Blue Mass Group

Reality-based commentary on politics.

“He would make outrageous claims like he invented the question mark.”

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My father would womanize, he would drink. He would make outrageous claims like he invented the question mark. Sometimes he would accuse chestnuts of being lazy. The sort of general malaise that only the genius possess and the insane lament. ~ Dr. Evil

Was Dr. Evil’s dad John McCain?

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) plans to promise on Monday that he will balance the federal budget by the end of his first term by curbing wasteful spending and overhauling entitlement programs, including Social Security, his advisers told Politico.

All this while spending indefinitely on the Iraq occupation and cutting taxes for the wealthy? Impressive! Who said “the issue of economics is not something [McCain has] understood as well as [he] should”? [Hint: it was John McCain. ~ ed.] McCain doesn’t understand economics like a fox, I’d say!

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  1. via TMP

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    “The McCain administration would reserve all savings from victory in the Iraq and Afghanistan operations in the fight against Islamic extremists for reducing the deficit. Since all their costs were financed with deficit spending, all their savings must go to deficit reduction.”

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    p>So what’s victory again?  It’s changed so much that we don’t know what that means anymore from McCain/Bush.  He wants to keep troops there after “victory” as well, while at the same time use money that we’re still spending in Iraq to reduce the deficit.

          • No WMDs? Check.
            No Nukes? Check.
            Toppled evil regime? Check.
            Democracy? Good enough. They voted.
            Kick al-Qaeda’s ass (those that are in Iraq, anyway)? Check.
            “Mission Accomplished” declared!

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            p>Time to bounce.

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            p>Why, what do you think “victory” is and when will this “victory” be achieved?  

            • why did the Democratic House and Senate approve more war funding? They must want to keep this thing going. Or maybe they are “refining” their strategy too.

              • …they don’t want to be criticized for not funding and not “supporting” the troops. They think it would be political suicide to be seen as anti-troop who won’t pay for their equipment.

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                p>I’m all for cutting the purse strings and I think the Dems in congress have been spineless. On the other hand, they’ve been limited because the Senate is so close and they have anything but a working majority.

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                p>I’m hopeful that the anti-war Dems will be more active with the election of Barack Obama. He says: “”My first day in office, I will bring the Joint Chiefs of Staff in, and I will give them a new mission, and that is to end this war. Responsibly, deliberately, but decisively.”

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                p>We’re done. Any objective we the people were given for going into Iraq before the war started has been taken care of. The US won.  There’s no justification for shedding any more American blood.  

              • And how long is too long? 5 years? 10 years? 100 years?

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                p>What’s the deadline?

                • more legitimate than any but the oldest can remember, Saddam Hussein is dead, the government is curbing sectarian violence and the oil business is finally getting its feet on the ground.  

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                  p>The link I posted above is another important step — normalizing relations with neighbors.  

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                  p>How many people died for our country to be free?  How many more died in the civil war to sustain it?  Bloodshed and sacrifice for democracy isn’t some new song.  How long until the job is done?  Ask the Iraqis, because the ball is in their court.  However, from an objective standpoint, it’s looking a lot better than it did a year ago.  Hopefully a year from now this trend will have continued and an actual peace may have been realized.  How long is too long?  At some point, if it arises, we will have to admit that there is no want for the peace we are helping them with.  I would be shocked if the war in Iraq is still a large issue by the next election, and if it is, it might be time to say they had their chance, give them a few guns, and tell them we’ll be back in a few years to bury the dead and take the oil.

                • …when it’s not your life you’re giving for a country that is not yours. Second, where are the billions and billions of dollars going to come from to keep this war going until the next election? That’s another huge gamble.

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                  p>There’s no comparison with Americans dying in the Revolution and Civil War to Americans dying in Iraq. A large portion of Iraqis don’t even want us there, otherwise there wouldn’t be an insurgency. We need a deadline, but all you can offer is “hopefully”. We’ve been hearing the “hopefully in 6 more months” and “hopefully a year from now” delay tactics since 2004. Fool us once shame on you…fool us 5 or 6 times, it’s time to go.

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                  p>I don’t see any reason to keep giving Iraqis a blank, indefinite check of the vague and ambiguous “staying till the job is done” that you suggest. Every pre-war objective was met. Our troops did their jobs and plenty more then they were originally asked to do. I can’t see how any American can ask a fellow citizen to go die in that desert for the democracy of the Supreme Islamic Council, especially when it may never happen. I can’t think of one American I can ask to go do that. I can’t ask one child to give up their parent for that. I can’t ask one parent to give up their child for that. I can’t in clear conscience ask my worst enemy to give up his life for that.  

                • Let’s see:

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                  p>McCain will i.) maintain a higher tax burden on 85% of Americans, including you and me,  then Senator Obama’s tax plan and he ii.) wants to make major cuts in domestic spending for things actual tax-paying Americans need like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaide, law enforcement, highway budgets etc, all the while he iii.) continues spending $2.3 billion dollars a week on Iraq for four more years where Americans are killed every day or coming home and attempting 1,000 suicides per month or rip apart marriages and families because the person that comes home is not the person that left and by the way iv.) 40% of that $2,300,000,000 per week go to enriching private contractors like Haliburton/KBR and Blackwater who moved out of the US to avoid paying taxes on their earnings and are doing an absolute shit job at providing the support they were contracted to give? Are you sure?

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                  p>Let me get this straight: So McCain is going to ask people like you and me to forgo Obama’s lower taxes and allow the government to gut services and cut spending on us, all the while shipping our dollars overseas to Iraq (not to keep Americans safe, but to give Iraqis “democracy”) and making American contractors richer even though they’re skirting American taxes, so he can balance the budget in 4 years? And people give Obama a hard time about his soaring promises and riding in to save America on a Pegasus? McCain would have an easier time convincing me that he invented the question mark.

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                  p>Seriously, Joe, why would anyone want this? I don’t get as big a reduction in my taxes as Obama would give me (or 85% of Americans) and I have to deal with gutting of services while we pour money indefinitely into a country that’s trying to blow our soldiers up? How is shipping $2,300,000,000 a week to overseas and handing $920,000,000 of that money to subsidize private industry “conservative”?

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                  p>Let’s keep the bulk of that money, and our troops, at home and invest in building our nation and invest in our people.  

      • I’m glad that Arab ambassadors are no longer being kidnapped and murdered, as was apparently an issue after the American invasion.  At this rate, Iraq might return to the status quo antebellum, with only thousands of deaths on either side to pay for the return to normalcy!

        • I know it’s not some huge issue that needs to be hyper-analyzed, but would you call a Japanese person Chinese?

            • Egypt is actually the largest Arabic-speaking country on earth. Of course, for a respected commenter who has spent a considerable amount of time arguing that our botched $500 billion fiasco in Iraq — a bloody and unnecessary war that has killed thousands of our own, tens of thousands of Iraqis and left the entire region less stable than it was before our attack, not to mention helping to produce gas at $4.50 gallon and a sagging stock market — is a success, this reality-based detail may seem like a triviality.  

              • It also effected the end of the Saddam regime, which, even if the end result is ethnic partition, and regardless of one’s political position on the war and occupation, has got to count as a long term net plus.  

            • Nice try on using their official name to gotcha! me, but I don’t think anyone here is going to make the argument that North Korea is a democracy

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              p>How embarassing!  Someone should tel Kim Jong-il they should change that.  

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              p>Here are some facts:  Egyptian is a seperate ethnic group

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              p>Don’t believe me?  Compare with Saudi ARABia.  here
              or Yemen

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              p>Also, to Bob below me, the Arab spoken in Egypt is a seperate language and calling them the same is tantamount to saying Portuguese and Spanish are the same.  They are quite similar, but they are not the same language.  

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              p>I don’t know what else I could show you to prove my point.  If all else fails, find someone you know who is Egyptian and ask them if they self-identify as an Arab — then you’ll have your answer.  

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              p>I better get a damn 6 for this hahaha.

              • Egyptian v. Saudi Arabic is similar to Australian vs. American English.  They’re different dialects within a mutually comprehensible language.

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                p>I don’t care that the Factbook declares Egyptian an ethnicity…its does the same with Andorran, even though I can’t imagine a population of 24,000 having enough of a long-duration genetic base to be a separate ethnicity.

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                p>The official name of Egypt is “Jumhuriyat Misr al-Arabiyah”  Note the last word.  Before that, they were joined with Syria, a fellow Arab nation, in the United Arab Republic.  Their president, Hosni Mubarak, talks about “Arab vision” the “Arab region” and “brotherly Arab leaders” in this 2005 speech.  What else do you need??

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                p>I can see how you come by your understanding of Iraq.  

              • Yes, Egypt has been Arab for quite a while. During the last century of the Ottoman Empire they functioned quasi-independently of the the Empire and then had to endure British dominance for an extended period. That has made their politics different from Syria, the emirates, or Saudi Arabia.

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                p>Remember, though, that Nasser was pushing pan-Arabism. He was a nationalist and the brand of nationalism he was pushing was not Egyptian nationalism. It was Arab nationalism.

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                p>If I’m not mistaken, there may be Berbers living in Egypt but the concentration of Berbers is higher to the west of Egypt.

      • …simply because it’s so shreddable.  Look at it this way, John – if you racked up a huge balance on your credit cards and then stopped charging on them, would you call the charges you’re no longer making savings?  Would you be able to use those “savings” to pay off the debt you’ve already racked up?  This plan, like everything else McCain proposes, is pure bullshit, that’s why it’s being shredded on these pages and elsewhere.  

      • That’s the question, McCain never has provided any details whatsoever.  He’s never provided numbers to his proposals.  How long has he been running?  You’d think he night have some estimates?  But instead we get the Jerry Seinfeld budgets, “made up of nothing”.  

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        p>My point is that he continuing to add to the nonsense by including that he will magically have victory in Iraq (but we don’t exactly know what that means), and with that money that we won’t be spending (even though he wants to keep troops there) that he will now balance the budget.

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        p>Here’s a great summation that I just read over at MyDD

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        McCain will waive his magic wand, you see, and win the war against “Islamic extremists” peacefully. Then he’ll use that leftover money to balance the budget. McCain might even end with a surplus! And then he’ll take the money from that surplus, and he’ll spend it to cure cancer. And then with all the additional survivors of cancer, we can harness the brainpower to invent a time machine! And then we’ll go back to 2002, and decide that going to war in Iraq was a stupid idea in the first place.

        And then the war in Iraq will be over.

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        p>It just that simple, McCain for President!

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