[quote=Allan from Fallbrook][quote=briansd1]Allan, I would submit that Democrats voted for the Iraq war because they feared being maligned as “providing comfort” to the enemy.
They voted very reluctantly for the war.
Democrats were lazy and they didn’t want to go to the public and make the case against war and against the Republican idea of the war on terrorism.
Since it is Snopes, it deals very fairly with both the quotes and their supporting context/additional text (some of the quotes were truncated). Read them through, its very interesting stuff. It also utterly demolishes your “reluctance” and “lazy” arguments simultaneously.
Enjoy.[/quote]
The democrats and Iraq is similar to the republicans and the bailouts. They have to do a little dog and pony show for their constituents but the key power players made sure each one happened.
The system runs the politicians, not the other way around. And this is not in a conspiratorial sense.
From, Immanuel Wallerstein, a Yale professor, American sociologist, historical social scientist, and world-systems analyst. And one of my favorite thinkers of modern times.
The newspapers are full of analyses of the political errors of Barack Obama. Who can argue with this? I could easily list dozens of decisions Obama has made which, in my view, were wrong, cowardly, and sometimes downright immoral. But I do wonder whether, if he had made all the much better decisions his base thinks he ought to have made, it would have made much difference in the outcome. The decline of the United States is not the result of poor decisions by its president, but of structural realities in the world-system. Obama may be the most powerful individual in the world still, but no president of the United States is or could be today as powerful as the presidents of yesteryear.
