SultanOfSwing

Stop trying to pretend like you're some humanitarian pacifist and not some alt-right crybaby looking for something to pin on an otherwise comparatively OK 8 years.

scrubbedexpat099

When I see stupidity I like to call it.

SultanOfSwing

How do you reconcile that with your posts, then?

I mean, we're at war; have been since 2003. Right or wrong, bombs tend to be dropped during a war.

Obama just couldn't win either way. Either continue the wars started by his predecessor and he's some kind of hawk, or stop the fighting and he's seen as being soft on terror/the Middle East/whatever bogeyman the paranoid, scared-of-their-own-shadow right wing like to demonize this week.

mrken30

I think the only way for him to win was to drop more bombs. I believe we are still at war. It was a bad idea to drop the first bomb in the first place with hindsight.

SultanOfSwing

It's just a series of smaller and smaller bombs all the way down. Except for those two really big ones we dropped a while ago.

zargof

We've actually been at war since 2001.

Also, the problem is Obama has massively expanded the use of drone strikes as well as increasing the number of countries the US is bombing up to eight. That isn't a liberal position, but half the left ignore it.

Granted, if McCain had won, things would more than likely as worse, but it don't make Obama good.

Also, Boiler may be many things, but alt-right isn't one.

SultanOfSwing

I don't know why I was thinking only of Iraq and not Afghanistan. Anyway, I wasn't concerning myself with the right or wrongs of it, merely mentioning that when a country is at war, bombs tend to be dropped and it certainly isn't something to be used to consider Obama's terms as a bad presidency, when they clearly weren't.

zargof

Just pointing out the hypocrisy of the situation, in that if it's a Republican in charge then the left considers wars as a bad thing. But if it's a Democrat in charge then those same wars are conveniently ignored.

Of course when it's comes to deficits then it's vice versa.

SultanOfSwing

Wars are too much of a grey area to be a pure left/right issue anyway. I mean, I'm not a fan of the current one but I do accept the reality of the situation when it comes to how Obama has to lead the country through a war.

Though, you'd be hard pushed to find people even on the left who would argue that the Second World War wasn't a necessary evil.

zzrmark

I seem to recall reading somewhere that the US has been in one armed conflict or another since WW1 without a significant break between any of them.

SultanOfSwing

It was WW2. There was nothing between the wars for the US, but there has been at least one armed conflict every decade since WW2.

mrken30

Between WW1 and WW2 it was just economic warfare.

zzrmark

I knew about Mexican/US troubles between the two wars but it also turns out that there were issues in Cuba and Panama as well. I was curious and went googling. If you include conflicts with indigenous North American peoples and Civil War the US has only 14 (21 if you exclude the odd foray by the CIA) war free years since it gained independence, their longest period of military inactivity was 1935 to 1940.
As if the amount of time spent fighting other nations wasn't enough WTFery, many of those conflicts were US initiated offensives. Makes Russia's spats in Crimea and and other old USSR territories seem fairly insignificant (To clarify, I'm not saying that they are insignificant).

Edit: Mind you, they're still only amateurs at it if you compare them to the Brits in their heyday!!!

SultanOfSwing

Well, shit. Guess the page I found had a few omissions, then.

zargof

Indeed. When they talk about American exceptionalism, what they really mean is American supremacy.