2012 U.S. Presidential Election

[Sasaki Kojiro]

Ah, so you're dead certain that sending Navy SEALS into a sovereign nation with uncertain intel was "not a tough decision." I admire your certainty, if not your reasoning.

Why do you think it was a tough decision?

False equivalence is false. GWB chest-thumped over an accomplishment which was epically unaccomplished. BHO is chest-thumping over an actual accomplishment. Small but crucial difference.

MRD was saying republican war goofs were ignored and democrat war goofs repeated over and over. I was arguing against that kind of disparity.

Ah, those evil, evil media people. Is there any wickedness they don't promote?

Yes. But it's bad that they latch on to an easy narrative and churn out "here's more of so and so being X" stories. It leads to a simplified and false image of the presidential candidates being broadcast to the american people. My favorite Kimmel joke from the WHCD was a "non joke":

"Some people say journalism is on the decline, you've become too politicized, too focused on sensationalism. They say you no longer honor your duty to inform America, but instead actively try to divide us so that your corporate overlords can rake in the profits… I don't have a joke for this, I'm just letting you know what some people say…"

Here's a useful and accurate bit of perspective (from the EVIL MEDIA, natch):

You know who this puts Obama on par with? Every fricking Republican who has run for office since 2001. Oh, yeah, and Hillary Clinton, whose infamous 3 a.m. phone-call ad from 2008 is being revisited in the wake of Obama’s new one.

Let us take a brief stroll down memory lane to the 2004 Republican Convention. The not-so-subtle theme: vote for John Kerry and al Qaeda will invade your homes and eat your children. This is only a slight exaggeration. Dick Cheney hasn’t uttered a word in the past decade that didn’t raise the specter of terrorists at the door. And Rudy Giuliani? Joe Biden said it best when he noted that for a long stretch, every sentence that came out of Hizzoner’s mouth consisted of “a noun, a verb, and 9/11.”

Going even further back, who can forget President Bush’s much-ridiculed, flight-suity “Mission Accomplished” speech on May 1, 2003, from the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln? But you know one of the main reasons that photo op was so widely ridiculed? It was bollocks. The “mission” in Iraq was anything but “accomplished.” Bush was touting an achievement he had not yet even achieved.

Osama bin Laden, by contrast, is very, very dead. [...]

Romney has been swinging at the president’s international cred of late. The governor has suggested he would be tougher than Obama on everyone from China to Iran, while his foreign-policy adviser Richard Williamson has flat out accused Obama of “naiveté and fecklessness.”

Those sound like fighting words to me. [...]

Is Team Obama’s ad a political punch to Romney’s magnificently chiseled jaw? Of course it is. It is harsh, exploitative, tacky even.

It is, in short, perfectly in keeping with today’s political climate.

A little more amusingness:

Republicans are — forgive the cliché — shocked, shocked to discover that a presidential contender is “politicizing” an important national event. In this sense, “politicizing” might be best translated as “beating us up and we don’t have anything much to say to stop it.” The ad itself raises intriguing, substantive, legitimate questions — and the ferocious, sputtering Republican reaction is proof positive that they know it, or at least suspect it.

And so on and so forth:

It couldn’t be more hilarious, watching these Republicans rend their garments over the Obama administration’s bin Laden video. Imaging the paroxysms we’d have been forced to endure if George W. Bush had iced the dreaded one is all we need to do to understand how hypocritical it all is. But what obviously gets under Republicans’ skin is not the fact of this video’s existence, but the fact that Barack Obama got him and they didn’t, which destroys their assumption of the past decade that they are “the 9/11 party."

And my personal favorite, which appears to be addressed directly to Sasaki and Panzer: "So the Republican position on the operation that took out Osama bin Laden is that it was no big deal? Good luck with that one."

What "intriguing, substantive, and legitimate" questions does the ad raise? Why did you link and quote four people who are just saying the same things you've been saying?

I get it, to you any kind of dishonest smear job by obama is fine because as long as it shows he's a "clever politician" who's "taking it to the republicans". You often focus on the polls and how some political move might go over with the public rather than whether it's actually good or bad and you consistently have this wildly exaggerated impression of how "hard obama rocked" the republicans. They are rending their garments, getting beaten up, in apoplexy, ferocious sputtering, etc.

It's a weird situation where the rest of the people (not just me and panzer, the forum as a whole) are here talking about politics and events etc, metaphorically sitting around a fireplace, and you're here campaigning like we're in the political trenches, throwing out blog-grenades willy nilly, scrabbling around for ammunition to use against the "enemy", and ducking imaginary salvos.