations than mccain. gee i wonder why O WAIT THEY'RE NOT ALL DUMBFUCKS LIKE YOU and they can see the futility of the war and see that john SIDNEY mccain doesnt give a fuck about them after they get out; he voted against the new GI bill and veterans benefits.

johnny mac didn't have to worry about money post-military; he dumped his cripple wife to marry a sugar momma to buy him 8 houses and 13 cars and have her daddy hook him up in AZ politics as a carpetbagging douchebag.

[archibaldcrane]

Most of the military knows how to follow orders and adapts to the culture of the military, which is "find the politician who says 'support the troops' the most and doesn't seem like a pussy". They of course don't notice how conservatives slash their veterans benefits or send them to die on wars of dubious merit.

It baffles me too, and it's in my own family.

[ZarakiKujata]

Why would we support Hussein against the Ayatollah Khomenei? You need to ask 70 some odd Americans held at the embassy for 444 days that question.

The enemy of my enemy is my friend. For now.

But really, you people dance around stuff like crazy. First the surge was successful. Then we only met our own goals and nothing was successful. Then surrendering in the face of armed aggression isn't cowardice. Then we only did what we did to cause what is happening to happen, and it isn't happening.

Yes, our enemy is more clever than we are. Yes, he is more resourceful than we are. He may yet win this war. But for now, and for the past seven years, we have held the wolves at bay.

Something tells me our enemy will not be so cowed by Barack Hussein Obama, no matter how well he speaks.

You are aware that we gave arms to Iran too? The goal was to weaken both of them equally since we disliked both.

Also, I take umbrage that you are denigrating our fighting men and women by saying that Al-Qaeda is more clever and resourceful then they are.

[Beckwin]

my meaningful and insightful rhetoric... I'm not trolling.

definitely trolling. this is proof.

[Dimmauk]

The reason the Surge "Worked". Ask the countries around Iraq how the Surge worked out for them.


Satellite images show ethnic cleanout in Iraq

By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor Fri Sep 19, 4:19 PM ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Satellite images taken at night show heavily Sunni Arab neighborhoods of Baghdad began emptying before a U.S. troop surge in 2007, graphic evidence of ethnic cleansing that preceded a drop in violence, according to a report published on Friday.


The images support the view of international refugee organizations and Iraq experts that a major population shift was a key factor in the decline in sectarian violence, particularly in the Iraqi capital, the epicenter of the bloodletting in which hundreds of thousands were killed.

Minority Sunni Arabs were driven out of many neighborhoods by Shi'ite militants enraged by the bombing of the Samarra mosque in February 2006. The bombing, blamed on the Sunni militant group al Qaeda, sparked a wave of sectarian violence.

"By the launch of the surge, many of the targets of conflict had either been killed or fled the country, and they turned off the lights when they left," geography professor John Agnew of the University of California Los Angeles, who led the study, said in a statement.

"Essentially, our interpretation is that violence has declined in Baghdad because of intercommunal violence that reached a climax as the surge was beginning," said Agnew, who studies ethnic conflict.

Some 2 million Iraqis are displaced within Iraq, while 2 million more have sought refuge in neighboring Syria and Jordan. Previously religiously mixed neighborhoods of Baghdad became homogenized Sunni or Shi'ite Muslim enclaves.

The study, published in the journal Environment and Planning A, provides more evidence of ethnic conflict in Iraq, which peaked just before U.S. President George W. Bush ordered the deployment of about 30,000 extra U.S. troops.

The extent to which the troop build-up helped halt Iraq's slide into sectarian civil war has been debated, particularly in the United States, with supporters of the surge saying it was the main contributing factor, and others arguing it was simply one of a number of factors.

"Our findings suggest that the surge has had no observable effect, except insofar as it has helped to provide a seal of approval for a process of ethno-sectarian neighborhood homogenization that is now largely achieved," Agnew's team wrote in their report.

Agnew's team used publicly available infrared night imagery from a weather satellite operated by the U.S. Air Force.

"The overall night light signature of Baghdad since the U.S. invasion appears to have increased between 2003 and 2006 and then declined dramatically from 20 March 2006 through 16 December 2007," their report said.

They said the night lights of Shi'ite-dominated Sadr City remained constant, as did lights in the Green Zone government and diplomatic compound in central Baghdad. Lights increased in the eastern New Baghdad district, another Shi'ite enclave.

Satellite studies have also been used to help document forced relocations in Myanmar and ethnic cleansing in Uganda.

[Silenus]

He more then likely was a fob ranger who never once left the wire and never saw reality. Pushing paper safely in his happy little green zone while quick as shit to wear a combat patch when he got back to the states. No different then the same idiot privates who wanna "get some action" and then freeze the fuck up when shit hits the fan.

There's a lot of these in the army unfortunately, little faggots who've done absolutely nothing down-range yet wanna be cool so they bullshit up a storm to their friends. Repeating stories they hear from soldiers who DID do something while insinuating they were part of it all.

Marine Corps. 2nd LAI. Combat Action Ribbon.

Otherwise, you were dead on.