Uechi-Ryu.com

Laughing stock, respected...it was a fine line


Well you keep trying to turn a WSJ article about how China has ignored the requests of two presidents in the Xue case into an unrelated rant about Obama, hard to see how that is on topic.

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Glenn

One president, Glenn. The decision was made on Obama's watch.

10 Begin
20 Bush isn't president any more.
30 If blame on Bush, then go to 20
40 End

I do however hear that he's responsible for the breakup of the Beatles...

- Bill

Oh come on Bill, you read the timeline in the WSJ article. That copout doesn't wash here.

That stated ineffectiveness was all during Bush's watch, with the decisions being made by the Bush administration. The chain of events was already set in motion long before Obama came on the scene. As the WSJ and other articles state, Obama carried on the effort and was no more or less effective than Bush. Although as I said earlier, maybe they were effective, Xue wasn't sentenced to death.

Correct, but it is not always the president you want to be responsible.

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Glenn

The decision was made on Obama's watch.

10 Begin
20 Bush isn't president any more.
30 If blame on Bush, then go to 20
40 End

Yoko Ono just e-mailed me. Indeed Bush caused the breakup of the Beatles.

- Bill

OK, I'll bite, what single 'decision' in an almost three-year chain of events are you focusing on to make this Obama's fault even though it started over a year before he became president?

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Glenn

Perhaps a paradigm shift is in order.

Bush's presidency is done. Obama is the man in the Oval Office. The former president's legacy is pretty much determined. The latter is in the process of governing. I cannot change the former. I can complain about and vote against the latter.

When you get to the last lap of a relay race, the man with the baton is going to be determining the end from that point forward. All that has happened before is done. Are there initial conditions? Yes. Can you change them? No. But you can make excuses. And as the parent of a teenager, I've learned not to tolerate excuses.

- Bill

As a friend & Sensei, he shouldn't tolerate them either...

which is why this fat old man is going for a 2+ mile walk (uphill both ways!) during (& instead of) lunch!

Sure, but by the same token, when someone poses the question "Why did our relay team lose?" You don't say "Oh because our last runner couldn't run 30 miles an hour" you say "Well, probably because our first runner lay down and took a ten minute nap on the track."

Bill, what you keep doing is raising issues, and instead of talking about what we should do, you just want to make it about the job Obama is doing. Here's the funny part. If you want to talk about what to do going forward, great! Then let's skip the blame game. But if you're going to use these issues as an excuse to bash Obama, then you can't play the "Oh you liberals and your Bush blaming" card.

So tell me, Bill. What do you suggest we do about China's human rights violations? I absolutely agree it's an important issue. Unfortunately I'm not sure what to suggest.

As for the general point of whether it's better to be respected or loved, I would point out that those aren't mutually exclusive emotions. I also think there's real strategic value in trying to catch some flies with honey. So you haven't convinced me that extending an olive branch to the muslim community is a bad idea.

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- Justin Powell

There are reasons, and then there are excuses. I don't tolerate excuses. You play the hand you were dealt in life.

You beat them at their own game, the way Reagan did with the Soviets. You get the economy on track by hook or by crook.

And that doesn't mean extending unemployment benefits. I never took a dime in the year I was w/o a paycheck. (Tell your grandchildren to thank me.) The only thing extended unemployment benefits do is extend unemployment. Hunger is an amazing thing. So is learning that if you and live beyond your means and don't save, then you lose all your silly material goodies (and your credit) as soon as the first paycheck doesn't come.

And that doesn't mean saving businesses that should be allowed to fail. GM should have been allowed to go down the tubes. Compete like the Japanese do within our own shores - WITHOUT THE UAW!!! They build cars for a fraction of what GM does - right here in this country in "Detroit South." The phoenix can rise from the ashes, but only after it has been thoroughly torched. Old business paradigm? Buh bye!! Hello twenty-first century.

Ever heard of Tesla Motors? Why didn't they get a fraction of all that GM bailout money? They're actually building and making the cars of the future. They're building cars that people want, albeit a little expensive right now. Without the UAW. But no..... Obama has to throw money at the labor unions that got him in office. And GM continues to build and sell cr@p. And they get government support so that their Volt will compete against the Tesla cars in an unfair market. Because they have the backing of the We-bought-your-ass-in-chief.

Meanwhile, China's going to build cars for a fraction of what we do, and kick our asses in the marketplace.

Or....

You let Capitalism happen. It rewards the efficient. It destroys the inefficient, old paradigms.

I could go on and on and on and on... Reagan got it. Do you airport traffic control workers want to go on strike and paralyze our country? YOU'RE FIRED! ALL OF YOU!!! Bring in new staff. Problem solved. They didn't think he'd do it. Yea, he actually did that! You wonder where Trump learned how to do what he does...

Obama doesn't get it. He's too busy listening to (socialist peace prize winning) Krugman and his Keynesian nonsense. (BTW, on GMA this week Krugman predicted a depression is ahead. No doubt if people keep listening to him.)

You let free market economies win against state-controlled economies.

You sell freedom in the world. And you DO NOT apologize for it, or mince words when talking about political oppression.

This is true. But given a Sophie's Choice, I'll take respect.

Let's see now... Why don't we go to today's newspaper.

Obama hasn't convinced anyone that his peace offensive is working.

They didn't like us before. They don't like us now. They won't like us in the future. This minority faction which pollutes one of the world's great religions needs to be exterminated like the western-civilization-hating cockroaches that they are.

- Bill

It appears that due to a computer error, a previous thread about people talking to themselves and repeating what they believe has been mistakenly duplicated.

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--Ian

So why do you constantly make excuses for Bush and blame Obama for how he handles the hand he is dealt?

Oh, and holding Bush accountable for his decisions is not the same as making excuses for Obama's decisions. Countering blame levied at Obama is not the same as making excuses for Obama's decisions. Countering blame levied at Obama for events occurring before his presidency is not the same as making excuses for Obama's decisions. You are in effect setting up a condition that people either agree that Obama can be blamed or try to make excuses for him, with no other options available. That's hardly productive.


Justin comments about extending an olive branch to the muslim community, you reply with how bad al-Qaeda is. So you are saying we should not try for peaceful relations with any muslims because of that one minority faction?

And no praise for the Obama administration being on top of that global terror plot?

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Glenn

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Glenn

So I take it that you have tired of getting your intellectual ass kicked, and have resorted to drive-by cheap shots. You're better than that, Ian.

Would you expect someone whose political beliefs are based upon principle rather than expediency to change his/her point of view? I'll take recognition of a pattern as a compliment.

And I still love you.

- Bill

10 Begin
20 Bush isn't president any more.
30 If blame on Bush, then go to 20
40 End

This reminds me of Bobby Knight - then basketball coach of Texas Tech - at a press conference. Something happened to the Indiana coach. Bobby didn't want to talk about it, and there was no good reason for him to. You don't speak badly about former bosses; it isn't wise by any measure. So Bobby had a prepared, written response. Any time a reporter asked him a question about Indiana, Bobby picked up the note card and read from it in a monotone. The more they asked, the more he picked up the note card. Did the reporters stop? No... which made Bobby's act all the more funny. Then Bobby's non-response became the hot story of the day. It kept the Indiana story going for the reporters. What-ever...

I'm saying it didn't work. I'm keeping it very simple.

It actually gets more complicated than that, Glenn. On the one hand we have Obama kissing the hand of the Saudi King.

Obama bows to, kisses hand of Saudi King

And then we have this view of how he treats the Israeli prime minister. I chose an article from the foreign press so you get to see how bad it looks from the outside looking in. (I avoided the usual sources that Obama's enemies would use.)

Obama snubbed Netanyahu for dinner with Michelle and the girls, Israelis claim

So I'm not seeing anything positive with this peace offensive towards the Muslim world. I frankly see the same garden variety antisemitism that can be found in the UN.

Obama can't seen to hide his stripes on this one. Even though Netanyahu treated the situation with class and Obama did a kiss-and-make-up session for the press, his true colors came through loud and clear.

Even a broken clock is right twice a day. That doesn't mean I'll want to keep it.

He's not my guru, and he didn't do anything original that helped the matter. Anything original that he did try wasn't helpful - at best. That's the topic of this thread.

- Bill

This is just perplexing. What do you expect would have happened in a year and a half? Anti-American attitudes in the muslim world aren't boolean factors. You can't (legitimately) say that just because there is still terrorist activity and anti-Americanism that it has categorically failed, or that we should give up on the approach. It's not like any other solution would've made the problem just disappear. As far as I know the goal is to reduce sympathy for terrorist groups and make their recruitment harder. Do you have some reason to believe this has completely failed? Nobody is expecting them to throw down their swords and come running for hugs.

As for China, fine, we can try to outcompete them. Maybe, maybe they'll go bankrupt in 10-15 years (at the earliest) if your strategy works. So that's your solution to the human rights issues? Waiting a decade or two for their economy to collapse and spark a revolution doesn't really address anything in the near term. It certainly wouldn't do anything about the kind of thing you started this thread with.

Furthermore, there is no way we're going to compete with China on a manufacturing basis while maintaining our standard of living. Personally I'm not willing to go back to the days of 14-16 hour factory shifts in miserable conditions in order to be able to say that we have more theoretical wealth in some way. If you want to go slave away reliving the industrial revolution, go ahead. I'd rather see respectable wages and comfortable working conditions for American labor.

And if you're talking about the knowledge economy, then I don't even see how we're failing to compete now. China may have all the manufacturing, but as far as I can tell all the ideas still come from elsewhere (and often from the US).

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- Justin Powell