The Respectfully Republican Conversation

"Rosemary, shows that Biden doesn't know what he's talking about.  I've heard over and over just the opposite.  And, look what happened after Bush made that announcement.  I truly believe it had an effect.

I used to live in Texas.  I can remember traveling back from N.C. and seeing all the oil wells pumping in fields.  That's before all the interstates were around.  I wonder if I'd see them now.

We need to impeach Pelosi.  LOL  As I understand it, she won't even bring this issue to the floor.  I can't wait for the dems to go home this August and see what they tell their constituents.  I don't think the constituents are going to buy Al Gore's idea of getting off fossil fuels in 10 years.  That's absolutely absurd.

I wish more people who had Fox News would watch that station.  But, no, they only want to hear and see what THEY want to believe is true.  The othe day when I was watching Fox they showed limos and SUVs lined up where Gore was making his speech about getting off fossil fuels.  One of the reporters knocked on the limo driver's window (while the limo had been idoling for 20 minutes).  I couldn't quite get the comment from the FOX (who else would report this truth), reporter, but it was something about using energy or polluting.  The driver pushed his little electric window and it rolled SHUT. LOL  And dear ole Al was asking people to ride their bikes or take other alternative ways to get there.  Well, when Mrs Gore et al got in their limo it was nice and cool.  What a hypocrit!

And people on the Obama thread (yes, I know they come here to read and I occasionaly read their's but not often at all cuz I really don't care what they have to say) accuses some of waiting for the hypocrite (Gores et al) to show us by example.  Well, I did bring that up several times before the "bow-down-to-BHO" (notice the "H" I inserted..means nothing, but I like to pi$$ people off from time to time..)  people started that thread..(remember the Respectful Presidential Thread?).  I was over "there" the other day when one of the posters mentioned how some of us want the excuse of not conserving I just had to put my two cents in and tell the poster that I knew she was talking about me.  I AM NOT TURNING OFF MY AIR CONDITIONERS UNTIL AND WHEN THE GORES DO!  And then I stiil WON'T. LOL

Okay, back to reading the remainder of the posts.  Hope Obama's having fun over there in the Middle East.

Shirley

I know this a respctful Republican conversation, but I have to ask if anyone has read the Left Behind book series,  The bad guy in the books is Obama for sure!! Hopefully not because he showed up after the rapture and I'm still here but the comparisons are uncanny.  Came from nowhere, very likeable, everyoone listening...  SCARY!!

Doesn't this top all???  What the heck is a matter with these folks? Haven't MSNBC and CBS done enough to rig this election? Now we have the administration adding to this. What a comedy of errors.

Even a spokesman for al-Maliki said his remarks "were misunderstood, mistranslated and not conveyed accurately."

("Government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said the possibility of troop withdrawal was based on the continuance of security improvements, echoing statements that the White House made Friday after a meeting between al-Maliki and U.S. President Bush." )

From ABC-----------------------------

White House Accidentally E-Mails to Reporters Story That Maliki Supports Obama Iraq Withdrawal Plan

July 19, 2008 1:29 PM

The White House this afternoon accidentally sent to its extensive distribution list a Reuters story headlined "Iraqi PM backs Obama troop exit plan - magazine."

The story relayed how Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki told the German magazine Der Spiegel that "he supported prospective U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama's proposal that U.S. troops should leave Iraq within 16 months … ‘U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama talks about 16 months. That, we think, would be the right timeframe for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes,'" the prime minister said.

The White House employee had intended to send the article to an internal distribution list, ABC News' Martha Raddatz reports, but hit the wrong button.

The misfire comes at an odd time for Bush foreign policy, at a time when Obama's campaign alleges the president is moving closer toward Obama's recommendations about international relations -- sending more U.S. troops to Afghanistan, discussing a "general time horizon" for U.S. troop withdrawal and launching talks with Iran.

- jpt

__________________

PS-  No wonder why my BP is so uncontrollable.

Well, I see this (if true) as censorship.  If al Maliki actually used those words, he prefers Obama's plan then we should hear it.  Something tells me he didn't say he prefers Obama's plan.  Last week he wanted a time frame of 5 years. 

I read a story about the citizens there are afraid to let us leave too soon.  And one thought 16 months was too soon.  They think that will just open the door to more fighting.  They want to start building and creating jobs, people with college degrees are standing on corners selling pencils.  They want to get on with it, and at the same time, they need us there to do it.

 Some of the buildings in Dubai that we paid for: 

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2008/07/17/amazing-projects-of-dubai.aspx?source=nl

The Dancing towers should be re-named the Pelosi-Reid building.  It seems so fitting.

Interesting video.  Saw this on Fox the other night.  It's called "Busted Again." 

http://www.foxnews.com/video2/video08.html?maven_referralObject=2435807&maven_referralPlaylistId=&sRevUrl =http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,387261,00.html

The URL looks funny, but I was trying to post it so it won't make the page all screwed up.  It worked for me this way.

Just got through listen/watching Obama's news conference in Jordan.  He stumples quite a bit when there's no props to help him read the questions by the press.  If someone doesn't give McCain some speed or ritalin or something he's not going to "inspire."  Ya know, people want to be INSPIRED no matter what the candidate has to say.  Can't wait to hear McCain's response to Obama's comments.

Shirley

This is too funny!!!! Enjoy.

http://www.johnmccain.com/video/love.htm

Uh, I think this "advisor" put the cart before the horse!  LOL

I doubt very seriously I can watch Obama speak.  I've heard all I need to hear from this man.

A knew word that Obama used in one of the press conference after meeting with the Iraqis...DRAW DOWN rather than WITHDRAW.  E.D. was doing the 5 o'clock show on Fox and she pointed out the word "change."

I'll be so glad when this election is over.  Then we can go back to the "alternative" thread. LOL

Shirley

i guess this is a dumb question, but we as taxpayers are paying for Obama's trip as a congressman although it is a political event, correct?  Does anyone else see a problem with that?

Peapot-  Welcome! 

I'm one of the Independents on this thread.  I'm registered Democrat and I didn't think I'd be saying this because normally, I'm a ticket splitter---but I am so angry at this Democratic Congress that I will be pulling a straight Republican ticket.------

As to the funding of this grand Photo-Op,  as long as he's got Sen. Chuck Hagel and Sen. Jack Reed as window dressing he'll get away with it being a Congressional Fact finding tour and we taxpayers will pay.

As a matter of fact the total will eventually appear in the Congressional Record as a committee expense.

I think the Obama campaign may be picking up the cost for the European and Middle East part of the trip. 

Linda--I hope you aren't right about Ridge---He will never give Pennsylvania to McCain and Obama would just counter with Rendell who is popular in Pa.  Personally, I think McCain needs a hail Mary. And Romney had such an icky, factor, --------

I hope he does not pick Romney.  And Ridge?  Don't think so (at least I hope not).  I think he needs someone much more exciting.  I agree Bobby R. is probably not a good pick because of his inexperience.  However, that "boy" is one smart MAN!  He could outsmart Obama anytime.  As Hannity continues to remind us, Obama was a community leader. LOL

It's about time Obama visited Afghanstan and Iraq.  Thanks to McCain's challenge he did.  However, I certainly do not see anything exciting coming out of his trip THUS FAR.  We'll see what he has to say about al-Maliki supposed remarks when he comes back.  There's still an ongoing debate whether al-Maliki made those remarks.  Tonight on of the pundits said that a "spokesperson" said that al-Maliki remarks were not translated correctly...meaning al-Maliki didn't say this himself.

Shirley

Looks like Jindal took himself out of the running today.  Tim Pawlenty is a name starting to surface.

As we shake our heads at the continuing European euphoria over Obama, due to reach fever pitch Friday at his pre-inauguration rally at Berlin's Victory column- a reality check is in order.

Here is a perspective from the other side of the pond.--The Times on-line and an insightful commentator.

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Eventually, we will all hate Obama too

What makes America such an indispensable power is precisely what makes anti-Americanism inevitable
David Aaronovitch

It amuses me that some of those who criticise the present US Administration for its Manichaeism - its division of the world into good and evil - themselves allocate all past badness to Bush and all prospective goodness to Obama. As the ever-improving myth has it, on the morning of September 12, 2001, George W. and America enjoyed the sympathy of the world. This comradeship was destroyed, in a uniquely cavalier (or should we say cowboyish) fashion, through the belligerence, the carelessness, the ideological fixity and the rapacity of that amorphous and useful category of American flawed thinker, the neoconservative. They just threw it away.

But there isn't anything that can't be fixed with a sprinkling of genuine fairy dust. What Bush lost, Obama can find. Where the Texan swaggered, the Chicagoan can glide. Emotional literacy will replace flat iteration, persuasion will supplant force as the preferred means of achieving what needs to be achieved, empathy will trump narcissism. Those who hate America may find their antipathy waning, those who were alarmed by unilateralism will warm to softer, moral leadership. A new dawn will break, will it not?

Some on the Left are getting their count-me-outs in already, realising that Mr Obama is, after all, a big-game hunter, a full-trousered American candidate. They, I think, are more realistic than those who manage on one day to laud the Democrat as not being a real politician, and on the next to praise him for his sensible left-trimming when seeking the party's nomination and his equally sensible centre-hugging once it was in the bag. I say the antis are more realistic because, eventually, we will hate or ridicule Mr Obama too - provided, of course, that he is elected and serves two full terms.

George W.Bush, of course, represents a particular kind of offence to European sensibilities. He blew out Kyoto, instead of pretending to care about it and then not implementing it, which is what our hypocrisies require. He took no exquisite pains to make us feel consulted. He invaded Iraq in the name of freedom and then somehow allowed torturers to photograph each other in the fallen dictator's house of tortures. He is not going to run Franklin Roosevelt a close race for nomination as the second greatest president of the US.

But even if he had been a half-Chinese ballet-loving Francophone, he would have been hated by some who should have loved him, for there isn't an American president since Eisenhower who hasn't ended up, at some point or other, being depicted by the world's cartoonists as a cowboy astride a phallic missile. It happened to Bill Clinton when he bombed Iraq; it will happen to Mr Obama when his reinforced forces in Afghanistan or Pakistan mistake a meeting of tribal elders for an unwise gathering of Taleban and al-Qaeda. Then the new president (or, if McCain, the old president) will be the target of that mandarin Anglo-French conceit that our superior colonialism somehow gives us the standing to critique the Yank's naive and inferior imperialism.

Often those who express their tiresome anti-Americanism will suggest, as do some of the more disingenuous anti-Zionists with regard to anti-Semitism - that they, of course, are not anti-American, and that no one really is. But, coming as I do from an Anti-American tradition that wasn't afraid to proclaim itself, I think I know where the corpses are interred. For example, the current production of Bernstein's Candide at the English National Opera is a classic of elite anti-Americanism, in which we are invited to laugh at the philistine invocation of “Democracy, the American Way and McDonald's”. The laughter that accompanied this feeble satire showed our proper understanding that we, the audience, had a proper concept of democracy, and would never soil ourselves with an Egg McMuffin.

The true irony went way above the sniggerers' heads, which was that Leonard Bernstein was the American cultural import that we were, at that very moment, enjoying. But the prejudice is that American culture has had a negative influence on the world, tabloidising our journalism, subverting the gentle land of Ealing with the violent pleasures of Die Hard 10 and commercialising our most intimate lives. And so we have ever complained; my father, back in the early Fifties, once wrote an entire communist pamphlet about the terrible effect of Hollywood and jazz on the land of Shakespeare and Elgar.

This week you could hear the author Andrew O'Hagan on Radio 4, reading from his collection of self-conscious essays, The Atlantic Ocean, in which - despite his own claims - every impact of American life on Britain is somehow configured negatively. He writes of an exported popular culture “born in the suburbs of America” and defined as “Spite as entertainment. Shouting as argument. Dysfunction as normality. Desires as rights. Shopping as democracy.” This in the country that has sent Big Brother, Pop Idol, Wife Swap and Location, Location, Location over the Atlantic in the other direction, while taking delivery of Curb Your Enthusiasm and The Wire.

I should admit that I am irked by O'Hagan's dismissal of the “idiots who supported that bad and stupid war (ie, Iraq)” and am willing to match my idiocy against his intelligence in any debating forum that he cares to name. More interesting, though, is the desire to blame America. For all that O'Hagan claims that the US has lost its purchase on the world's affections, it remains the chosen destination for the most ambitious of the planet's migrants. For all that he claims that this change in sentiment is recent, I can't help recalling those - the most honest - who commented, in journals he writes for and on the very day after September 11, that the Americans had had it coming.

In part I think that anti-Americanism is linked to a view of change as decline. The imagination is that dynamic capitalism, associated with the US, is destroying our authentic lives, with our own partly willing connivance. It is a continuing and - at the moment - constant narrative, uniting left and right conservatives, which will usually take in the 19th- century radical journalist William Cobbett (conveniently shorn of his anti-Semitism), and end with an expression of disgust over the Dome, the Olympics or Tesco. Just as bird flu is a disease from out of the East, runaway modernity is a scourge originating to the West.

So Barack Obama, en fête around the world, will one day learn that there is no magical cure for the envy of others. What makes America the indispensable power (and even more indispensable in the era of the new China), is precisely what makes anti-Americanism inevitable.