Sorry, was out at dinner. It being Cinco de Mayo, I had the fish.
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Recent Comments
- In The Mailbox: 02.28.23 (Afternoon Edition) : The Other McCain on Hey, longtime pw readers…
- In The Mailbox: 12.23.22 : The Other McCain on Patrick J. Carroll truly IS a sad, embittered psychopath
- Danger on Patrick J. Carroll might be a psychopath
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- In The Mailbox: 07.18.22 : The Other McCain on Patrick J. Carroll might be a psychopath
Has it started yet?
Dude, it’s not even Friday.
Way to screw even that up.
What debate?
Herman!
the “contention crowd” don’t like pizza.
Frank Luntz’s focus group on FOX News is going nuts about Herman Cain. More proof that focus groups are ridiculous.
yo
“Well I been around the world
And I’ve been in the Washington zoo
And in all my travels as the facts unravel
I found this to be true
Chorus
They got the house on the corner
With the rug inside
They got the booze they need
All that money can buy
“
to the asshole including jen rube at commentary fuck you:
“With the exception of former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty, tonight’s crop of Republican candidates are those kids who did not have a prayer of signing with the team. Gary Johnson eliminated himself from the race with one whining complaint that he wasn’t being called on often enough. Rick Santorum claimed incredibly that he had an enviable record of beating Democratic incumbents, conveniently overlooking the fact that, as a Republican incumbent, he was soundly trashed by a Democratic nonentity. Herman Cain left me never wanting to order a pizza from Godfather’s. ”
did i say fuck you?
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2011/05/05/summing-up-the-debate-open-tryouts/
There was a debate?
oh
btw
sneak preview
my vacation started
todayend of work today … Sunday morning I’ll be sending Mom Day wishes by hoisting a pint in your direction from Dublin.you people are worthless. Anyhoo, RTO said Cain won.
maggie
seems like Cain won hands down. I really didn’t have to watch it to understand that he would.
catchin’ the Luntz focus group now… they seemed to really like him.
Vodkapundit seemed to think Cain did ok:
by way of Glenn Reynolds
Cain won, clearly. Santorum did ok, but, well, my gut tells me he will never be POTUS. T-Paw tried desperately to shake the RINO out of his rep, but, even if he were to his charisma deficit means no one will ever listen, so his message will go unheard.
And, of course, the Paulnuts stacked the audience, so whatever he said was met with wild audience response.
I’m sure that they’ll freep many polls tonight.
RON PAUL!11!1! FTW!!1!11
And Gov Johnson needs to work on his delivery, because no matter what his ideas, like T-Paw, no one will bother listening…
Here’s one thing I know for sure about the former MN Governor.
Even if were (somehow) to be the GOP standard bearer, MN would still go for Barak Obama.
Or any other Donk, for that matter.
This seemed like a contest for a group of people that ain’t gonna ever be President.
There’s some consolation in knowing everyone thought something similar around this point back in 1991.
A “gutsy” debate…
And a “gutsy” call choosing the fish, JeffG.
Herman keeps this up, I’m gonna have to throw some cash his way.
I made a gutsy call to have ketchup and mustard on a burger tonight. Gutsy, I tell you.
I went out for beer. It worked for me. And I had ale, not Mexican beer.
“Agree with it or disagree with it, COMMENTARY cannot be ignored. To read it is to take part in the great American discussion.”
COMMENTARY bloggers allow no comments.
Read. Shut up. Take part.
On the other hand, COMMENTARY bloggers brook no commentariat.
link
link link
OT, but just…wow.
Report: Nearly Half Of Detroiters Can’t Read
But that’s unpossible, Pablo! Detroit has had the very best of Democratic governance for decades! Surely that city is a veritable Eden!
I turned it on partway through. Cain was asked what his Afghanistan strategy would be. He said he’d have to evaluate our strategic interests and consult experts, then do what the experts say. Asked how he views our strategic interests, he repeated his answer. Unimpressive.
Pablo, pfffft. How are these Detroiters self esteem levels? I’m sure they have several “participant” trophies. And they know how to fuck.
Jayzus, it’s like you don’t even know what a school is for, Pablo. Read???!? puhleeze,
This isn’t news, Pablo. It has been this way for a while.
Unimpressive.
Points for honesty though (not having seen the debate myself).
Just as long as it doesn’t take him 6-9 months of meetings followed by a couple of weeks of “sleeping on it” to make a decision.
I mean, what I’m saying is that they do this study every few years, decide they need to throw money at the problem … and it continues.
I mean, FUCK. HOw hard is it to learn to read?
Way back when, people didn’t learn to read because they couldn’t actually get their hands on books. Or they had to work all day and no time to learn.
There is absolutely NO excuse. I taught all my children how to read. W/o fancy equipment, and government aid.
Carin, are you admitting to the THEFT of a teacher’s livelihood?
Wrecker.
It’s “gutsy” to throw money at the problem; especially when the failure rate is 50%…
gutsy.
As Chris Rock says, if the kid can’t read, that’s mom’s fault. If the kid can’t read because there’s no electricity for the lights, that’s dad’s fault.
They don’t learn to read because they’re not interested. They’re not interested because no one around them reads. I read well at a fairly early age, and I may have no matter what, but my parents read all the time. I’m sure their example made a difference.
I don’t understand why anyone would care about the foreign policy positions of someone who doesn’t know all the facts. Has any candidate ever really done what they said they would on the campaign trail? I doubt it. Just look at President Present. He has reversed himself all over the place.
Does anyone know what our interests are in A’stan, how we’re going to achieve them and how we’ll know we’ve done it? I’m pretty fuzzy on it myself.
Impressive back top back comments, cranky-d. And by impressive, I mean I agree with them 100%, so they must be right :)
I have no idea, Pablo. Sometimes it seems like we’re chasing a sunk cost there, and no one seems to know what a reasonable outcome will be. The point may be as simple as fighting them there so we don’t fight them here, which is concrete yet unsatisfying on many levels. It may be that we’re trying to change their way of thinking about the world and their place in it, which is about as fuzzy as it gets.
I think it has something to do with keeping the Spice flowing, the Balance maintained, and the Force undisturbed, by way of restoring Order and maintaining the Peace, Pablo.
You’ll note my movie references are as mashed up as our foreign policy.
After reading OI’s comment in #40, I have concluded that he is a really smart guy.
Go check out http://www.johncoxart.com/ and his cartoons. He’s got one he did ten years ago, and then Michael Ramirez’s looks almost exactly the same.
Other good ones, too, about bin Laden’s demise.
Well Pablo, in terms of geopolitics, here’s something I posted in another thread here:
Am I the only old cold-warrior here that see’s what’s really going on?
The Pakis are China’s SW asian proxy, much like the Norks are their NE asian goons. They give the corrupt Pakis some dough, as well as helped them get nukes in the 90?s; and passed on missile technology that Clinton gave them. In return, they do China’s dirty work in the region; stuff they don’t want their fingerprints on.
Part of that dirty work is to “bleed” us in the AF like we did to the Russians; by supplying the opposition with the weapons, money, and support-it’s no shockah that the Taliban mostly uses Chinese stuff. And the Pakis “run” the Taliban, as well as AQ.
Far fetched? Think about it. Afghanistan is mineral rich in the north. China says to Pakis, get the US to cut and run, then have your boys in the Taliban take over again. You can run them as your vassal state, and we’ll buy the minerals we covet from you. And, BONUS!, in addition to making you rich and allowing you to effectively rule Afghanistan, we’ll also back you up if India get’s froggy…
And in reality, the Chinese get leverage against the Indians, who they fear as military and economic rivals in the region, via another large military that has nukes; possibly more warheads than China!
So China gets to both bleed and humiliate the US, who they also profit off of by financing the war by buying our treasuries, they ultimately get access to the mineral wealth of Afghanistan that they covet, and get to surround their regional competitor, India; all done on the cheap because the Pakis don’t cost much to buy…
And all this will be easier if a weakling like Obama is in power; which is why the Chinese ordered the Pakis to let him take bin Laden. Think of it as China’s contribution to ObaMao’s re-election campaign.
I know it’s a bit TL:DR, and sounds tin-foil-hat-esque, but it sure seems to add up to me. And so aside from whipping Taliban butt, it would seem like a pretty good reason to git-er-done; if not only to stymie the Chi-comms.
Get to the point where the AF army can do the bulk of it, like Iraq, and just leave some advisors, as kind of a trip wire…
Whaddaya think? Insightful? “Gutsy”? Or just doofy?
The media was all over the foreign policy lack well in advance of the debate.
Let’s see the narrative. Obama has more foreign policy experience than any Republican. Senators beat any other elected official. Elected officials beat those from the private sector. So that’s that, the election is over and Obama has won out already.
Good excuse to post a link to this Jacques Barzun essay:
Too bad for Obama’s media fluffers that the election isn’t going to turn on foreign policy experience.
Thing is, the Taliban isn’t coming here. And al-Qaeda, as I understand it, is mostly out of A’stan, (and why wouldn’t they be as welcoming as Pakistan is?)
Bob, I saw that, and you make some compelling points. But my question remains. What are we doing about it, and how will we know when we’ve succeeded?
Those are excellent questions Pablo.
I fear that success will be hard to measure indeed, like in the original cold war.
A good start would be to publicy acknowledge that the Chinese are our “frenemies”, in diplomatic language of course. We need to make sure our relationship with India is airtight; wooing them into our “alliance” is an accomplishment by Bush that many folks minimize or overlook. At the expense of the Chinese, we should strengthen our economic an military relationships with the Indians as much as possible.
And we also need to make it clear to the Pakis that our close ties with the Indians isn’t at the expense of the relationship we’d like to have with them. But we need to make it clear if they keep playing duplicitous games with the Chinese that we won’t be played for the fool. In my opinion, a good start would be to make it clear that our relationship will suffer greatly if they don’t turn over the remains of our helo pronto. Also, we should be very clear that we won’t abide by their meddling in the AF, going as far as to remind them that being sandwiched between our allies is a bad place for them to be if they choose to be our adversary.
In Afghanistan, we should do what has been done in Iraq; continue to train their forces to take the lead as we draw down our own, and impress on their military leaders that they shouldn’t allow their corrupt civilian leaders to put them in a position where their soveriegnty would be ceded to Pakistan, and it would be better for them and the Afghans as a whole to be “with us instead of against us”.
This is all off the top of my head, of course, and it’s something that I’ve been considering a lot as of late. I’m convinced the best first step is to politely acknowledge that a new cold war exists, based on the actions of the Chi-coms, and recognize that it is a possible existential threat looming on a distant horizon, instead of any Trump-like bluster about taxing all their imports, and work towards enhancing our trade with friendlies in the region instead.
But I acknowledge it’s a tough nut, where success is not immediate and hard to quantify; I don’t really relish going back into cold war mode at all.
Unless Christie runs, Cain is the man to back. The rest of the field (except for West)is doomed – non-starters.
The more I see of Cain, the more I like him.
Even as the racist that I was born to be…
Jeff –
Those “Taylor Swift Naked” linkls are back.
Is it just my computer, or do I have to cut my son’s hands off?