I managed to actually listen to the whole thing because, praise Gaia, it was short.
I remain bemused at his idiosyncratic pronunciations. The Taliban remains the Tollybahn (Hey Mr. Tollybahn, tolly me banahna, daylight comes, and me wanna go home), yet Afghanistan is pronounced like Stan Laurel. It is clear that he doesn’t want to end the war so that he can reduce the nation-destroying deficit, but so that he can “reinvest” (i.e., continue to spend us into oblivion) at home.
And he remains, like most modern Democrats, congenitally incapable of using the words “win” and “war” in the same sentence, at least when it’s an American war — at best, it can be “ended.” He would choke on such a conjunction — our national sins remain too great to allow such an outcome. He only wants to “end” it. He reserves actual victory for his goal with respect to his much more fearsome and evil domestic enemies.
in order to win the war in Afghanistan you’d actually have to know why the troops are even there in the first place.
“He reserves actual victory for his much more fearsome and evil domestic enemies.”
Like anyone who disagrees with his ‘view’ of the world? Because that’s the way he, and everyone in his administration talk.
I didn’t watch, can’t do it. I’m sick of his disingenuous BS, and all the laying of blame. He lies about what he HAS accomplished on one hand, and blames MY greed on hungry peoples all over the planet, on the other.
An odd way to go for a guy who has become a MILLIONAIRE while most of us are losing jobs and our houses are going down in value!
Screw him and his Communist BS speeches.
I’ve gotten to the point that just hearing him talk makes me start cleaning guns and digging trenches and bunkers and dugouts.
.
.
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Trent,
the troops know why we are there.
Some of our elected officials still remember.
The people at home either think it’s “Bush’s War”, or a huge mistake. Either way, most of them have ZERO connection to ‘the war’.
My older son just got back. He was on a ship that stared out going to Pakistan last summer after the Monsoons. He then spent 5 months running around the IO looking for pirates. They finished up, off the coast of Libya, launching some of the choppers that did some of the early fly overs of Libya. 10 months at sea, away from home, they had 19 days in port.
He told me the Marines are STILL wanting to WIN ‘the war’.
(of course the problem is, that WH / lib Dem / NYT / LAT / NPR crowd knows the REAL truth, they just want to kill brown people!)
IF Obama manages to turn this country BACK over to the murdering assholes who had it to start with, he’ll move JFK and FDR out as the “Top Democrat of all Time” slots. He’ll become the be all and end all to the left by turning ‘the war ‘ into Viet Nam Redux!
And please guys, save me the right or left political rhetoric, my kids have been there, I get my intel first hand, not from FOX or NPR.
The mission was to kick the shit out of the ‘TallyBahn’, kill Bin Laden, and attempt to bring the Afghan (and Iraqi) people into, at east, the 19th Century! To de-radicalize them, and teach them that being modern was NOT impossible or against the will of Allah.
(of course how you de-radicalize and teach them, with Iran in between them, is seemingly impossible)
I don’t think any modernization or de-radicalization will ever happen now. We’ve lost the political will. And IF Obama walks away, (I think he will) and allows the Taliban to retake Afghanistan, then we DID waste the lives of those killed over there, all the time the survivors spent over there and billions of American taxpayer dollars.
God help us if he does walk away. That’ll be a sure sign to the Islamofascists that we are ready to surrender.
A second war was launched in Iraq, and we spent enormous blood and treasure to support a new government there.
“Enormous blood”? WTF?
Didn’t LBJ make this same speech? Something about a light at the end of a tunnel.
How many folks did the congressional democrats kill when they pulled the funding for the South Viets? Pol Pot level or merely Lenin? Obama is going to kill Afgans by the bucket-load. He’ll be killing people not born yet for the next 30 years when we pull out!
We were distacted from Afghanistan by Iraq, according to candidate Obama. Now, President Obama is allowing himself to be destracted from Afghanistan by Libya. Or is it his sinking re-election prospects?
“And most of all, after a decade of passionate debate, we must recapture the common purpose that we shared at the beginning of this time of war.”
http://www.cnn.com/2011/POLITICS/06/22/obama.afghanistan.transcript/index.html?section=cnn_latest
WHAT common purpose? We were a nation divided between the takers and the taken back then, and for longer than that. I have a really hard time spotting that unity.
O God give me the streghth to endure the balance of the term of our first afirmative action president
“The information that we recovered from bin Laden’s compound shows al Qaeda under enormous strain. Bin Laden expressed concern that al Qaeda has been unable to effectively replace senior terrorists that have been killed”
So lets pull out.
“In Afghanistan, we’ve inflicted serious losses on the Taliban and taken a number of its strongholds. Along with our surge, our allies also increased their commitments, which helped stabilize more of the country.”
So lets pull out.
“We will have to do the hard work of keeping the gains that we have made, while we drawdown our forces and transition responsibility for security to the Afghan government.”
When my enemy is at his weakest, the best course of action is to let up the pressure.
“Already this decade of war has caused many to question the nature of America’s engagement around the world. Some would have America retreat from our responsibility as an anchor of global security, and embrace an isolation that ignores the very real threats that we face. Others would have America over-extend ourselves, confronting every evil that can be found abroad. ”
Assuming the last statement refers to Iraq otherwise it is a strawman. Who is advocating military action and in what countries? The only person advocating more military action is Obama in Libya.
“We must chart a more centered course. Like generations before, we must embrace America’s singular role in the course of human events. But we must be as pragmatic as we are passionate; as strategic as we are resolute. When threatened, we must respond with force”
Sounds pretty good. Sounds great even.
“but when that force can be targeted, we need not deploy large armies overseas.”
We can do war but not war war just war.
“When innocents are being slaughtered and global security endangered, we don’t have to choose between standing idly by or acting on our own. Instead, we must rally international action, which we are doing in Libya, where we do not have a single soldier on the ground”
I can’t handle Obama’s contradictions from paragraph to paragraph.
Wodun, I suspect his constant contradictions and vague, meaningless statements are just part of who he is. On the campaign trail everyone could walk away thinking he told them what they wanted to hear, but as chief executive, it just means that none of his audience is on the same page even after he’s issued instructions. He’s worse than having no leader at all, because if we didn’t have a leader then everyone would get together and decide on a course of action. With Obama, no one can figure out what to do, nobody knows what’s going on, and later nobody can even agree on what happened.
Mr. Obama’s job as Campaigner is to fool fools in a world where a large majority of those that are under the 100 IQ average remain bitter patchouli smelling Dems.
The left seems to get easily discombobulated when placed in front of shiny, articulate, objects. Makes it nearly impossible for them to focus on the obvious balloon popping needle in his strawmen arguments.
Obama will abandon Afghanistan and it will fall to the Tollyban. History will not remember this well no matter what the outcome of the election. History will remember that Afghan forces feared what would happen if the US left too soon.
The Muslim Brotherhood (and thus fundamentalist Islam) will garner control of North Africa thanks to Obama pulling all the corks out of the bottles.
It will be a terrible legacy.
Sigh.. I dunno about your tax dollars but I don’t want mine spent on “nation building” at all. Unfortunately, as a satellite of the USA, we don’t get a choice in the matter.
Col. Allen West was interviewed on Fox News after this speech, and he mentioned that his experience in Afghanistan taught him that the tribal leaders will back whoever they think will be the ultimate winner. Obama’s speech just told them that the Taliban will eventually be victorious and that they should switch sides again. In essence, Obama just gave away all the gains our soldiers have made so he could boost his chances in 2012. The Narcissist in Chief just through everyone over there under the bus.
Great. I don’t know why you bleeding heart Conservatives care about Afghanistan. Screw ’em. I want my defense force engaged in *defense* of my own country.. not some backwater hell hole.