KSA: I don’t know how people sleep at night. Well…very comfortably, I’m sure.

Jack Brown They can’t live without their cognitive dissonance.

PCB oh my god…..they really have no shame, no cares for anyone else, just greed.

J.F Jack you got the parties reversed!

MC FARRELL Succinct and to the point —

HWC Jack… where did you find this nonsense???? Jimmy is correct…. you’re confused….

JP ? @Jimmy and Harold – you have to read before you comment. There is no debate about any of these points.

HWC Not sure what JP means…. I read the Washington Post and the Washington Times every day…. Plenty of debate… I am well versed on DC politics…. Did anybody catch that the Post even acknowledged that the administration had cooked the books to come up with a statistic that showed he wasn’t the big spender he really is…. got any shovel ready projects? got any green industry companies that the gov’t can loan money to before they go bankrupt?

HWC One of the problems with spending other people’s money is that eventually the other people run out of money….. how many wealthy people have changed their state of residency from NY to FL? Which has high income taxes and which has none? I want an Obama value meal, I’ll order what ever I want and you can pay for it….

JACK BROWN This poster hit a nerve, I will reply to the points made either tonite late or tomorrow, as I am a little under the weather (nothing serious). And remember all, we may disagree, but we are all Americans and just about all of us are veterans…Harold, Jimmy, MC Farrell and I, US Army, Jack Pryor US Navy, and thus we swore to put our butts on the line to protect our constitution.
Stay
tuned for the detailed response!

MC FARRELL Starve the beast is Grover Norquist — Republican.

Although the centrist Dems went along, the de-regulation and tax cuts were all done by the Bush administration. Cheney said Reagan proved deficits don’t matter which is odd since Reagan and Bush I both raised taxes. Economy didn’t start rolling for most people until Clinton era which coincided with new tax rates.

Unfunded wars started by Dems? Not really — in fact, the Bush administration chose to not put the Iraq or Afghanistan wars on the budget which resulted in lousy oversight and during the Hastert and Trent Lott eras resulted in lots of fraud. Ask anyone remotely honest and not on any kind of bizarre bonus plan about oversight at Haliburton, et. al.

MC Farrell Bailouts happened primarily under the Bush administration because Hank Paulson and the President’s economic advisers convinced the world that it was the only thing between us and takeover by the Lycians, or the Chinese or somebody. What minimal oversight that was applied to TARP I and II was brought about by either Democratic stonewalling or by the Obama administration. The Obama team could and should have put a lot of bastards in jail and hasn’t done so. Had McCain and Palin won and the Tea Party controlled the Senate as well as the House, the Wall Street Gang would have all gotten Medals of Freedom.

MC FARRELL During the Obama administration, the Wall-Streeters have pretty consistently paid the government back because of the threat of more oversight. Which is desperately needed, of course — the JP Morgan Chase mess is clearly a case in point but there are lots more.

MC FARRELL The fiscal spiral was not intentional. Nobody is that stupid — it’s still a very close run thing, but what the hell. The idea that deficits don’t matter that was Cheney and Laffler think so long as the deficits resulted from tax cuts and not expenditures was one one flush of the drain; the idea that derivatives and securitization were good ideas and that bet hedging and risk management could make cow shit into filet mignon was another; the reluctance to accept the Willie Sutton Axiom (Go where the money is!) on taxes is another, and probably at this point the liquid plumber further speeding the fiscal spiral down the drain. Opposed to it we have slightly though still insufficient demand and what the fed is able to do. There are lots of other things that can be done but they largely require spending. Not happening with the logjam in Congress.

MC FARRELL As for the last point, you have a Speaker of the House who will not keep his word because his minions won’t support him and he doesn’t want to go to Nancy Pelosi for any votes. In the Senate, Mitch McConnell has openly admitted and when offered the opportunity to walk it back, re-affirmed that his legislative priority is purely political — defeat the President. Not by being smarter or coming up with better policy ideas but by stopping everything. Now, historically, the Senate has been able to find ways to cooperate and the idea that a Speaker of the House would shake hands and agree with the President and the Majority Leader only to renege is pretty much unthinkable. But it happens continually with the current crop in the House and Senate. Henry Clay, Sam Rayburn, and Tip O’Neil are sitting in a bar in heaven, drinking copiously along with Polk, Eisenhower and Reagan. (ADDED AS I WAS EDITING BECAUSE I CAN AND SHOULD HAVE PUT IT IN ORIGINALLY.)

MC FARRELL John Wayne said after the election of John Kennedy,” I hope he does well; I didn’t vote for hm but he’s our president and I wish him success.” How do you think he’d react to this sort of crap? How would Barry Goldwater, Howard Baker, Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, or Harry Truman react? Off the record, how do you think GHW Bush and spouse would react? Hell, how would Herbert Hoover and Calvin Coolidge react to what is a continuing display of bad faith, broken promises — the road to job creation runs through defunding Planned Parenthood? Seriously? Or saying that Hawaii forged the President’s Birth Certificate? Really? — and plain old fashioned bullshit.

MC FARRELL Had people showed up at Bush events to protest with guns, would the R’s have defended their second amendment rights? Pure racism, pure political expediency.

MC FARRELL The Democrats aren’t any blushing virgin’s prayer; granted. But, when you have one plain old fashioned really bad choice — let’s just let the banks and Wall Street self-regulate and let the market figure it out! Let’s go to war with Iran! Our last Persian Gulf war turned out sooooo well. Let’s invade Syria! We achieved the strategic goal in Libya but we should have had boots on the ground! — and one that at least makes mathematical sense, are based in fact and reality and are not more of the same policy that got us here, it’s pretty obvious. You know what you call the least bad alternative — the right choice!

JACK BROWN So now, Harry and Jimmy, we posted our thoughts.. Please point out just where we are “Confused”.

JACK BROWN My last post makes no sense as it appears that Facebook failed to record the long discussion posted before it…it follows..

Well, looks like being under the weather “saved” me from making a series of long posts that MC has made, and very well argued they are. The only addition I would make is this…
on “Starting Wars”… We didn’t start the War with Afghanistan, the Taliban tried to hide our enemies and refused to turn them over.. We had to go into Afghanistan. Among my major beefs with W is NOT closing the deal in Afghanistan, rather, pivoting to go into Iraq after nonexistent WMD. For not listening to the CS/Army Shinseki, who said it would take 300K plus troops to SECURE Iraq. For Rumsfeld trashing a year + of work that the State Department, Marine Corps, and Army War College made on how to PROPERLY occupy Iraq (See “Blinded into Baghdad” by James Fallows). For NOT doing the spending to protect our troops with Body Armor and armored vehicles once they got there. Most of all, for the tragic loss of over 5000 soldiers, and the serious wounding of thousands more.

Another serious failure was throwing away so much of the world support the US received after 9/11. It is hard to remember now, but right after 9/11 almost the entire world was on our side and had little or no problem with our going into Afghanistan. Hell, IRAN was helping us with intell on the Taliban (who they had problems with). But then came the “Axis of Evil” Speech, and then the attack on Iraq…Except for the UK, our NATO allies thought we had lost our minds. Bush’s “My Way or the Highway” and preemptive war polices alienated most of the world.. and to top it off, the incompetency of Rumsfeld, et al, on fighting the war. Had we spent a tenth of what we have spent on Iraq in Afghanistan at the beginning, I think Afghanistan would be in much better shape than the almost basket case it is now. We had a chance to stabilize the situation there, instead we pulled out the SF Group in Afghanistan (that was specialized in the Middle East and SW Asia) to send them to the Iraq build up, and spent far too little on Afghanistan. The SF group that was then sent to Afghanistan were Latin America experts. Geez…
A final straw (for me) was throwing away decades of good will towards the US by “legalizing” torture and ill treatment of prisoners in Iraq. Abu Gharib gave Al Qada THOUSANDS of recruits due to the Cheney policy of torture. (CIA estimate). My father literally fought the Nazis, in North Africa, and later was wounded during the Normandy campaign. I grew up knowing that the Nazis and evil Commies were the torturers and brainwashers of this world, that the US and its military were the “good guys”. Not anymore, now we are just as much SOB’s as North Korea in the war crimes department, at least as far as most of the world thinks. During Vietnam, we court martialed and put in Leavenworth US soldiers who waterboarded VC, now, Cheney and the neocons crow about it…

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