[quote]countingbeans wrote:
[quote]smh_23 wrote:
Which is to say that our priority, right now, should be to make sure that we don’t elect another Bush, even if that means we have to elect another Obama. That’s my feeling, anyway.
[/quote]
Obama really isn’t materially different than Bush in terms of Foreign Policy.
Congress voted “yea” on Iraq. Bam wanted Syria, and will likely (as it is tracking now) have our boots on the ground in Ukraine…
All I’m saying is I’d like someone vastly different than the two of them. Because if Bush ordered the drone strike of citizens and their teenage sons, void of due process, please point it out to me.
They are both deplorable, and we deserve better. [/quote]
I agree with much of this, but not the first sentence. Syria–complicated, in that what Obama actually would have done probably would not have involved boots and the ground and thus probably would have not led in the direction of “real” war, which is a good thing. But, either way, in the end, nothing much happened.
Drone strikes on American citizens–his worst offense in the arena of FP, and an absolute and utter transgression. I’m with you 100 percent.
Still, what Bush did renders the two items I just detailed vanishingly small. An absolutely pointless war–a real war, mind you, with thousands of real American corpses, and many more real Iraqi civilian corpses, and trillions of dollars just–poof–gone.
In the end, the first thing I look for in a President is, “will he start a war like an asshole?” Because any war, in this day, can lead to total war. American Presidents are among the very few people on Earth endowed with the power to snuff out the universe’s last sentient thought (of which we’re aware). I can work around the taxes they levy and the laws they pass. I can’t get away from a mushroom cloud.