Tim Daneliuk wrote:
Morris Dovey wrote:
Tim Daneliuk wrote:

It seems likely that this trend of rising real income will stop
with our current President.

I'll stick my neck out and opine that a great many trends were
impacted by a financial system based on false premise and empty
promise.

I'll resist the impulse to quibble over "real".

I just meant in terms of actual buying power as opposed to
phony-baloney money being printed by the Hopeium smokers.

Well, I've been giving a lot of thought to the impact of those false
premises and empty promises on this household's retirements - and
it would appear that our carefully made plans and efforts to provide for
retirement were ruined well before January.

Ever see a war that went according to plan? (Read Von
Clausewitz.)

Would you care to project what /any/ of the great strategists would
say about any plan that made no provision for victory?

You are missing a very important bit of context here. Historically,
"victory" meant the annihilation or at least the decimation of the
enemy to utterly neuter not just their military, but their
infrastructure, social underpinnings, economy, and borders.

Essentially true through WWI. It was the realization that this did not
produce long-term solutions that led to the radical changes implemented
at the end of WWII.

It was interesting to me that the Soviet Union attempted to use the old
approach after WWII while the remaining Allied countries simultaneously
adopted the reconstruction approach. IMO, the results speak for themselves.

Witness any of the major wars of the past century for many trenchant
examples. It is iron that W tried to fight a very narrow and
limited engagement - almost no a war but a surgical removal - and in
so doing now gets criticized by the armchair quarterbacks because he
didn't plan neatly enough for the needs of the people he was trying
to leave alone.

I'm not a quarterback. I played right guard. I don't criticize
Bush/Rumsfeld for failing to plan "neatly enough" - I criticize them for
having neither a clue as to what they were getting us into, and for
failing to plan beyond "hit 'em hard".

There is simply no way to do this. Either you blast the enemy into
non-existence or you're faced with a messy cleanup after the fact.

It is the nature of war to produce messes, and the cleanup seems to
always be messy. We do have a range of choices in the exercise of force
and in the type and extent of the messes created. We also have a range
of choices in how the cleanup is handled.

Go read the history of Germany and Japan in the immediate post-war
period.

Not only have I read about it, I remember the actuality.

Many of the issues (and worse) you grouse about were there in spades.
Would you similarly condemn Truman/FDR they way you have W on the
same grounds?

I reserve the right to severely criticize /anyone/ in a position of
command who causes unnecessary loss of life as a result of failing to
exercise due diligence.

There is no question the US actions had European consequences. Maybe
next time they'll be a bit more anxious to help and minimize the
duration of the whole business.

Maybe next time they'll tell us to go it alone.

Gore has already parlayed a net worth of $2M into $200M. This is a
guy who got worse grades in college than W, who hasn't the slightest
understanding of the science and complexities underlying his pet
hobby horse, but has a wealth of connections in D.C. Watch and see
what happens when crap-in-trade gets passed.

I suppose you're trying to make a rational argument here, but it comes
across more as "sour grapes".

OK, then I'll defer to your understanding of the area. Explain to me
what the US could or should have done in the face of:

- Material support for terrorists (people who make war on civilian
non combatants to make a point) by Yemen, Syria, Saudi, Libya, Iran,
Iraq, ... (I'm sure I'm missing some).

(You are.)

- Over 25 years of U.S. citizens being targeted by the
aforementionined on planes, in hotels/bars, and most recently, in our
own country.

My apologies, but I'm not even going to try to answer your question in a
usenet post. If we were next door neighbors with reasonable schedules, I
think we might both enjoy working our way through this, but I doubt we'd
get very far is less than six months.

I /can/ say with a high degree of confidence that there is no quick fix
- no instant gratification - and no fix of any kind without
understanding the culture(s) of the players.

You cannot fight all the above at once. So you start to take them
out one at a time. IMHO (and that's all it is), Iraq was chosen
primarily because it is such a strategic lever in putting military
pressure on Iran. Taking out the 5th largest standing army in the
world and the dictator that ran it was just icing on the cake.

I'll agree that Saddam was a bad actor, but beyond that I have no way of
knowing the motivations behind choosing any country. To me it seems
equally likely that the motivation was "he tried to whack my daddy so
I'm gonna whack him."

The BS factor has been excessively high for too many years, and
whether the Obama administration has a good recovery strategy or
not, we'll all be experiencing the consequences of that failure of
integrity for quite a while.

Fair enough, so long as you stipulate the primary "failure of
integrity" was that of the Congress and the regulators who
respectively created the environment that caused the problem in the
first place and failed to provide anything resembling adequate
oversight.

I don't so stipulate, but agree that the legislature and the regulators
seem to have not fulfilled their responsibilities.

--
Morris Dovey
DeSoto Solar
DeSoto, Iowa USA
http://www.iedu.com/DeSoto/