I can easily imagine Obama thinking everything about the GWOT stinks to high heaven, but this scattered network of terrorists is a legitimate problem, if not an existential threat, and it must be addressed. What can I do to mitigate the damage and put it on a path to drawing back from the ledge? Given the frathouse nightmare he inherited from Bush, I think he did as much as possible to those ends.
The thing about conventional public liberal thought that drives me absolutely bananas is the belief that doing the Right Thing is trivially easy, and would always "work", delivering the desired outcome, but our corrupt leaders refuse to do it out of blindness, cowardice or complicity. Biden could end the Israel-Hamas war by simply telling Israel to cut the crap or else, but he refuses. The concept of "then what" (thanks, Obama!) simply does not exist for these people. There are never any consequences when you do the Right Thing, only virtuous reward. Institutional racism is as real as a glass of orange juice, but institutional inertia, apathy, self-interest, are all phantoms devoid of power and influence, needing only a stern glare to be banished. It drives me nuts, and these are the people I agree with...
Geopolitics is definitely the area where Biden is a marked improvement over Obama — clearly because he learned from Obama's weaknesses — and in a sane world this would be widely acknowledged even by Conservatives.
Before he was VP he was a power on the Senate foreign relations committee--chaired it in the bad time 2001-03 and the better time 2006-08. I think it was a major reason Obama chose him, to counter his own inexperience (and possibly to make Hillary's job harder). I've long thought what you say, but I'm just now starting to see it as a more mixed blessing, I'll get to that later.
I can easily imagine Obama thinking everything about the GWOT stinks to high heaven, but this scattered network of terrorists is a legitimate problem, if not an existential threat, and it must be addressed. What can I do to mitigate the damage and put it on a path to drawing back from the ledge? Given the frathouse nightmare he inherited from Bush, I think he did as much as possible to those ends.
The thing about conventional public liberal thought that drives me absolutely bananas is the belief that doing the Right Thing is trivially easy, and would always "work", delivering the desired outcome, but our corrupt leaders refuse to do it out of blindness, cowardice or complicity. Biden could end the Israel-Hamas war by simply telling Israel to cut the crap or else, but he refuses. The concept of "then what" (thanks, Obama!) simply does not exist for these people. There are never any consequences when you do the Right Thing, only virtuous reward. Institutional racism is as real as a glass of orange juice, but institutional inertia, apathy, self-interest, are all phantoms devoid of power and influence, needing only a stern glare to be banished. It drives me nuts, and these are the people I agree with...
Geopolitics is definitely the area where Biden is a marked improvement over Obama — clearly because he learned from Obama's weaknesses — and in a sane world this would be widely acknowledged even by Conservatives.
Before he was VP he was a power on the Senate foreign relations committee--chaired it in the bad time 2001-03 and the better time 2006-08. I think it was a major reason Obama chose him, to counter his own inexperience (and possibly to make Hillary's job harder). I've long thought what you say, but I'm just now starting to see it as a more mixed blessing, I'll get to that later.