Political truths that are worth sharing but aren’t funny

I did/do. Had Congress looked to go Democratic and had I been in a swing state, I probably would have voted for him too, under the premise that Trump held in check by a Democratic Congress would have been better than the alternative.

Talk about deflection. You have no ideas on how Biden could be better here so you attack the reason for people voting for Biden?

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You must have missed my post ( 5 back from your post) where I gave a quick list of 5 things.

Might help if you expanded on this claim. I would generally assume the opposite of what you are saying-- That by clearing sanctions, Biden made NS2 a direct consequence of the invasion.

The economic fallout, the drop of the ruble, and the lost pipeline are now all tied to this specific war, rather than just East vs West disdain.

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None of those 5 things is remotely a ‘screw-up’

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Since the MASH thing blew up in the RIP thread, saw this on Reddit and felt like it’s worth a share.

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Exactly the sort of thing that belongs in this thread. Good job!

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You keep bringing up the Afghanistan withdrawal as if it was a failure, it wasn’t. I thought we already discussed this. Also, the 20 years of policy and occupation proved where we are weak, not the withdrawal.

On BBB. Since the conservative adoption of Reaganomics from the 80’s (with bipartisan support) government taxation and priority has unbalanced the economy in favor of the highest bracket at the cost of the lowest. We can fix that balance (painfully) or implode as a nation.

I think Biden is doing … as well as anyone on Russia. What do you think he should be doing?

Seems fine

Seem completely irrelevant to the Russian situation

As mentioned above, this was pulling the band-aid off quickly. That had been a disaster for years, and it was time to accept our loss and get out. Our error now is not forming diplomatic ties with the government of Afghanistan.

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So how does the withdrawal from Afghanistan effect the Ukraine/Russia invasion?

That’s easy, first it was a massive screw-up. Any other conclusion than that is a head-buried-in-the-sand-blame-it-on-the-predecessors-fantasy. Leaving billions of dollars of military hardware in the hands of terrorists is never anything other than a massive failure. The timeline was a massive screw-up. What was projected to be a months long advancement of the Taliban through the country was instead a weeklong parade through the country. Watching people fall to their deaths as the desperately cling to the side of airplanes, a massive PR failure. Leaving behind American citizens and Afghani citizens who directly helped the military as translators, Failure.

The Taliban informally ended up dictating to the US how/when the withdrawal was going to happen. That’s not a show of US military strength. That’s not the sign of strength. That’s not the sign of a Super-power. That’s not the sign of strong leadership. That’s the sign of weakness and failure.

Pile this military failure on to the other bumbles and signs of weakness and Putin sees a Super-power unwilling and unable to occupy its position. Putin sees a “super-power” unwilling to secure its own borders and allows massive amounts of illegal immigrants and drugs to flood into the country. Putin remembers what happened when he annexed the Crimea peninsula. Putin sees a “super-power” willing to stop pipelines bringing oil into the US, but willing to allow pipelines to be built which will increase European dependence on Russian energy sources. Putin watches Whiplash-Biden putting back into place Trump’s policies (i.e. sanctions on Nord Stream II, MPP). Weakness, all of it points to weakness.

And if Putin is hanging out in a dictators internet forum, you know he had a good chuckle in the “Funny and SFW” thread when John Kerry wants Putin to be mindful of the carbon emissions during the military actions in Ukraine.

As I mentioned earlier, where Biden really screwed up was in the prevention of Putin invading Ukraine. Biden is a weak leader. He doesn’t project strength. His past actions shown weakness.

The despots and dictators have noticed. They’re taking advantage. A strong leader doesn’t react, he/she leads. Biden is reacting.

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Russia is starting to look dumb right now, so that means Biden is doing a good job, right?

Biden was never going to be an amazing president. He was elected because people were tired of the chaos, and wanted something predictable. You can point to all the things he did wrong, but you really are not offering a better alternative. Afghanistan looked like a disaster…after nearly 20 years, was there a realistic scenario where it goes well? It was a political landmine that Bush, Obama, and Trump all left behind.

You must have missed my quick list of 5 alternatives I recently posted earlier in this thread. Nick missed it as well. Did I used invisible ink???

You used don’t in 4 of the 5 points.

The pixels you produced aren’t invisible, they just don’t say much.

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Biden had more balls than Obama. He actually got us out of Afghanistan. Something Obama said he’d do.

No, the exit didn’t go nicely. Neither did the exit from Vietnam, which it was oh so similar to. (Only in Vietnam it was people clutching helicopters, not jets.) It was still better than the alternative.

Every country has leaky borders. If you think the dictators forum is talking about illegal immigration in the US as if it’s a sign of weakness you have cobwebs where you should have brains. The dictators wish they had people knocking at the gates trying to get in.

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This line of thinking right here though. So if Biden seemed strong, however we want to define that, Russia would have been less inclined to invade Ukraine. So what does that look like? Threatening to deploy troops to Ukraine? Surely strength must imply Putin would have thought there was a stronger risk of us literally going to war over Ukraine? But then we’re back to: your argument is Biden should have threatened nuclear war?

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We could still invade Syria. That would be some classic American leadership.

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Did you want me to respond to your strawman argument about threatening to send US troops to Ukraine? I think I’ve already made my point plenty of time. Leaders lead. Biden isn’t leading, he’s reacting. He’s managing. What could he do to look like a strong leader who can lead? Go back and read my 5 quicks points for examples of a leader leading rather than manager reacting.

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You 5 points are all “Biden shouldn’t have done x”. Not what Biden should have done. And most of them are irrelvant.

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This sounds less like leadership advice to me and more like how to get laid in high school.

I agree that Biden is very old, making him appear weak. We shouldn’t have 80 year old leaders, or 70 year old leaders for that matter. And the US in general is quite weak. We lost in Afghanistan just like we’ve lost so many wars. We can’t even widely agree on who our own president is. And Putin meanwhile just won his war in Syria just as he won in the Crimea, Donbas, Georgia, Chechnya…

But I don’t think acting for the sake of acting is a good idea. In fact, I think Putin’s invasion is largely the result of needing to appear strong at a time of weakness. A lot of leaders act, in order to say they’ve “done something”. I don’t like that approach to governing. I also don’t think that form of propaganda works well on other leaders.

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