Particularly Ed Schultz. Rachel Maddow I disagree with some but she dosn't act like a baffoon and generally gives the people she interviews a fair shake. Keith Olbermann is the liberal equivalent of Hannity and goes into ridiculous hyperbole and hyperventilation a lot. However Ed Schultz is the dumbest idiot I've ever seen on television.

This diatribe was spawned by me watching him and Dennis Kucinich talking about how we need to bring our troops home from Afghanistan. These two were just circle jerking about how we were past due and our strategy has failed etc... This is the dumbest position imagineable. The Afghanistan war is a totally different animal then Vietnam or Iraq. If you want to argue we should pull out of Iraq completely as that was an elective war, no WMDs, yadda yadda yadda I'm okay with that as you are making rational points. However the Afghani Taliban is a sworn enemy of the United States who protected Osama Bin Laden from us after 9/11. If we pull out and the Taliban comes to power, which will most certainly happen then Osama Bin Laden and Mullah Omar are right back in the driver's seat of a nation state again. They get to restart all of their terrorist camps without any sort of pressure or harassment throughout the entire country. They WILL make attempts to attack the United States again. If anything we need to get serious and just send in every available troop into the mountains and obliterate the Taliban once and for all not give them a free pass to start up a state sponsor of terror again.

The idea that a US Congressman and a National TV analyst would suggest we hand Afghanistan back over to Omar and Osama is just mind blowing.

I somewhat enjoy Olbermann. I feel like Maddow is much worse about hyperbole and tends to present things in a certain light by ignoring certain facts.

I am entirely unfamiliar with Ed Schultz.

Ed Schultz is a fat former republican that got some tail from a hippy chick and had a miraculous conversion to extreme liberalism when he decided he liked the sex.

how much money are you going to spend trying to kill an enemy who uses box cutters and you're own dang planes to cause billions of dollars in damage?

The answer to that is however much it takes. Are we just supposed to roll over and take it?

no, we weren't suppossed to have to deal with it all.
that's why we spend billions for DEFENSE.
you know, so that people can't do that kind of stuff to us.

Anyone that can use an entire country as a launching platform to attack us will be able to get through the defense eventually. Seriously the idea of giving the country back to the Taliban and Bin Laden is flat out crazy.

The mountains of Pakistan, you mean? Because that would destabilize that government. Do you really want anarchy in a nuclear power? Do you really want an opportunity for a fundamentalist group not unlike the Taliban, which are all quite popular in Pakistan, to fill that power void?

And once we obliterate the Taliban from Afghanistan, the problem of government building remains. Merely eliminating the threat of the Taliban doesn't mean Afghanistan won't revert back to Tribalism and governance by War Lords. Hell, you can make the argument that's always been what they've had.

And your Al Qaeda threat is still present, even if all that happens. Unless of course we start invading places like Yemen...

That is THE main Al Qaeda though. The Pakistan situation is very sticky, but letting the Taliban take over Afghanistan is a sure way to destabalize Pakistan because the Taliban will now be fighting only Pakistan on only one front. There 's just nothing good to come in the long term from leaving Afghanistan to these people. Not for us, not for the Afghanis or the world.

It wasn't too long ago that Pakistan actively supported the Taliban. Many accuse the ISID of continuing this support. A destabilized Afghanistan doesn't make Pakistan any more or any less stable than it would be otherwise.

The main Al Qaeda base of power is actually in the Arabian Peninsula, not Afghanistan. Thats where Radical Fundamental Islam runs rampant. If it was indigenous to Afghanistan, the poppy harvest wouldn't be the nation's largest cash cow.

There are plenty of other regimes that are just as frightening, if not more, to the world than the Taliban. I'm not saying that the Taliban aren't worthy of fighting, merely that placing this group as the root of all evil when there are other bad dictators still in power (Mugabe, Kim Jong Il) or where there is politically-motivated genocide going on elsewhere in the same region (Kyrgyzstan, where we have a military presence incidently)... It just seems selective.


The bottom line is that the Afghanistan problem cannot be solved by a solution that relies exclusively on the military.

doesn't america pay billions of dollars to pakistan to fight the fluffing terrorists there? to do it for them? so that america doesn't have to "The mountains of Pakistan, you mean? Because that would destabilize that government. Do you really want anarchy in a nuclear power? "

or am i mistaken about a) the aid, or the b) the reason for it?

I don't agree that there isnt neccesarily a solely military solution, you just have to absolutely commit to it and right now we are not. But the worst of all possible scenarios would be us just pulling out.

You can not fight a conventional war against a group that hide up in the mountains and caves and their main form of attacking are sneak attacks and car bombings. Why do you think Columbia have had such a difficult time fighting the FARC.

Yes you can, you just have to be willing to fully commit to doing what is neccesary which we are not. We pull punches just like we did in Vietnam because of civillian casualties and international borders.

We could have won in Vietnam if military commanders could have gone on a real offensive. Trying to play a defensive game while getting potshots taken at you from across a border is always a recipe for fatigue and longterm failure.

However the difference between this and Vietnam is the North Vietnamese did not actually want a fight with us. They were content with ruling their country. The Taliban is clearly not.

we coulda won the war that the French lost and dragged us into? why bother?

Dibs: I'm not saying we SHOULD have :P Just saying people act like a determined indigenous populace is unbeatable and it's not. Plenty of determined passionate populaces have been wiped out, not the least of which was the native Americans.

So you are suggesting we commit genocide, like we did to the native Americans?

my problem is self-defense. for some odd reason they won't let me go around killing people just for the heck of it, or because i need more meat in my diet. they make it a damn requirement that i can't kill anybody and get away with it unless it's in self-defense. fine, if i can't do it, then why do you let other people do it. they ain't even killing them to throw them on the BBQ.

great, i can kill the aggressor, but i can't even get any meat out of it. big waste of energy, man.

its a shame that all of those liberals that you so hate are so very correct about the economy. when your republican senators keep blocking job creation programs, you lose your right to complain about anything that liberals do :P

your senators are throwing us into our 3rd depression and you want to scream about a nut job(kucinich) and a talking head. how about you try calling your ultra rich republican senators and telling them to pass a damned jobs bill so we at least have a chance instead of fluffing about nonsense.

hey man, we need some more jobs, why don't we just print some more up. that'll solve the problem, they won't even have to have any qualifications to get the job.

Dibs, you have no idea wtf you're talking about. There are millions of qualified people that are willing to work that are unemployed right now. Sadly, unless we get another somewhat large injection of capital into the economy we're going to look back at 10% unemployment as the good old days. At this point the government is the only entity able to supply the funds needed, so either we get the injection of capital that we so badly need or else we head into a deflationary trap(this means long term high unemplyment).

I hope Germnay rots in hell for screwing over the EU community with their stupid austerity policies.

I just turned my cable off in 1998 when they added msnbc to it... Solved the whole problem for me....

Naminef: I am a Republican who is extremely anti-Tea Party. This thread was specifically about Afghanistan. I actually think Obama is taking the correct approach there and made a great move by sending Petraeus. I'm not mentioning the economy because this thread is not about the economy. If you want to complain about that I can preach to the choir about why the Tea Party and Glenn Beck are dumb there.

Yeah.... Their whole plan is to cut taxs, like thats the way out of a recession... NOT!

yeah, wtf are we talking about? the economy or the Taliban?

The Taliban, I meant to say we can rage against the tea party in an economy thread if he made one, not here :P

ORKIN, the tea party and beck dont vote in the senate...the uneducated republican senators do.

Naminef, maybe you aren't paying attention, but the tea party idiots are winning primaries over moderates left and right.

Since we're going down random tangents...

The US needs to dump the current geographical method of representation and adopt a form of ideological representation. Gerrymandering and the "Bringing Home The Bacon" style of Pork Barrel Spending are amongst the largest threats to our Democratically elected Republic. Why do you think the majority of Americans don't vote and don't feel represented?



And to get it back on track (or at least in the vicinity thereof)...

President Obama should not have gone so far as to fire McChrystal for the Rolling Stones article. He knew (or should have known) that the General was a loose cannon of sorts (as loose a cannon as any general officer can be at least), based on his well-documented personality as well as the community he came out of. This move is reactionary and harmful to our efforts.

I'm paying attention...and i LOVE the fact that they're winning primaries. Winning a primary is not the same as winning a general election.

Outside of places like Utah and Kentucky tea bagger candidates won't have a snowballs chance in hell of winning a general election. They're far too nuts to appeal to any independent voters.

Winning the crazy vote in the primary = getting massacred in the fall. What I really like to see is tea baggers running as 3rd party candidates so its a really easy win for the democrat in the race :)

The refusal to help fix the economy is going to bite the republicans in the butt starting in September/October. Its not a stretch to see something like
"Senator ****** voted to increase the deficit by refusing to create jobs for working Americans.
/start evil music
That's right, Senator ****** voted to deny working Americans a chance to provide for their families. Instead, Senator ****** voted to give tax breaks to BP."

good, there'll be less fat cow people sitting in their SUVs at the drive thru windows.

http://en.wikipedia.org/...n#Explanation_of_ideology

so, are we going for extermination of the uneducated pepples?

probably not, but how you going to keep them from grouping together and passing stupid laws?

Dibs: We do what we have to do to protect ourselves. We simply cannot allow a country that will actively plan attacks on us to continue to exist/operate. If you can think of a way to make them stop beyond converting the entire country to Islam I'd be happy to hear it.

why exactly is Islam wrong? suppossedly, it's based on another prophet coming down from God explaining how people are to live their lives. why is this prophet any different from the other prophets that have come down and told people how they are suppossed to live?

I didn't say it was wrong I said in the particular case of Afghanistan us bowing down to their religion is the only way they MIGHT stop acting crazy towards us.

religion in general is wrong. common sense and rational thought will show you just how stupid the very concept of organized religions are.

That is also another thread Naminef, but that kind of thinking is also retarded if you even have a basic grasp of cosmology.

big movie projectors that play Baywatch or pron on the side of the mountains?

ah yes, cosmology, otherwise known as hocus pocus.

You do know that cosmology is an actual scientific field right?

yes I do. I also know that we don't know nearly enough about physics outside of our little planet to determine anything yet.

Yeah we probably know a lot more then you think :|

The problem with people who are fervently anti-religion is most of the time they are as ignorant as the fundamentalists they despise so much.

orkin i'm not ignorant of physics. I just no better than to think that we know everything or for that matter even enough to form a real opinion of the universe at this point. When there are still things like this going on, you have to figure that if we cant get things that we have access to correct, then we have little hope of accurately knowing much outside of our little corner.

http://economistsview.typepad.com/...rite-laws-of-physics.html