Re: Mother should I run for president.
 

Right. If he's winning by a decent margin on regular delegates, the super delegates will go along. But if it's super close, they'll have to decide it and there will be uproar from the Bernie crowd.

Although the hand wringing about it is kind of funny, as the point of super delegates is to protect the party (none of this is democracy, btw) from outside influences. Like, perhaps, a candidate who spent years not being a member of the party and signing up solely for the purposes of running for president.

Re: Mother should I run for president.
 

It seems like a massive tactical mistake. McConnell has to know that Hillary is still the most likely next president. Heck, there's an argument that Bernie is second most likely. Betting on the chance that one of Rubio/Trump/Cruz occupies the White House a year from now over taking the substantial leverage he has right now to get a moderate nominee.

But maybe he will cave and to let the GOP nominee try to make it a big issue for them?

Re: Mother should I run for president.
 

I love the new GOP line of pointing to what Schemer said -- as opposed to what Dems in the Senate actually DID -- when Alito was nominated.

Today's GOP: "We can't be as reasonable and measured and bi-partisan as Harry Reid. We're only shooting to be as good as Chuck Schumer."

Schumer was an idiot to propose that the Senate prevent ANY nominee from going thru. Fortunately -- much as I don't like Alito - the Dems were not filled with idiot extremists. But it appears that the GOP is -- indeed, based on your post and many others like it, it appears that is what the GOP aspires to, and has achieved.


As for Obama -- he "voted against" a nominee. The horror. The GOP is too cowardly to actually have a vote.

Re: Cruz with the first cut, McConnell with the kaishaku
 

BUT BUT BUT you are ignoring the GREAT PRECEDENT when this was done during TYLER'S TERM - you know, the last time a major political party committed seppuku in the United States. Ah, those crazy Whigs!

Re: Cruz with the first cut, McConnell with the kaishaku
 

don't be discouraged that this isn't seeming to gain traction. Seinfeld was a bust until season 2.

Re: Mother should I run for president.
 

While I generally believe that the GOP should vote down the sort of person that Obama would be likely to nominate, and I wish Obama would not nominate, I understand why he would want to. I do think there should be an up or down vote, as putting the job of the Senate off to protect individual Senators from going on the record in a difficult vote is detestable. And I loathe it as much when McConnell does it as I did when Reid so frequently availed himself of that tactic (pretty much all of 2014).

As to what the Dems actually did with the Alito nomination? You mean the failed filibuster initiated by Kerry and joined by Obama? I guess you are correct in that all of the Dems were not idiot extremists at that time, but there was certainly a concerted effort to obstruct a SC nominee for political reasons. That was not an attempt where the majority voted to block a nominee; it was an attempt by a minority to obstruct.

And as for being as reasonable as Harry Reid, you do recall that Reid personally led the effort to prevent many judicial nominees from getting a hearing at all in 2005. Just ask Bill Frist.

Re: Mother should I run for president.
 

Harry Reid didn't support the idea of preventing any Bush nominees. The Dems had enough votes to sustain a filibuster, but Reid and other refused to support that tactic.

But hey, the GOP can't be as reasonable as Harry Reid. How pathetic.

Iraq
 

Really interesting article in Vox about the the lead-up to the Iraq War. It wasn't lies or mistaken intelligence, this theory goes, it was driven by the views of the neoconservatives who viewed the American military as a means to overthrow authoritarian governments we disagreed with and spread democracy. Not bad in the abstract, but the devil is in the details.

And even if one agrees with the decision of GHWB/Cheney/Powell/Schwaezkopf to stop at the border after expelling the Iraqis from Kuwait, it's hard to argue with then Under Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, who wanted to shoot down Saddam's helicopters to keep the Republican Guard from crushing the Kurds and the Shiites in southern Iraq who took us at our word and rose up against Saddam.

Anyway, worth a read. http://www.vox.com/2016/2/16/1102210...oconservatives

Re: Iraq
 

It is a good article, and it demonstrates how the neo-con ideology overwhelmed all reason and rational thought -- from how evidence of WMD was interpreted, to how obviously flawed sources were credited, to how every aspect that might make the neocon goal difficult to achieve was simply dismissed (e.g.: If you believe that Shiites and Sunnis will start fighting each other, then the whole project gets very difficult. Ergo, there are no real divisions between them. See also, the will welcome us as liberators.)

But I disagree with your last point, sort of. The mistake Bush I made was not failing to take out the Republican Guard and the Iraqi air power. The mistake he made was encouraging Iraqis to rise up against Saddam Hussein in the first place. It's really easy to say "if Bush had taken out the Iraqi air force, many thousands of Shiites would not have been slaughtered." Okay. But what would have happened next? Would Saddam simply have surrendered, or would the country have fallen in to a sustained civil war between government and rebel forces that were more balanced in their military power? (See, e.g., Syria) How long would that war have lasted? How many factions would the rebels have split into? How many more people would have died, from all the factors that a long and drawn-out civil war creates? Would a cycle of Shiites killing Sunnis and Sunnis killing Shiites have followed? (See, e.g., Iraq)

We went there with a clear and specific mission: End the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait. The war should have stopped once that mission was achieved, plus at most some additional degrading of Iraq's ability to lash out again (i.e., destroy much of their armored forces, which had already happened). The mission was not to overthrow Hussein, nor to support a rebellion against him, nor to do anything inside of Iraq's borders; it was solely to defend the sovereignty of Kuwait.

Bush should not have made promises that he did not intend to keep, and could not have kept. And for all the times that I've heard people say "he should have prevented Hussein from crushing the Shiite uprising," no one -- particularly Wolfie -- has given a credible analysis of what would have happened next.

I realize that it is cold-hearted as hell to say what I am, in essence, saying: That we should have let Iraqis deal with their own problems, even if that meant a lot of them died, so long as those problems didn't cross their borders. But unless we were prepared to do a hell of a lot more than just shoot down some helicopters, that is actually what we should have done.

Re: Iraq
 

I fully agree with this.

What do you know? We can agree on something!

Re: If you want to be friends, be friendly
 

There are ways to help them with their problems short of invading them and killing a bunch of people, of course.

Re: Iraq
 

But that's pretty much what we did do a little bit later - the no-fly zones in Northern Iraq allowed the Kurds to essentially set up their own little autonomous region. And we didn't have to occupy Baghdad or mediate between tribes and factions and sectarian groups.

And it's ok to use pre-limited military means - it sometimes even works. See e.g. the former Yugoslavia (bombing and cruise missiles got the Serbs to the table, not the 82nd Airborne). But even if shooting down Saddam's helicopters ended up not working, it would have been worth it. Maybe GHWB shouldn't have encouraged the Shiites to rise, but once he did, a no-fly zone was really a no-brainer.

Sometimes we have to make a gesture towards preventing slaughter. I mean, could Clinton have stopped the massacres in Rwanda? No, but he could have (and I think has said that he *should* have) taken doable military action - supporting the French with logistics and transport, jamming the airwaves to prevent the government's radio station inciting and directing the mobs. And I realize that our interests prevent us from doing this (too many examples to list, but let's include our current unwillingness to even mention our objections to ethnic cleansing to the newly democratic government in Burma), but in Iraq it was in our interest, and in Rwanda it was not against our interest to do something.

I'm fine with recognizing the limits of our power and the need to not put American lives at risk unless necessary. I just think it's a sliding scale - logistical support is low risk, smart bombs and cruise misses a little more risk, shooting down helicopters a little more (though Iraq's air defenses had been wiped out at that point) - and all are far less risky than sending in ground troops, which really should be avoided as much as possible. Afghanistan 2001? Absolutely. Kuwait/Iraq 1990? Strong yes. Peacekeeping in Bosnia 1996? Probably (it ended up not requiring combat, but that's ex post facto). Panama 1989? Maybe other options, but I thought it was a reasonable decision. Grenada 1983? Um, post-Vietnam muscle flexing, but at least the medical students were happy to see the USMC. Iraq 2003? Nope.

Re: Mother should I run for president.
 

I can't believe this is even up for debate. McConnell is flat-out ignoring the Constitution by suggesting he won't even put a nominee to an up or down vote. This whole topic makes me furious. There is zero integrity in the Senate.

I disagree with voting against based on anything other than qualifications--and yes I understand that it's now impossible to divorce politics from how any of these assholes defines the term "qualifications." But to act like Obama can't nominate someone because he's in the last year of office is fucking ridiculous. If they don't put it to a vote, it will be the first step toward destroying this country, because the next step will be extending that period to the whole second term, and then it will just be pure politics. The only way to get someone confirmed will be to control both the Senate and Presidency. If that's how it's going to go, let's just do away with the Supreme Court.

I cannot identify one Republican in office who I respect. Someone help me. Who's worth more than a spit in the bucket on the right?

TM

Re: Mother should I run for president.
 

Pope says Trump is "not Christian"!

Trump tweets that Pope is "disgraceful"!

We are living in a cartoon reality. While politics in this country had long ago pushed so far past the absurd that it made one long for the comforting normalcy of an Ionesco play, we have now reached the point where our political system is unparodyable. It's pure dada, albeit an unspeakably vile and infected form of dadaism. Which is one of the reasons I never visit this board. Ever.

Re: Iraq
 

Apparently we can.

But if Obama did exactly what I said, you'd call him a coward, a weakling, an appeaser, blah blah blah.