How Will the New Gates Book Affect Obama/Hillary/Et Al?

No scandal hurts this president, his supporters will continue to support him no matter what. I don't know if its blind faith OR the gravy train.

 

The state of the economy, to be more specific the level of optimism about the economy will be what elects or defeats Hillary in 2016.

 

Gates tore apart Obama's "leadership"

not surprised at all. Obama was woefully unprepared and too inexperienced for the job. His performance has proven that out, as well.

 

I think you have to get more Americans to read first.

 

Economy/Health Care - yes.
Bush's wars - no.

 

Does he mention his old boss and how they handled Iraq?

 

Tell all books rarely have much of an effect on presidents. They are a news item for a few days and then go away. Stockman wrote one, there have been a couple from the Secret Service side, Woodward's books, etc.

As far as I can tell from reading the articles, Obama never fully trusted the info he was getting and was suspicious of what he inherited. That's not exactly going to piss off Libs unless they get mad that he kept Gates and didn't act forcefully enough on those concerns by doing something different with regards to Afghanistan.

 

good on him for trying and then successfully getting out of Iraq and hopefully now Afghanistan.

Just because the military-industrial complex thinks it's a good idea to be securing entire nations doesn't mean the President has to believe as well. His shred of doubt on this matter, if anything, is probably the one decent shred of "fantasy 2008" Obama left.

If the Republicans want to use this as red meat, so be it, but a lot of them are going to have to justify why intervening in Fallujah is a good idea, but Syria isn't.

 

this is not surprising, but it is, indeed, remarkable:

Gates offers a catalogue of various meetings, based in part on notes that he and his aides made at the time, including an exchange between Obama and then-Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton that he calls “remarkable.”

He writes: “Hillary told the president that her opposition to the [2007] surge in Iraq had been political because she was facing him in the Iowa primary. . . . The president conceded vaguely that opposition to the Iraq surge had been political. To hear the two of them making these admissions, and in front of me, was as surprising as it was dismaying.”​

 

basso, what do you care, all politicians are liars to some degree, you just happened to support the liar who started these disasters in the first place

 

I've consistently slammed the Obama Administration on its' treatment of whistle-blowers (Snowden to Manning to Drake), excessive use of drones, slow-footing white-collar crime prosecution and bank regulation, and possibly unconstitutional surveillance programs, so don't really know what you are talking about.

George Bush the Younger is probably a lot worse than a liar as all of these sins I listed started with him. If certain right-wingers took a better approach to politics than "everything liberals do is suspect", they might be able to make more level-headed, reason-based critiques, and not look like massive hypocrites and attack bots.

 

No, Bush was acting on "intelligence" that was cherry picked and did not represent the beliefs of the intelligence community at large. This is part of why he created his own DoD based "intelligence" organization, so that he could have control over the conclusion (to be fair, I think it was probably engineered by Cheney since Bush doesn't belong in the same sentence with intelligence or competence).

 

"getting to the truth" is a whole lot easier if you don't selectively cherry-pick at one side and ignore the other.

While this trait is perhaps subconsciously present in most people, for some it is so overt that it is near shameful (i.e people who were ardent Bush fans suddenly questioning the "leadership" of someone who continues these terrible programs. I don't even have to name names).

 

Hilarious that the liberals have to bring up George W Bush in an attempt to divert.

just own the disaster that Obama's been, folks. You're not successful in diverting attention away from his failures.

 

Obama's administration has been a disaster in certain respects, ESPECIALLY with regards to treatment of Manning,Snowden,Drake, drones, and surveillance.

At least some people have the principle and integrity to admit that a side they marginally prefer screwed up: how are you feeling about the PATRIOT Act these days, texxx?