Is Obama tough enough?

[bush_cheney2004]

... It's all fun and games till someone loses an eye.. Seeing you have some Slavonic blood I bet you are good with a sword...I know I am - Did I tell you that my dad was one of the last to be trained to wield a sword on horseback? He showed me the moves...

I did a bit of fencing in college....but it was more like dancing than fighting...so I went back to handguns!

[Oleg Bach]

I did a bit of fencing in college....but it was more like dancing than fighting...so I went back to handguns!

Guns run out of amo-- your arm never runs out .... we are not talking fencing buddy boy - that's french pin pricking thing..we are talking about stashing and chopping...and all you yanks can think of is poking a small hole with a projectile at a distance - where is the fun in that - nothing like seeing an unskilled swords man take notice that you know exactly what you are doing it and are about to enjoy taking off an an arm or two - a gentlemen goes for the ankles - and once the man is down - you pee on him to humilitate him - but never kill him - that is not sportsman like.

[Pliny]

Complaining about socialism doesn't deal with the problem here. The standard conservative mantras: "government that governs best, governs least," and "government doesn't solve problems, government is the problem," ring pretty hollow in the light of what's happened over the last 20 years.

The Republicans and a smaller number of Democrats, followed the advice of their Wall Street paymasters and tore down the wall separating commercial banking and investment banking, and other regulations that were brought in during the Great Depression to save the banking industry. Wall Street wanted government out of the way, and they payed out a good chunk of money to pay politicians to look the other way and provide no oversight. The final result is that the mess was created by a lack of government, not too much government. It was the government's failure and inability to monitor Wall Street that allowed the system to spiral out of control.

What would make Wall Street abandon prudence in their practices? Greed? I don't think so. Killing oneself for profit is nonsensical. Or perhaps an opportunity to sell off risks? The sub-prime mortgage crisis was the crisis and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac minimized risk for mortgage companies by buying them up.

Wall Street was suckered into being careless with "no risk" guarantees from government, who you know pushed unqualified buyers to buy and lenders to lend.

Profit and loss, are the drivers of activity in the market. No one needs to watch over a failing enterprise - it's losses will remove it from the market. The only thing government should be watching over is fraud and criminality as defined by law. They failed to do so by ignoring warnings about Bernie Madoff and overstepped their bounds by encouraging bad business practices which are just as regulatory as restrictive oversight.

If you think government had an inability to monitor Wall street I don't know what you have been reading. They were not passive and lax in their activities. They have ample means to control the activites of Wall street. Where was the SEC?

I would go so far as to accuse some politicians of being insiders really driving the process and most likely taking advantage of their knowledge and the institution of their own policies by themselves investing in Wall Street.They are not businessmen though and when it came crashing down around their heads they had to shore it up with bailouts to save their own necks. Cynical, I know but it's just an opinion.

Politicians would do well to know a little about economics before they started influencing and regulating it. Neo-economists are really not much help as their basic theory is flawed and deals almost exclusively with macro-economics and the tools to "manage" a macro-economy, as if it could be managed. Government has no qualms about claiming their policies will create a vibrant economy but it is the markets fault when a vibrant economy does not appear. Saying they failed to regulate is a real hoot. I would say it is a case of the left hand of government not knowing what the right hand is doing.

Edited April 14, 2009 by Pliny

[bush_cheney2004]

Guns run out of amo-- your arm never runs out .... we are not talking fencing buddy boy - that's french pin pricking thing..we are talking about stashing and chopping...and all you yanks can think of is poking a small hole with a projectile at a distance - where is the fun in that -

Does a Marine Corps mameluke (cross hilted sword) count?

nothing like seeing an unskilled swords man take notice that you know exactly what you are doing it and are about to enjoy taking off an an arm or two - a gentlemen goes for the ankles - and once the man is down - you pee on him to humilitate him - but never kill him - that is not sportsman like.

Then the women folk come and castrate for ceremonial display....just ask General Custer.

Edited April 14, 2009 by bush_cheney2004

[msj]

Stupid thread, meet stupid comic.....

[Borg]

A few days ago, before Obama went to Europe, US bankers met Obama in the White House. Here's what Obama said to them:Link

The mere fact that this quote is on the Internet implies to me that Obama is not tough enough.

He may be tough enough - but he is losing his grip on the polls, he has spurred firearms purchase, he has spurred ammo purchases, he has divided his country racially, he has embarassed his country internationally, he has spend millions to seal his college records and birth certificate (not his certificate of natural birth - in the US they are different) and he has more than doubled the debt within his first 100 days in office.

Obama is in over his head and the US is in trouble.

The US is in big, big trouble financially, and serious trouble along religious lines and along racial lines.

I believe that place will see serious internal - and quite likely very violent strife over the next two years - it will follow racial lines and possibly religious lines.

It will not be pretty.

Borg

[bush_cheney2004]

....The US is in big, big trouble financially, and serious trouble along religious lines and along racial lines.

I believe that place will see serious internal - and quite likely very violent strife over the next two years - it will follow racial lines and possibly religious lines.

It will not be pretty.

No more than at previous times in US history. This is how the country grew to become the behemoth that it is. America is the same as it ever was.

[Moonlight Graham]

A US President must be indifferent, inside the bubble. Before becoming PM, Trudeau asked himself whether he was tough enough. (Trudeau had no qualms about the FLQ crisis.)

So, I wonder whether Obama is tough enough?

What he may lack in toughness, he makes up for intelligence. I'd rather have a smart President than a tough one. see: Bush and LBJ. "Tough" would have got us all killed during the Cuban Missle Crisis.

Obama does pander a lot, tries to make everyone happy. That can be a strength and also a weakness. He is a statesman-like president, a diplomat like Bill Clinton. But Clinton had balls too. The pirate crisis showed Obama could make a tough decision, but we'll have to see how he does on a grander test.

[August1991]

Welcome back, msj. I missed you. (You were right and I was wrong.)

Stupid thread, meet stupid comic.....

Pirates?

----

msj, how do you feel about the Paulson, Lewis, Bernanke conversations?

[August1991]

Rather than start something new, I'll resurrect this old thread because it carries the basic point.

In June 1977, President Jimmy Carter said this at Notre Dame University:

Democracy’s great recent successes — in India, Portugal, Spain, Greece — show that our confidence in this system is not misplaced. Being confident of our own future, we are now free of that inordinate fear of communism which once led us to embrace any dictator who joined us in that fear. I’m glad that that’s being changed.

For too many years, we’ve been willing to adopt the flawed and erroneous principles and tactics of our adversaries, sometimes abandoning our own values for theirs. We’ve fought fire with fire, never thinking that fire is better quenched with water. This approach failed, with Vietnam the best example of its intellectual and moral poverty. But through failure we have now found our way back to our own principles and values, and we have regained our lost confidence.

Link

By 1979, Muslim fundamentalists had taken control of Iran and taken hostages in the American Embassy in Tehran. The Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan.

President Barack Obama said this in May 2009:

Unfortunately, faced with an uncertain threat, our government made a series of hasty decisions. I believe that many of these decisions were motivated by a sincere desire to protect the American people. But I also believe that all too often our government made decisions based on fear rather than foresight; that all too often our government trimmed facts and evidence to fit ideological predispositions. Instead of strategically applying our power and our principles, too often we set those principles aside as luxuries that we could no longer afford. And during this season of fear, too many of us — Democrats and Republicans, politicians, journalists, and citizens — fell silent.

Link

----

Is Obama tough enough?

IMV, no US president worthy of the title should question the United States. The time to question is before becoming president. But once in the Oval Office, no President should question the institution.

I have been thinking about this for some time but Mark Steyn's interview gave me the links.

Edited May 23, 2009 by August1991

[bush_cheney2004]

....Is Obama tough enough?

IMV, no US president worthy of the title should question the United States. The time to question is before becoming president. But once in the Oval Office, no President should question the institution....

Yep, that's the rub. The Office is more important than the man or his ego.

Dr. King was not running for US president. There are things that Obama cannot solve with the shuck and jive of a presidential campaign.