Your 2016 Presidential Candidate Speculation Thread

there's plenty to criticize in Obama's fp - drone wars, stupid red-line statements - but praising Clinton's as better doesn't make sense to me.

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+ btw somalia started under GHWB so in terms of clean-up...

so long as presidents resort to foreign adventures after reeling from legislative setbacks we're going to have horrible shit to clean up and never will

frederik, it's pretty offensive to ignore a list of like 20 things that have nothing to do w/ israel and decide that actually my secret motivation for hating obama's foreign policy is that he doesn't like bibi enough. i thought you were better than that. that's morbz level idiocy.

― Mordy, 16. marts 2015 17:31 (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Fuck you saying it's offensive. For you to make a list of things you dislike about Obama and not include Israel, when that is like 95% of what you complain about on here, is bullshit, and it only gets worse the more items is on the list. Calling you out on that is not 'offensive'. Offensive is saying someone dislikes Bibi because he is Iranian, or discussing how to get islamophobic friends to express their hatred of muslims without using antisemitic tropes.

I don't care what you think of me. I've honestly lost all the respect I had for you these last few months.

i don't know what the fuck you're talking about w/ getting islamophobic friends to express their hatred of muslims whatever, but i talk about a lot of things on ilx. that you think 95% of it is israel only tells me where your focus is.

this is tiresome. you guys hate each other, we get it.

maybe i left israel out bc i know morons like you + morbz love the chance to attack me for my support of israel every chance you get and maybe i want to discuss obama's FP without having to deal w/ your illiterate howls.

(^ not maybe. that was actually my motivation. thanks for proving my instincts correct)

'Oh, I lied about my motivations so as not to have them discussed, and you called me out on it. That's offensive!!!'

actually i don't organize my entire view of the world around my opinion on israel and i have many interests. you apparently have one. i'm not surprised.

'Oh, I lied about my motivations... '

The externally available facts are woefully insufficient to establish this as a fact. To put it more succinctly, you're imagining things. nagl

i'm coming around to the opinion that it would be a great thing to knock off HRC in the primaries. but it would be much harder than in 08 and it was plenty hard then. i don't know who could do it and i don't think warren could.

yeah options are thin on the ground

i think O's foreign policy record is Very Bad, but the one thing he did right was "leave a power vacuum in iraq" ie the thing that unbreakable majorities of americans and iraqis wanted him to do. whatever mess has flowed from that decision, i just don't buy any counterfactual that staying would have made anything better.

really looks like this administration just drastically underestimated the creativity and brutality of its adversaries. like they thought if they flipped the central government of ukraine that would be that; that putin wouldn't just carve up the country, taking the bits he wanted and babysitting a civil war in the rest. or that assad wouldn't rather bunker up in his strongholds and degrade the rest of his country rather than give it up.

we all watched iraq descend to its lowest common denominator bloodbath after the strongman had been removed; why this expectation wasn't in mind re: libya (or even egypt tbh) is anybody's guess. to parrot some of the hardcore "realist" line: the through line between 43 and 44 isn't "neoconservatism" but a certain, idk romanticism. believing ones own hype.

both obama and HRC are so secretive its really hard to tell how much of any of this is the white house's doing and how much is hers

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CAMYWkvWYAAC82W.jpg

omalley seems to be who ppl think is the most reasonable pick, webb imo has a lot of juice personality/culturally but everyone seems to think hes not a natural politician and doesnt have the energy/passion for a long campaign

i tend to agree w the CW that hillary will be very hard to knock off but i think there is another possibility which is that shes just a bad campaigner and its inevitable she gets knocked off

it's kinda weird that Biden isn't even trying this time around

webb is certainly more interesting than HRC and comes by his centrism a little more honestly (if that makes sense; i heard his book on rednecks ahem the scots-irish is p cool) but idk if he's that different from her politically

like i cld see webb just humiliating hillary in a debate, the dynamic of her being a super focused grouped triangulated speaker and him being this no nonsense grumpy man cld be very rough for her

feel like webb would do well w/ building a big enough voting block to win - not sure how his opinions on gun control would undermine his opportunity to reach out to moderate-right voters

p much everyone in the country is receptive to the minor gun controls webb is in favor of, he doesnt need to win any wingnuts

seems like a (really rich, self-funded) 3rd party candidate could be a possibility. perot managed to nab 20% of the vote in 1992. although, if you're one of the 500 U.S. billionaires in 2015, there's not much point in running. just let hillary win and she'll take care of the rich people.

rand running third party wld be such a beautiful dream

he seems a lil too smart to do it but it wld be very cool if he did

I can't see a lefty third-party raising enough money, and frankly it would just guarantee a GOP win soooo

"so what" is the finish there

POTUS costs a billion dollars if u haven't noticed. no nonshits need apply.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CAPN4OwXEAA7oGi.jpg

"Rand Paul under investigation for alleged connection with thousands of teens over Snapchat"

loool

heh

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CAL_UnPUMAEuTup.jpg

their shd be a snapchat primary debate where the candidates have to share their nudes

weird to see anyone still blaming obama for pulling out of iraq, as if just continuing to do what bush had done from 04 to 08 would have made much difference; you still get an unstable nightmare no matter when you do it and i haven't heard a single remotely convincing alternative scenario. the problem was knocking off saddam in the first place.

obama's foreign policy has been terrible but that doesn't make him much different from any other president post-1969 (at one point i would've said 1947 but i've mellowed a bit, haha).

Idk obv hindsight 20/20 but wouldn't a more graduated withdrawal have been better? In the end we are going back anyway.

yeah I'm more interested in what Mordy thinks made Clinton *better* apart from the Oslo photo op. Bubba was fortunate to be president at a time when Russia had basically abdicated from its role as a geopolitical enemy of the US, and the Middle East was firmly under the boot of various tinpot dictators. But when he was confronted with a crisis, he hardly performed heroically - I always thought it was gross that the impeachment vote in the Senate just happened to coincide with the day the US started dropping bombs in Bosnia

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At the very least we could've saved some airfare

In the end we are going back anyway.

haha no

I assume you've noticed that Obama can't get his expanded war powers through congress at the moment

I'm not an expert in Balkan politics by any means but a generally explosive region seems to have calmed substantially since the NATO intervention?

my understanding is obama was in favor of a more gradual withdrawal but the iragis werent into it

I'm not an expert in Balkan politics by any means but a generally explosive region seems to have calmed substantially since the NATO intervention?

well duh the real question is why it didn't happen sooner

in retrospect the most clintonian foreign policy moment was when he attempted to bomb osama and every republican accused him of doing it to distract ppl from the lewinsky episode

they were all who tf is osama bin labbern

well duh the real question is why it didn't happen sooner

i'm sure there are very complicated answers to this but at least re clinton it is bc overwhelming airstrikes forced yugoslavian forces out of kosovo? i'm not sure if like Rambouillet is in effect (maybe de facto + not de jure?) but NATO interventions played a pretty serious role from what I understand. I'm sure Sanpaku will be about shortly to correct me.

"Constitution was made by christians directed by God."

God directed that each slave would count as three fifths of a person?

sounds more progressive than the god of leviticus tbh

but not the god of Morbs

clinton also gets some credit for kicking indonesia out of east timor, about which (east timor in general, not so much clinton's role in it) war nerd wrote about this week

That Constitution tweet was made by a Mormon kid on a mission trip, but it seems divinity of the constitution is a thing many in the LDS church believe?

it seems divinity of the constitution is a thing many in the LDS church believe?

I recall this being a big talking point when I visited the Mormon Tabernacle as a teenager

Mordy I just don't think it's that much of a stretch to regard Bosnia or Rwanda as bearing parallels to some of Obama's challenges. Clinton's performance does not seem measurably more successful or ethical, in both cases cynical realpolitik and lack of options resulted in a lot of deaths. Obama's tenure has been marked by a higher number of conflicts than Clinton's, but he's hardly to blame for that.