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Do you think the people killed in Chicago were well-trained, well-armed, and wearing body armor?

100% of the American deaths in Iraq are the direct result of a policy decision. It is a silly argument to compare that to inevitable, random violence in a city of nearly 3 million people.

I'm not condemning anyone's decision to serve their country. I'm condemning the poorly-conceived mission they have been sent to perform as a waste of lives and resources. Big difference. Why do I have to project a certain level of "concern" about crime victims in U.S. cities to legitimately question misguided U.S. foreign policy and its human and monetary costs? Again, this line of argument is a non-sequitur.

These two subjects are completely unrelated, yet it is being implied that we should care less about the human cost of the Iraq War because it is less than the arbitrary measure of murders in Chicago. It is a non-sequitur. 40,000 Americans die in auto accidents each year. Should that have a bearing on whether we squander American lives and billions of dollars in Iraq? No.

That is an infantile argument. Chicago is an American city and has a population of nearly 3 million people (nearly 10 million metro). Like any large urban area, violent crime is an unfortunate reality. What reason is there for Americans to be laying down their lives in Iraq? Thank God someone will soon put an end to this senseless waste of American blood and treasure...

Why should there be any Americans killed in Iraq?

That's fair, but I say that there are conservatives that moderates will vote for and there are conservatives that moderates will not vote for. Sarah Palin, because of her shallow knowledge and experience, falls into the latter category. I don't think she'll be able to attract a critical mass of voters by pandering to the rural residents in red states who are willing to overlook her inadequacies.

I hate to be the one to break this to you, but Sarah Palin is no Ronald Reagan.

Moderates will not vote for Sarah Palin. If the GOP nominates her in 4 years, they will lose, because they can't win without moderates and she represents the most polarizing aspects of the Republican platform. The good news is that she does have plenty of time to practice her one-line zingers before the first 2012 debate... :lol:

Based on the limited unscripted instances where she spoke of her knowledge of foreign affairs topics, it is certainly plausible.

The oft-repeated references to socialism might have the alarmist effect you intended if it were not for the fact that your party's president has encouraged the takeover of insurance companies, banks, and mortgage underwriting firms, and breathlessly endorsed the $700 billion government bailout of the U.S. banking sector as part of a panicked response to his mismanagement of the financial system. The presidential candidate you supported suspended his campaign to ensure passage of the latter. Of course, we don't really know where Sarah Palin stood on this--as she was never able to summon an intelligible statement on the subject. But she did manage, in the scant time she's been in charge of Alaska's affairs, to raise taxes on big oil and increase state spending levels significantly.

I didn't see any specific refutation of the story that Palin didn't know the NAFTA nations or that Africa is a continent in this article. This was a dead link. This was a dead link, too. This is dated September 3, 2008. Were McCain staffers leaking information about Palin's knowledge only 4 days after she was named? :confused: I'll go one further than that: There really is nothing scarier than a charismatic, but intellectually-vacuous conservative politician capable of drawing tens of thousands of people to a political rally. Thank goodness this one's been exposed. Maybe someday it will prevent a repeat of the last 8 years.

What sources? Link? If Fox News bothered to report the information provided it by campaign insiders, I will consider them reliable sources. Has Fox issued a retraction?

There's a difference between making a slip of the tongue during an extemporaneous remark and not being able to answer direct, straightforward questions about your qualifications (like what newspapers you read, or speaking intelligently about the proposed financial rescue package, or discussing the merits of the September 2002 Bush Doctrine.) Obama and McCain had their share of the former. Obama said he had visited "57 states", McCain stated that al Qaeda were crossing into Iran for training. Most people took these mis-statements for what they were--manifestations of long hours on the campaign trail, and not indications of genuine ignorance.

Exactly. Instead, she expresses outrage that the American public have learned how unqualified she is.

I see a lot of righteous indignation about the "tabloid reporting" on Sarah Palin, but it was Fox News that reported the statements from McCain campaign staff that Palin a) didn't know the nations participating in the NAFTA treaty and b) didn't know that 'Africa' is a continent and not a country. Geez, are you people so anxious to defend this woman as a victim of the media that you are willing to overlook her stunning ignorance of basic geopolitical facts? These are things that moderately-bright high school students know. She had no business being on the ticket for a major national office. Maybe your outrage should be directed at John McCain, who we now know picked this person with practically no vetting. Fox News: Palin didn't know Africa was a continent

Her lack of qualifications became a disqualifier for Sarah Palin after people saw that she was unable to articulate coherent responses to reasonable questions during her extended interviews. If she had been able to give thoughtful answers which conveyed a clear understanding of specific major domestic and foreign policy issues, people (and the press) might have been more willing to cut her some slack on her small-time resume.

I agree. It seems a little bit off to complain about taxes when you haven't been paying yours. Kind of like sneaking into the movies and then complaining to the theater manager about the price of popcorn. Pay your taxes, Joe (like 99% of the rest of us), THEN complain. Furthermore, while I agree that this man's private records should not have been accessed in Ohio (I have seen no evidence that the query was connected in any way to the Obama campaign, BTW), Joe Wurzelbacher's actions haven't exactly been those of someone who wants to be left alone. He made a campaign appearance with Sarah Palin last week. And it was McCain's campaign, not Obama's, that kept Mr. Wurzelbacher in the news by mentioning "Joe the Plumber" numerous times during the last debate and on numerous occasions during subsequent campaign stops.

Governor Palin needs to come back in 2012 with some qualifications for major national office. That's why most people didn't take her seriously in 2008. If she doesn't substantially beef up her resume, it will be game over.

I'm not ready to say that the Palin pick cost McCain the race, but it didn't help. On the plus side, she energized the evangelical base, on the negative, she turned off independent and moderate voters. There were many polls that showed she was a net liability.

I disagree. It's true that GWB was not up for re-election yesterday, however many people who enabled him over the last eight years were. Republicans in Congress who were in lockstep with the president's policies and refused to break with him on a host of unpopular policies deserve to be judged with the President they enabled.

I arrived at the polling place at about 6:05 and waited about 20 minutes. Largest line I have ever seen.

They may not be able to enforce payment of the debt, but if the United States stops honoring its treasuries (even if only to China and the Saudis), it will probably never be able to borrow money again (from anyone) because it will be seen as too risky (don't know if you're going to get your money back). U.S. Treasuries would go from being just about the safest investment in the world to something with quite a lot of risk--that means the value of Treasuries on the open market would plummet and that could cause a global financial meltdown. I could also see the value of the dollar falling off a cliff as investors the world over sought to dump it in exchange for a safer haven. Just because we have the baddest military in the world, doesn't mean we're in in the driver's seat to dictate how or even whether we pay our bills.

The economic policies you are advocating have failed. Pure and simple. That is why the Republicans stand to have their butts handed to them today.

Before Iraq, we were not a nation that started large-scale, unprovoked wars. You note that support for the Iraq war was widespread, thereby providing cover for the President's decision to invade. Why wouldn't support for the war be widespread when the administration repeatedly and deliberately oversold the razor-thin evidence linking Saddam's Iraq to 9/11. Geez, you had Cheney going on Meet the Press and making innuendo-laced statements all but directly saying Saddam was involved. In the emotion-charged environment following 9/11, why should it surprise you that the majority of Americans (and therefore the politicians who represented them) supported a war against Iraq? Sixths months after the beginning of the Iraq war, 70% of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the 9/11 attacks. The Bush administration knew better than this, but chose to perpetuate that notion because it supported their desire for 'regime change' which dated to the earliest days of the Bush presidency in early 2001. There certainly was no urgent need to invade when we did, no intelligence evidence of an imminent threat to the United States (as was forcefully implied by the President, Condoleeza Rice, et al). The only real reason was that political support would eventually wane and the initiative would be lost. I don't rely on hindsight for my certainty--I was extremely apprehensive about getting involved in an inherently hostile Muslim country without a darn good (and certain) reason. I trusted what I was hearing, but held that the President better have his facts straight before taking us down the path of starting an unprovoked war. I later found out that he really did not, and that his administration downplayed any doubts from the intelligence apparatus. As far as your comments about force size, yes, it is obvious we had more than enough boots on the ground to knock off Saddam's poorly-equipped, poorly-trained Army. That is a trivial point. We probably could have kicked their tails with 1/2 of the force we had. That's not the point. With a military as sophisticated as ours, bringing brute, indiscriminate force is not a problem. What is a problem, and what Powell, Shinseki, the Desert Crossing simulation pointed out, is that it takes far more troops to stabilize a large, lawless country than it takes to knock off a second rate Army armed with obsolete Russian equipment. You seem willing to give Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld the benefit of the doubt because there might have plausibly been at least one military man in the room who endorsed the plan. Leadership is not finding a token "expert" to validate your pre-ordained plan just before you ram it down everyone's throats. It involves getting into the details and using careful judgment. Furthermore, undertaking an enterprise as dangerous as invading a hostile country on the other side of the world (with limited international support) encourages erring on the side of being conservative (i.e. more forces than necessary to do the job), not less. So far, I haven't heard of any military leader in an advisory role during the war's planning who said he lobbied for fewer troops, but was overruled. I listened. I heard a lot of "It's going to be a lot of hard work". I bet I heard the President say that ten times. Problem is, statements like that fit the textbook definition of triteness and just don't convey very much meaning. His actions weren't consistent with a Commander in Chief who believed that he had just committed the country to a six-year (so far) open-ended military committment. It was only well after receiving numerous warnings that the military was near the breaking point (December 2006, literally years after the invasion) that the President proposed increasing the size of our ground forces. Were those the actions of a leader who accurately foresaw the duration of the struggle and adequately prepared the military? Three years after the war started? Cheney told the American people that we "would be greeted as liberators". Administration estimates for the cost of the war were off by well over an order of magnitude. The President pulled that ridiculous stunt on the aircraft carrier under the "Mission Accomplished" banner. Were those the actions of an administration that foresaw the difficulties and adequately prepared the nation for the task? Since you seem eager to characterize me as a partisan because I am deeply disappointed about the war and its conduct, let me ask you a question: What defines partisanship? The majority of the Americans think the Iraq war was a mistake. The majority of Americans think they were deliberately misled by the Bush administration in the runup to the war. I would argue that since my position is well aligned with the majority of Americans, and yours is decidedly a fringe view, you may need to re-think your ideas about partisanship.