There seems to be little or no effect in the polls taken after Barack Obama's comments. Andy over at electoral vote. com has several polls up if you want to take a look.
I'd like to see what the polls show later in the week after the 24-7 news coverage of the comments by the "liberal" media soaks in a little more. Those will be the ones that will really show the effect.
Crabmaster threw down the gauntlet over on Kevin's blog that I haven't made any predictions because I'm (gasp!, sniffle sniffle) scared that I will be wrong. So, I have decided that on Monday I will predict how the rest of the primary season will play out.
13 comments:
I'm not sure which posting you read of mine over there.
I said you were wrong in the 2 predictions you made about the primaries in Iowa and New Hampshire. You said Edwards would win Iowa and he ended up getting 3rd in Iowa. Then you said Obama would win NH by a wide margin. Obama lost NH by a wide margin.
I also said you haven't made any predictions since then.
That is all I said.
I never said you were scared. Gauntlet? Not hardly, just reveling in the irony of someone being horribly wrong regarding both primaries while at the same time claiming they have their finger on the pulse of the people.
Why wait till the day before the primary? Hindsight is not wisdom.
Reagrding your predictions - you're dealing in intentions and I'm dealing in results.
Now where's the keyboard cowboy 1 line insult crew..........
Life is all about intentions and rarely about results. That's what makes it more interesting.
If, that is in fact what your wrote on the other blog, it sounds like a snide challenge to me.
Life is rarely about results?
I look forward to the day a Dem candidate comes out and makes a statement like Life is rarely about results. It will confirm what you and I have been saying on this blog for years.
Very, very revealing, Elizabeth. I could not have summed up the differences between right and left any more succinctly.
I don't think either one of you is understanding what I am saying. Here goes again...
Life is about the journey and how you grow from that journey, not the goal you achieve or fail to achieve when you get there.
In your particular allegory above, you fail to realize that polls or perception is more important, many times, than voting results. I offer as evidence the 2000 election.
Sounds like just dave was spot on when he said your comment clearly illustrates the differences between right and left. In my book it's very much the same as valuing the journey vs. the goal, or perception vs. results. Certainly everybody bases their decisions to some degree on perception over reality, but I'm sure not keen on turning over the reins of this country to somebody who is going to tell me that life isn't about results. I may stand alone on this, but to me the results are everything.
Funny when you consider that bin laden and Al Zawahri have not been caught yet.
I'm sorry, you have me confused with somebody who makes blanket evaluations of performance based on isolated components.
You just said results are everything. The two people most directly responsible for the 9-11 attacks have not been caught and yet somehow the Bush Administration is waging a more effective war on Al Qaeda, by invading Iraq, then the Democrats.
If you are going to hold the left to a certain standard, then you must hold the right to that same standard. The results of the Bush Administration's policies speak for themselves.
I'm not sure when the topic turned to Al Qaeda, but whatever...I'll run with it. There's not necessarily any relationship between "waging an effective war against Al Qaeda" and capturing those two individuals. But again, I'll run with your assumption that there is. I'm not sure where or how you leapt to the conclusion that I don't hold GWB accountable for failing to capture those two. Setting aside for the moment the fact that I have no military experience and I've never attempted a manhunt in hostile territory, I suspect our military and intelligence capabilities when used under better management could probably have prevented them from getting out of Afghanistan. I temper that conclusion with the simple fact that my "experience" in the realm stems entirely from what I read, as I suspect is the case with 99% of the people who criticize the administration on this topic.
Setting aside that last discussion, my point was simply this - the discussion of the success (or failure) of an administration extends far beyond cherry-picking individual things that have succeeded or failed. George Washington, Abe Lincoln, etc., are considered "great" Presidents for two reasons:
1) They accomplished one or more great things during their terms
2) Over time we have lost sight of the multitude of failures for which each was responsible.
Perhaps it's as simple as the net effect (1 - 2) being a positive.
In the end, the assessment of GWB as President for you might boil to a few matters about which you seem to have a great of anger, but for me it involves many other factors, some of which (gasp!) are quite positive. Is the net effect a positive? Perhaps not...I freely admit that, mostly because I think the jury is still out on critical components of the equation.
Elizabeth, I agree with you that life is about the journey but we are talking public policy here, not life lessons.
Clinton caught the 1993 WTC bombers. While we are all glad that were caught did that law-enforcement solution to the problem prevent future attacks? The War on Terror seems, to some, to be as easy as arresting OBL and putting him on trial. Not realizing all along it takes many conditions for his like to gain the necessary power to be a force. It takes the wealth and assistance of friendly governments in that region, a training ground like Afghanistan, absolute zero freedom of the press so what they see about the rest of the world is carefully controlled, illiteracy rates through the roof in those countries, etc. My point being, if we are to effectively prosecute this war it will take more than the mere removal of 2 individuals, but a change that will require great sacrifices and long term goals in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. It took similar socio-economic changes in countries like Brazil 7-10 years to fully realize the benefits, and that was without an insurgency going on.
Lots of people look at the impact of a decision without considering the possible consequences of the opposite decision (or inaction). Myself included probably...
Let's take Afganistan in the 1980's for instance. When it was invaded by the Soviets, our #1 enemy was clear – the Soviets. The thought of Soviet world domination certainly trumped any consequences of arming a bunch of rag tag mountain warriors. You must take in the full context of the time, the mood, the event. What decision would you have made? Would you have not armed these people and allowed the Soviets to carve out territory in the Middle East and monopolize the world's energy source? Or would you have sent in a ton of American troops and triggered WWIII? It's easy and lazy to say "we created these terrorists". It's another thing entirely to see that it is merely a side effect of avoiding a much worse problem. Don’t just focus on the negative effects of an action without also looking at the possible effects of inaction? It's a messy world and many times people have had to choose between bad and worse.
Let’s take a look at how no-bid contracts work because lots of people scream about them often. Unless you want soldiers in the field with no bullets or food you better get to love those no bid contracts. In federal procurement, contracts, especially large ones, can take months to complete. Secondly, and this is especially true in war, the logistics contracts tell the suppliers where the army is supposed to be, at what times and what armaments they will need to fight a battle. Want to give that information to the enemy since free and open bidding on contracts means anybody can get hands on that contract? Frankly, unless you want even higher body counts from allowing the enemy to get a logistics bid and seeing where we'll be, when we will be there, and what military hardware we're bringing, not to mention where it will be delivered enroute so you can sabotage it, then learn to love those contracts. That’s why I support tham but to each his own.
This country enacted a sweeping entitlement agenda with the Great Society/War on Poverty programs of the 1960’s. Sure the intentions were good but the results we have now is a Social Security system heading towards bankruptcy, a Medicare system badly in need of reform, a highly regressive tax to pay for both of them, public housing units that became slums almost overnight, a welfare system that for decades before reform subsidized out-of-wedlock births while penalizing marriage and work, and on and on and on. Those things are a result of the enactment of certain liberal policies and now that people understand their true price, they are having serious second thoughts about letting the government control things. The results we can see now are that there is quite a bit of evidence that the subsidizing of out-of-wedlock births encourages more out-of-wedlock births, that penalizing marriage discouraged welfare recipients from getting married, that midnight basketball didn’t solve shit, and that penalizing work discouraged welfare recipients from going to work. Many still to this day simply don’t want to look at the results because they are a natural consequence of a piece of that agenda that was enacted in this country. The policies exacerbated the problems – made them worse, with all kinds of negative cultural side effects. After a bill of $6 trillion, I think we can safely assume that throwing money at poverty doesn’t solve it and in fact only makes it worse. But the policies sure sound good if you only talk about the intentions right?
Now for some equal time - here is a little inside the Capitol history on terrorism: in 1989 the budget came to Capital Hill and missing from New President Bush Sr's budget were line items for nation building in Afghanistan which had been there in the Reagan budgets and carried over each year to be expended when the Soviets were evicted. The Republicans on appropriations were invited over to the White House to listen to why the budget was the budget and Charlie Wilson of Texas asked why it was gone since he was the champion of the freedom fighters (what we called them in those days in Afghanistan – see Rambo III). Brent Scowcroft bristled and said this administration would do none of what Reagan had promised and they could go back to their 15th century existence as far as he was concerned and that was policy and that was that. He said the US would fund their training and arms as long as the soviets were there but to the hell with them when the soviets were defeated. Needless to say that policy pissed off the "freedom fighters" and it didn't take much for Iran to get them to jump onto the Islamic Fundamentalist bandwagon. Brent Scowcroft and John Sunnunu are the two that hammered out that budget.
I was all set to chime in w/ quotes from John Ray ("The road to hell is paved with good intentions."), but, as usual, Crab has said it better than I could have. Drat.
Post a Comment