[quote]LIFTICVSMAXIMVS wrote:
The real question is why we should tolerate using a military force to go around the world looking for other people’s “problems to solve” in the first place.[/quote]
I agree. A dictator is killing his own people? Not cool, but not our problem. Perhaps we cut off all trade and talks and other business with them, but why do we go in, make a mess, fund the recovery, and then gain much of nothing.
Other foreign aid? Why is it assumed that I want to fund that?
Even humanitarian causes overseas…these should be funded via private contributions. [/quote]
While I too generally disagreed with attacking Libya I have no problem justifying it because of his role in the Lockerbie incident. He deserved his overthrow and death from an American perspective for just that one reason alone.[/quote]
A couple decades late…and after our overlords became all buddy-buddy with him.
The US government has no moral leg to stand on, EVER.[/quote]
There is no statute of limitations on murder.[/quote]
Did he actually blow up the plane?
If not then all living US presidents should be brought to “justice”.[/quote]
No US president has ever authorized and facilitated the terrorist hijacking, bombing, and downing of a civilian airliner.
LIFTI, it’s OK to hold to many of your insane anarchist views but don’t resort to outright stupidity like you did here. It really, really marginalizes you even more than you already are in the arena of ideas.[/quote]
Oh yeah, and there are couple hundred thousand dead Japanese that would also take exception to your statement about no president ordering the murder of innocent civilians.
[quote]LIFTICVSMAXIMVS wrote:
Oh yeah, and there are couple hundred thousand dead Japanese that would also take exception to your statement about no president ordering the murder of innocent civilians.[/quote]
You went there…oh yes, as predictable as the tides you went there.
[quote]Tiribulus wrote:
If we weren’t wasting mountains of money on unconstitutional social welfare programs we would have plenty of money for constitutionally mandated military actions. This says nothing whatsoever about the legitimacy of any given war. Only that we are not in debt primarily because of a military that is actually called for in our founding documents.[/quote]
Correct…the amount spent on social services for illegal immigrants each year alone could fund a year in Afghanistan. [/quote]
Prove it.
The truth about the government’s social welfare spending is that VERY little of it doesn’t go to those who’ve paid into it. Social security pays out in proportion to what a person paid in during their working years and currently has quite a bit of money sitting in reserves, which the government uses to gain interest and fund other things, like war. Then there are a lot of benefits, which are counted in the “welfare” portion of the US budget, for retired government employees and veterans and those make up another large chunk of the “social welfare spending”.
On the other hand, we’re financing the wars mostly on loans.[/quote]
Sorry in this instance you are very wrong 113 BILLION a year to illegal immigrants.
And the first part of your statement is just full of fail.
The last part COULD be very true, but I don’t have the time to dig through Google Docs for the budget info.[/quote]
For the 2010 fiscal year, the president’s base budget of the Department of spending on “overseas contingency operations” brings the sum to [b]$663.84 billion.[/b][1][dead link][2]
When the budget was signed into law on October 28, 2009, the final size of the Department of Defense’s budget was $680 billion, $16 billion more than President Obama had requested. An additional $37 billion supplemental bill to support the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was expected to pass in the spring of 2010, but has been delayed by the House of Representatives after passing the Senate.
The federally budgeted (see below) military expenditure of the United States Department of Defense for fiscal year 2010, including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, is[8]:
Components Funding Change, 2009 to 2010
Operations and maintenance $283.3 billion +4.2%
Military Personnel $154.2 billion +5.0%
Procurement $140.1 billion �?�¢??1.8%
Research, Development, Testing & Evaluation $79.1 billion +1.3%
Military Construction $23.9 billion +19.0%
Family Housing $3.1 billion �?�¢??20.2%
Total Spending 683.7 billion +3.0%
As for my claim that our payments to illegal immigrants are small compared to social security:
“In 2011, there will be 56 million beneficiaries and 158 million workers paying in. In 2010, total income was $781.1 billion and expenditures were $712.5 billion”
Do the math: 712.5/113= 6.3. Social security spending is 6.3x greater than monies given to illegal immigrants.[/quote]
Jesus Olenna, I was using ONE group as an example…the total entitlement system is a fucking GIGANTIC total. (not to mention you lumped Iraq AND Afghanistan together in your figures…I was only referencing Afghanistan)
And you did not address your other completely short bus statement either…
“The truth about the government’s social welfare spending is that VERY little of it doesn’t go to those who’ve paid into it”
O RLY?[/quote]
I addressed that above. People pay into social security and retirement benefits, which make up a large chunk of “goverment social welfare spending”. The other portion, “safety net spending” is mostly a refund on taxes!
BTW, interest paid on national debt per year is larger than the amount spent on illegal immigrants: e federal government must make regular interest payments on the money it has borrowed to finance past deficits â?? that is, on the national debt held by the public, which reached $9 trillion by the end of fiscal 2010. In 2010, these interest payments claimed $196 billion, or about 6 percent of the budget.
[quote]LIFTICVSMAXIMVS wrote:
Oh yeah, and there are couple hundred thousand dead Japanese that would also take exception to your statement about no president ordering the murder of innocent civilians.[/quote]
You are a dumb fucking idiot for saying that’s what I said. A dumb fucking idiot. A stupid, dumb, fucking idiot.
You really are a whole lot less intelligent than I previously thought. Your dumb ass just compared Qaddafi with Truman. [/quote]
Clearly Truman should have sacrificed 1 million G.I.'s on a land invasion of Japan (My grandfather was a Marine in the Pacific and would undoubtedly been in on the landing, our family would like to thank the President for saving his life).
[quote]LIFTICVSMAXIMVS wrote:
Oh yeah, and there are couple hundred thousand dead Japanese that would also take exception to your statement about no president ordering the murder of innocent civilians.[/quote]
You are a dumb fucking idiot for saying that’s what I said. A dumb fucking idiot. A stupid, dumb, fucking idiot.
You really are a whole lot less intelligent than I previously thought. Your dumb ass just compared Qaddafi with Truman. [/quote]
Truman is a murderer so is Qaddafi – what’s your point? In fact Truman is probably worse than Qaddafi and all the rest of the terrorists combined when you think about all those poor women and children murdered in the sleep.
Can you smell their melting flesh if you close your eyes and think about it hard enough?
[quote]LIFTICVSMAXIMVS wrote:
Oh yeah, and there are couple hundred thousand dead Japanese that would also take exception to your statement about no president ordering the murder of innocent civilians.[/quote]
You are a dumb fucking idiot for saying that’s what I said. A dumb fucking idiot. A stupid, dumb, fucking idiot.
You really are a whole lot less intelligent than I previously thought. Your dumb ass just compared Qaddafi with Truman. [/quote]
Clearly Truman should have sacrificed 1 million G.I.'s on a land invasion of Japan (My grandfather was a Marine in the Pacific and would undoubtedly been in on the landing, our family would like to thank the President for saving his life).
LIFT you plumb crazy baby.[/quote]
What do killing innocent Japanese women and children have to do with saving GI’s lives? Why are their lives more important than innocent people in Japan who have nothing to do with what their government does?
What if the Japanese were getting ready to surrender (which they were) and you just believe in the lies your government tells you?
[quote]LIFTICVSMAXIMVS wrote:
Oh yeah, and there are couple hundred thousand dead Japanese that would also take exception to your statement about no president ordering the murder of innocent civilians.[/quote]
You are a dumb fucking idiot for saying that’s what I said. A dumb fucking idiot. A stupid, dumb, fucking idiot.
You really are a whole lot less intelligent than I previously thought. Your dumb ass just compared Qaddafi with Truman. [/quote]
Truman is a murderer so is Qaddafi – what’s your point? In fact Truman is probably worse than Qaddafi and all the rest of the terrorists combined when you think about all those poor women and children murdered in the sleep.
Can you smell their melting flesh if you close your eyes and think about it hard enough?[/quote]
Yeah well, Truman did not really start that war, he played the hand he was dealt and with the cards he had he could go for the really shitty option and the abysmally shitty option.
LIFTICVSMAXIMVS… No judgement here… but I wonder if you live in the United States… you definitely benefit from our First Amendment rights.
The things you say are incredibly inflammatory and largely ignorant in the light of recorded history, however, I relish in the fact that a “warmonger” such as myself protects the very right for you to say the things you do.
The US is not perfect be any stretch of anyone’s imagination, but sure try harder than most. If there is a place that is better, more free, or anything else, perhaps you should start a chat forum on a web server in that country?
I never shy from solid argument, and enjoy people whose ideas are different than mine, if we all thought the same, we wouldn’t be America. Having said that, it is so much more interesting when someone disagrees from a position of knowledge.
[quote]LIFTICVSMAXIMVS wrote:
Oh yeah, and there are couple hundred thousand dead Japanese that would also take exception to your statement about no president ordering the murder of innocent civilians.[/quote]
You are a dumb fucking idiot for saying that’s what I said. A dumb fucking idiot. A stupid, dumb, fucking idiot.
You really are a whole lot less intelligent than I previously thought. Your dumb ass just compared Qaddafi with Truman. [/quote]
Clearly Truman should have sacrificed 1 million G.I.'s on a land invasion of Japan (My grandfather was a Marine in the Pacific and would undoubtedly been in on the landing, our family would like to thank the President for saving his life).
LIFT you plumb crazy baby.[/quote]
What do killing innocent Japanese women and children have to do with saving GI’s lives? Why are their lives more important than innocent people in Japan who have nothing to do with what their government does?
What if the Japanese were getting ready to surrender (which they were) and you just believe in the lies your government tells you?
[/quote]
Many of those “innocent Japanese women and children” were actively participating in the war effort. Don’t believe me? Come to Hiroshima and walk the monuments set up to them. Come to the poison gas factory with me where those “innocent” women were working. Come see the locations where young students were mobilized to help out with the war effort.
“Getting ready to surrender?” So why DIDN’T they after Hiroshima? Why was there still so much disagreement about what to do in Tokyo at the time? Have you even read the history of the decision to surrender?
Sheesh.
The former mayor of Hiroshima is more balanced in his view than you are…[/quote]
Former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara recalls that General Curtis LeMay, who relayed the Presidential order to drop nuclear bombs on Japan, said, “‘If we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.’ And I think he’s right. He, and I’d say I, were behaving as war criminals. LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?”
Years after relaying the orders from President Harry S. Truman to drop nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, General LeMay said the actions were not necessary.
‘Truman Told Me to Do It’
‘‘We felt that our incendiary bombings had been so successful that Japan would collapse before we invaded,’’ he said in a 1985 interview with the Omaha World Herald. ‘‘We went ahead and dropped the bombs because President Truman told me to do it. He told me in a personal letter.’’
[quote]joebassin wrote:
Years after relaying the orders from President Harry S. Truman to drop nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, General LeMay said the actions were not necessary.
‘Truman Told Me to Do It’
‘‘We felt that our incendiary bombings had been so successful that Japan would collapse before we invaded,’’ he said in a 1985 interview with the Omaha World Herald. ‘‘We went ahead and dropped the bombs because President Truman told me to do it. He told me in a personal letter.’’
I guess somebody should have told the Japanese that they were soon going to surrender, since they apparently did not know that and were still debating the issue…
But maybe LeMay knew better than the Japanese what they were planning, eh? After all, the Japanese DID make their wartime decisions based on the same values as the Americans… [/quote]
The fact is that they dropped the bomb thinking it was unnecessary. Stop ignoring inconvenient truth.
[quote]joebassin wrote:
Years after relaying the orders from President Harry S. Truman to drop nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, General LeMay said the actions were not necessary.
‘Truman Told Me to Do It’
‘‘We felt that our incendiary bombings had been so successful that Japan would collapse before we invaded,’’ he said in a 1985 interview with the Omaha World Herald. ‘‘We went ahead and dropped the bombs because President Truman told me to do it. He told me in a personal letter.’’
I guess somebody should have told the Japanese that they were soon going to surrender, since they apparently did not know that and were still debating the issue…
But maybe LeMay knew better than the Japanese what they were planning, eh? After all, the Japanese DID make their wartime decisions based on the same values as the Americans… [/quote]
The fact is that they dropped the bomb thinking it was unnecessary. Stop ignoring inconvenient truth. [/quote]
That is not a fact, it is an opinion, and one which is totally unsupported by any fact or sentient being. Why would you rely on the musings of a self-serving bastard like LeMay? (Fire bombing did NOT bring Japan to the table, BTW.)
As for Truman’s motives, Lifty’s persistent anhistorical amnesia, etc:
In 1945 Secretary of War Stimson, visiting my headquarters in Germany, informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act. During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Eisenhower, Dwight D. (1963). The White House Years; Mandate For Change: 1953?1956. Doubleday & Company. pp. 312?313.
“The Japanese had, in fact, already sued for peace. The atomic bomb played no decisive part, from a purely military point of view, in the defeat of Japan.” Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, Commander in Chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet.