smjjames

What are you referring to? The fact that the establishment tried to knock him out of the running? If you mean the whole Strzok thing, two FBI employees being dumb =/= the whole government. The way the FBI handled the Clinton Investigation was definetly a mess though and theres certainly oversight reasons to look into the handling of the Trump side of the investigation, but declassifying to the point of hurting national security seems like going beyond just oversight.

There is a low non-zero possiblity, yes, but a lot of specific things would have to fall into place for that to happen, not that I know what they are, it's just usually the case with low probability stuff. It'd definetly be more likely in the case of a close electoral college win though. Trump is 100& going to shout 'RIGGED!' in that situation, even though that's exactly how he won, which would further inflate the irony. Assuming it happens in 2020 anyway. Barr is supposed to be following the general rules regarding declassifying stuff, but the Intel Community is rightfully concerned about it. Besides, with Barr's behavior, I don't trust him to be honest about any sort of findings.

Not sure if it's actually possible, or it'd at least be statistically unlikely, for a Democrat to win electorally and lose the popular vote due to the way Democrats are distributed. In order to find the last time it happened to a Democrat (or in the one case, the precursor to the Democrats), you'd have to go back almost 200 years. The rest of them have all been Republicans. editwhiletyping: That one case also just happens to be during the brief period where the US was a one party state in all but definition since that party wasn't cohesive at all.

By no entanglements, you mean no-deal Brexit, right? Though theres the Irish border which is kind of a damned if you do and damned if you don't (do a no deal crashout) situation because the current system requires the existence of being in the EU and changing the current system is going to affect the Good Friday deal and the border simply due to rule changes. So, in a way, they can't escape some sort of entanglement no matter what. Not that a GFA 2.0 can't be done, it'd just be more complicated since it'd have to do something that GFA 1.0 barely touches on, trade crossing the border.

Isn't Marcus Aurelius the one who killed Cleopatra? Might not actually be accurate, but anyway..... nvm, I checked wiki and it was someone else, Augustus, though he was known as Octavian at the time.

Don't they still have to supplicate before the church? But I suppose you're not against that... are you? (just lightly messing with you here because logic, heh). It is pretty ironic though because Alabama.

It's also the only one with the level of government organization that it has, isn't it? That'd be a major difference since the others don't operate on the same level and are more of a trade bloc than a political and legislative entity. Still, it's not without issues and the political system has plenty of flaws and a long way to go with reform.

I meant the 'marrying their sibling' part, seemed obvious with the quote.

Just about all of them are Democrat controlled atm with Colorado and Nevada being at least partial exceptions. However, there are several Republican states which have it slowly going through the state legislature, so, it's progress. Sarcasm aside, it's a kids show, why would they do something like that? Also, hillbilly stereotypes ahoy.

Oh, I misunderstood who was in what party, or something. Thanks for the clarification though.

Pretty sure it's an example of a corrupt legal=ethical mindset since Trump and the way his campaign acted is such a blatant example.... Even if 'Herr Kurz' isn't directly or indirectly responsible for any of the corrupt acts by his party, he's still got a clusterbleeping mess on his hands.

Uh, I thought you guys didn’t need to create a new thread every 30 pages or so because of a forum bug that doesn’t exist anymore?

Except that these days, there’s not much that doesn’t trigger one side or the other (conservatives like to call liberals ‘snowflakes’, but they’re equally snowflakey), though you do have a point about picking your battles. Like Gromnir said though, it’s a private group that can change their name however they want, within reason of course Speaking of Alabama, maybe the Republicans should choose their battles more carefully, there are definitely people who think the Republicans plan to do some equally extreme stuff and the Republicans are just about confirming those. Even the RNC chairwoman is saying that it’s going too far https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/17/politics/ronna-mcdaniel-alabama-abortion-cnntv/index.html

I did sense some sarcasm, though it was more ‘what are you bull****ting about?’

Link to whatever the heck you’re actually going on about?

I can see that backfiring on them, heh, what they really want are conservatives, but it’ll get flooded with both.

For a second, before I checked the link (and also saw GDs post), I thought you meant the college and was a bit confused. Just me being tired here Would be useful if the article said what pledges weren’t being honored.

True, but it seems like overkill just for that reason given and the wiki article under criticisms said that there was no proof of them being in imminent danger. Being afraid of another Iran hostage incident is understandable, but it kind of sounds like it went beyond an extraction op.

I thought Black Hawk down was under Clinton, but it's possible that I might be thinking of when he withdrew several months later, a few months into his term. Also, you could put Democrat in for Afghanistan and Iraq. You put Syria down as Democrat and Republican because Trump still had to deal with it and Obama still had to deal with Afghanistan and Iraq. Not sure how Grenada was unavoidable, all I've heard is that it was basically overthrowing some leader we didn't like. I'll look at wiki though. edit: Looked at wiki and while Ronald Reagan said that the justification was to rescue 600 something students, reading wiki, it seems like overkill to do all of that just to rescue 600 students, why not just extract those people? That's what spec ops are for aren't they? Edit2: You know, isn't the reason sorta close to the excuse Putin gave for the invasion of Crimea? That is, to protect Russian citizens?

@zoraptor: Yea. To quote a great philosopher (no idea who it's attributed to as it's kind of general. edit: Actually, might be Clausewitz or Sun Tzu.), 'Never make a bluff that you can't or are unwilling to back up.' Obviously that's not strictly true as the success of mimicry shows, but it's just the general idea of 'If you're going to bluff, make sure it actually has teeth, or that the target thinks it has teeth'.

True, they're different circumstances, but they're still examples of ways that escalation could happen. The Gulf of Tonkin event sounds closer to what happened with the invasion of Iraq in terms of manufactured causus belli, while the USS Maine event is probably better understood as part of a series of events leading up to the Spanish-American war. Also, is it possible to have it keep the quotes within a post? It removes some context when it does that.

Just in terms of pure numbers, we do have them, just that it would mean moving EVERY active military and most reserves over to Iran, which just shows the enormity of the numbers. As Gromnir said, it pretty much all comes down to political will.

Actually, re-reading that, it looks like he wasn't forced to use WWII tech, but rather resorted to it in order to get around 'Blue', so, more of a lack of imagination on 'Blue's part.

Well, theres two major differences though, one is that we never tried to occupy Japan (well, the main islands at least), and two, Germany and the rest of Europe had the Marshall Plan, I don't think we ever did any sort of comprehensive Marshall Plan-like thing for Iraq. It may have been partially dumb luck, but there are lots of differences between those situations and the ME.

Eh? If they're going to make Iran use WWII tech, then the US needs to use WWII tech. That's not how you do a proper wargame. If you wanted to see if you could beat a WWII tech adversary to stroke your ego, sure, but nobody is at that level, not even terrorists. Not to mention that Iran is much bigger, something like three times bigger. Resources? Donald "We should have pillaged Iraqs oil!" Trump would have you think otherwise.