An apology to our allies.

[CaptainMattJ.]

Originally Posted by TorpX

I find all of this very amusing.

Obama was given the Nobel Peace Prize and endorsed, in effect, by europeans because he was good and pure and true (or so we were told, ad nauseum). Now, reality is slowly seeping in to the picture.

Obama (and the US Federal ruling class) trample the U.S. Constitution, spend recklessly, and generally use American institutions like drunken frat boys use an abandoned cabin. If Obama has no respect for the American people, why would anyone expect him to have any respect for foreign peoples.

"Spend recklessly". Oh, i don't know, could've had something to do with the fact that, through Clinton and Bush's deregulation, we allowed not only wall street and multiple other companies become too big to fail, but we allowed them to gamble BILLIONS upon BILLIONS of dollars that they neither had nor owned. And because so much of the loans and wealth was concentrated in wall street, if wall street collapsed so would the economy. We had to spend astronomical amounts of money to bailout the banks BECAUSE WE ALLOWED THEM TO ENJOY FREE MARKET. This is why history is just as important a subject as math science and primary language. Because if you take a comparatively SHORT LOOK BACK IN TIME to the end of the 19th century, you'd see why Republicans are dead wrong about allowing corporations freedom of market. You'd see why allowing corporations to spend however much they wanted, become however big they wanted, and pay/charge as much they wanted, is the entire reason capitalism and deregulation are awful concepts for everyone that isn't a mulch-billionaire CEO.

Not only did we have to spend astronomical amounts of money bailing out free enterprise run amuck, but the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are mind-numbingly expensive. It was republicans and the General Staff who not only started the war but fought Obama until he agreed for a crawling retreat from Afghanistan, in which we have wasted hundreds of billions of dollars trying to fix a region that was never able to be fixed in the first place. It is republicans who have proposed INCREASES for the DOD's budget, yet anyone with even minimal information about the DOD's spending knows how grotesquely inefficient its spending is. The F-35 JSF program is hundreds of billions of dollars and counting (and that's excluding the maintenance costs of the program for its lifespan), is ridiculously behind schedule, and is completely unnecessary for our military. It is only one out of thousands of examples of the grossly inefficient spending from the DOD. Billions upon billions were simply lost in the reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan, in some cases because only one person was hired to audit billions of dollars worth of spending and as a result, things such as military contractors charging 80 dollars for a component that is sold for 2 dollars, happened in vast scale. And they want to RAISE ITS BUDGET?!?!

Meanwhile Obama tries to increase spending in domestic programs that actually benefit the people and he gets endlessly harassed for it. The reason? Party politics. Both sides are so eager to slander the other that they completely lose sight of whats not only good but RIGHT for the people who pay them large salaries to serve them. Or they get bought out by the corporations, who now can spend as much as they want influencing the election, and their seemingly ridiculous and incompetent views are actually just the politicians trying to protect the companies that give them millions to protect them from necessary reform.