The Glade 4.0

When did Christie ever have a chance at the presidency?

$10 says Christie spends the next two years fighting the charges, and maybe even impeachment proceedings, and his presidential campaign will fizzle quicker than Giuliani's did.

When "political gain" threatens strategic options like increasing troop count, it's trading for votes with blood. If you're going to do something, do it right or don't do it at all. In this case, that meant either pull the troops out or put more boots on the ground when they're needed, and screw considering votes.



What you do after you qualify as a "dirty rotten rat-bastard that doesn't care about the citizens of this country" really doesn't make a difference to me. That said, politicians hurting one another is just fine with me.

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In time, this too shall pass.

It's not, unless the strategy you oppose is keeping your own soldiers alive. The only active duty personnel in our armed forces that support Barack Obama are the active duty personnel whose career continuation depends on keeping Barack Obama personally happy. The policies of his administration have been downright HOSTILE to active duty personnel. In fact, in his administration, real compensation has DECREASED for our soldiers and veterans and retirees. Strategy doesn't matter: his actions tell us Obama doesn't support our soldiers.
You mean, like, say ... putting one of your key contributors in charge of drawing up the franchise and dealership closure list for General Motors based on owner contributions to political groups and candidates?

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Oh please. Attempting to reign in military spending doesn't indicate hostility to the troops any more than budget cuts to municipal services indicates hostility to firemen.


Supporting evidence?

At any rate, do you have any thoughts on the matter that aren't just a blatant tu quoque fallacy, or must everything be an excuse for you to get your hate on for Obama?

So holding actions are never the right choice? A full court press or total withdrawal are the only valid military strategies? Look, if Obama thought that the surge would save lives but opposed it for persnal political gain, then yes, that would be despicable. However, if he thought it might cost more lives in the long run by creating the false appearance of progress and thus giving Republicans political cover to extend our involvement (which is exactly what many people who oppsed the surge argued at the time), then that's not so clear cut. In both cases, the opposition can be described as "political", but the latter has as its underlying motivation the desire to save lives by ending the war sooner rather than later.

Again, though, what do Obama's actions six years ago have to do with the question of whether or not Christie abused his power as Governor by closing parts of the GW Bridge last fall? The two things are totally unrelated unless one views everything as a partisan game of spin and deflection, where the only point is to score points against the other guy.

RD:

I appreciate Christie's honesty and directness, and I also appreciate that he seems to not be shy to go against his own party to do something he thinks is right. You're right that I don't agree with a lot of his policy decisions or leanings. But I have a great deal of respect for the fact that as Governor he's been focused on what he thinks is right for New Jersey, instead of circle jerking the Republican leadership to improve his bid for the presidency.

Not in combating insurgencies. Even in traditional combat operations, the reason to assume the defense is to create the conditions for the offense, either by another unit in a different location, or at a later time. In any case, you aren't actually showing reasons why a "holding action" would have been a good idea; you're just assuming that it could have been to dispute people.



Given the situation at the time, yes.



Tell me on exactly what basis Obama would have had the knowledge and understanding to seriously contest the recommendation for a surge from the military? The question before Congress was, and always should be, "are we or are we not going to fight?" not "how are we going to do it?"

"Many people that opposed the surge" argued that because they just wanted "out" and defeating the surge would have meant continued lack of progress. The worst the the left could have imagined at the time was success in Iraq.



What they have to do with it is your ridiculous double standard.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

No one said anything about "random".



Yes, as a matter of fact its exactly the kind of thing high level appointees do when they don't think the boss would approve, because they think it's for the best. They also sometimes "are confident the boss would approve" wrongly.

Your use of "poor naive Christie" predjudicial language aside, how plausible you personally find it is pretty irrelevant. You've already been established in the Zimmerman case to decide what's "plausible" based on nothing but subjective intuition. It's highly plausible that the staffers proceeded without his knowledge.



In other words, because it all fits with what you already had your mind made up about, based on nothing but intuition.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Obama sets the bar as far as partisan political behavior, same way "tricky" Dick did, same way that fool in Toronto does, same way every politician does. Close a bridge, sic the IRS on folks, it's all in their bag of tricks they play with all the time. Nero fiddles while Rome burns. Nero was a rat-bastard too, by the way.



As a casual observer of the political process, I'd say that's exactly what politicians do. I have tons of anecdotal evidence to support that belief too, more than enough to suggest to me that the exception is the politician that doesn't spin and deflect.

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In time, this too shall pass.

Do you remember the people that died when the garbage workers refused to do tbeir snowplowing duties? Yeah noone else does. How about Holmes? Not a peep about him.

FWIW I think 5he onky reason there is a "lawsuit" is so this will have enough legs to hobble closer to election season, and thats only if he even tries to run.

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A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. ~ John Stuart Mill

Yeah, fair enough. Sometimes these things catch on, though. It's mostly about timing - we'll see.

People don't vote for guys they like, they vote against the people they hate.

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"...the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Is a "hate on" what a guy gets when he wants to sleep with a chick out of spite?

huh huh huh

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The Dude abides.

RangerDave:

On the military spending issue, you might want to look into Obama's full-bore support for the disastrously inadequate Joint Strike Fighter that has now cost more to develop than the F-22 Raptor that he so unceremoniously cut. You might also want to look at the fact that our active duty personnel now have to pay their own insurance premiums, and that situation is worse for our veterans and retirees.

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Wait, so Obama closed the bridge? Or are we using Obama's failures to somehow excuse the Christie Administration?

We're using the Obama Administration to substantiate Shuyung's point that Christie is just another politician; we're also highlighting RangerDave's increasing partisanship and the complete lack of global consideration for the state of politics and governance in the United States. To be honest, no one gives a **** what another thug politician in the Northeastern Metroplex did; Christie is just another thug politician. That said, RangerDave's outrage on this particular issue is inconsistent with this treatment of Democratic politicians in general and the President of the United States in particular. Moreover, since he started by quoting an immediately discreditable source with a deliberately stated 'liberal" political agenda, one should question RangerDave's motive and cognitive throughput on the subject.

Christie is just another thug politician. Nothing about this situation is any worse than or any better than what the most immediate example of an opposing party executive -- Barack Obama.

Oh, and we're correcting RangerDave's assertion that Barack Obama actually supports our military and soldiers; there's entirely too much evidence to the contrary; almost all of Obama's military spending cuts have been in personnel and compensation.

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Just comparing the present crop of various political scandals to see where this one fits on the score sheet.

I'm giving it a "3". Not that I'm an authority, I give Benghazi a "10" but apparently I'm in the minority.

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In time, this too shall pass.

The Presidents actions vis-a-vis Benghazi constitute treason; no politician in their right mind would ever hold the first African American president to the fire for being a traitorous douchenozzle. Obama is also particularly enamored of giving temporary command authority to intelligence operatives so we can run military operations in allied territories without their consent. He's not the first president to do so, but he does make liberal use of it.

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Maybe he's just trying to catch up.

IMO, the only democrat relevant to this discussion is the mayor of whatever town got screwed (assuming he's a democrat).

I'm not interested in the Clinton Bush Obama shield crap. Saying they are all the same, or just another thug, or whatever, obfuscates the fact that this is f-ed up, unacceptable behavior. It does not need to be compared to other unacceptable behavior, it can stand on its own.

With who? I don't support either of our political parties and generally find fault with almost everything our government is doing. That's true for most of our posters except those who support Democrats. We don't have any dyed-in-the-wool Republicans at the Glade as far as I know.

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As Wwen said:

There are many on this board - including you, Khross - who very clearly hate Dems in general and Obama in particular. Folks here may give lip service to the idea that Republicans suck too when engaging in high-minded (or simplistic, in my opinion) "a pox on both your houses" denunciations of politicians in general, but whenever things get specific, the shields go up for the Reps and the knives come out for the Dems. This is a very, very partisan forum in practice.

I'm an independent, highly fiscally conservative, socially liberal when there's no money on the line. I vote for the guy that'll spend the least and grow government the least. It just looks republican-ish 'cause the democrats buy votes doing the opposite, and yeah, I hate that.

I don't believe any politician will ever win again by promising to cut both spending and the size of government, but I'd vote for that person if they got on the ballot.

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In time, this too shall pass.

RangerDave:

I'm vociferously critical of Barack Obama and his Administration; I am vociferously critical of the Democratic Party, which is demonstrably uninterested in protecting the Constitution, the American people, the United States, or governing with any degree of common sense. I read these forums; I read blogs; I read newspaper; I read magazines; I read pretty much everything I can about politics, including all those pesky bills they write like the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. I don't hate these people; I hate their policies; I hate their deliberate misinformation and their revisionist history.

To use your original source to make the point ...

Andrew Sullivan self-styles as a Burkean conservative. For the uninitiated, that means Sullivan claims to have more in common with the American Whig Party than the Democratic National Committee. It also means Andrew Sullivan claims a political stance at gross odds with his own crusade for homosexual rights and legitimization in the United States. So, let me know why a former editor of The New Republic, one largely responsible for the TNR's definition of liberal, would self-style as proto-Paleocon (as much as I hate that term).

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This is very apparent from this thread alone.