Ahira's Hangar

Hopefully Vain won't see this. As much as I love the guy his view of US politics and Obama is about to make my head explode. Yes Av, I lurked in the Tank yesterday-something I never should have done. "Somebody should shut off his teleprompter." The President doesn't even use a teleprompter, if he does he moves around so quickly he doesn't have time to look at one. To say that every time he speaks Wall Street takes a dive is absolutely ridiculous. I'm starting to lump him in with Limbaugh and the others who want to see Obama fail. This is a time for Americans to unite in order to save ourselves form the economic crisis. The dude is from New Zealand for Christchurch sakes!!!! I don't know how Wayfriend and aliantha do it--I'd start screaming and break board rules if I ever posted in there again--there are some real boneheads and hypocrites in that place.

The guy's been in office for just 39 days, give him a freaking break!

Well I don,t venture in there too much so I havent read the threads and it appears to be a very busy section of the forum and I can,t keep up with the posts.

I almost always hide from that place. People can often get down right nasty in there, though I know that the mods really try to stay on top of things and defuse situations as they come up. I actually sometimes wonder if people post there while drunk and beligerant. Bless the mods of that forum - they need whips and flame throwers to even try to keep things under a little bit of control.

I haven't visited any Think Tank threads in a long time. Just don't have the desire to.

Regarding President Obama, all I can say is many Canadians wish he was their Prime Minister. Some polls here suggest that 80% of Canadians support Obama, which is pretty astounding. Our own PM has an approval rating barely above 30%. It was quite the scene in Ottawa when Obama visited Canada a couple of weeks ago. I mean, people came from across the country just to catch a glimpse of Obama. I heard it said that such excitement and enthusiasm in Canada for an American President had not been seen since the days of JFK, when he visited in 1961.

However, some in the Canadian media did feel a bit miffed that Obama didn't address the House of Commons. President Clinton did when he visited. It was felt that Obama's visit was too business-like, too efficient. But that, I suppose, was Obama making a statement that he was serious about moving quickly on all the things before him in his first days in office, including foreign visits. But apparently he did end up chatting with our Governor-General (our first ever black Governor-General) in private for longer than the prescribed 15 minutes. And Obama did also drop unexpectedly into a local bakery shop to buy some cookies for his daughters, which must've been a nightmare for the Secret Service agents.

Presidents sometimes do stuff like that - President Clinton liked to stop off at a coney island in Ypsilanti on the edge of a very rough neighborhood whenever he was in the Detroit area (he always stayed at a luxery golf resort on Ford Lake in Ypsilanti not too far off of the freeway that runs by Detroit Metro Airport when he stayed in the Detroit area overnight). He also liked to go barhopping in Ypsilanti's Depot Town area. And go to a Polish restaurant in Hamtramk, Michigan - also in a sort of rough area. Hamtramk is a little city with deep eastern European roots surrounded by the city of Detroit.

I'm sure he made the secret service guys poo themselves. Regularly.

Hahahahahaha, there are days when I wish I could hide from it too danlo. And I sometimes wonder if Vain quit admining just so he could go and stir in the 'Tank.

And yes...it seems to have been an almighty rush to start pointing out how "bad" Obama is. Suspect it's a desire to get even for the years of bush-bashing.

That said, it hasn't been too bad by 'Tank standards, but with a heavy load of sarcasm. Still, I suspect that the next time things get ugly there I might have a little temper-tantrum...

--A

IMO, the Tank has always been like that! (much with the liberal/progressive bashing, but I'm biased.) A few years back a regular KW poster, said the Tank was just a place for GWBush bashers. So ATT the I browsed the threads and all I could find were sycophantic defenses and groveling praises for the previous POTUS. So I asked Cyndi what was regular poster talking about and she told me one had go beyond the first page, but IMO the first page was suficient evidence for me.

I have not seen any threads in question about Obama in the Tank - and have no desire to - but at this turning point in history, where we balance on a knife edge over a financial abyss - it shocks me how many hardcore conservatives want Obama to fail - and I'm getting this from mainstream media reports. You know - the far right wing publicity whore types like Limbaugh.

These people are nuts. They want the US - and a much greater part of the world than just the US - to come crashing down just so the guy from the "other party" can be seen as a failure?

Why would anyone want someone as powerful as the POTUS to ever be a huge failure?

When a POTUS suffers from monumental fail, usually a lot of people end up dead from wrongful warfare or simple malfeasiance. Look at the last eight years, when we had a poor POTUS - how many innocent civilians in Iraq - and New Orleans! - died due to unjust war and complete incompetance? Not to mention how screwed up the entire world financial syatem is right now due to lack of proper oversight of the markets - or how many cases of mass food poisonings have happened over the last few years because the food is not being properly inspected anymore, either.

And they want to see the next POTUS fail, too?

Give me a freaking break. Obama has inherited the worst mess of any President since FDR, and we had all better hope he is at least half the President FDR was, or we will all be starving on the streets together.

To be fair Taras, I think there's about an equal amount of bashing from both sides. The dems can't have a field day on Bush and not expect some of the same back. Me, I'm amazed there hasn't been civil war in the US. y'all seem to hate each other more than you hate anybody else. Or more than anybody else hates you for that matter. When I first started odding there, I believed the work would be in keeping everybody else from the American's throats. On the contrary, it was keeping the Americans from each others throats.

--A

Strangles Vain for his stupid effing billboards!!! Who could have know that such a cool guy has such a screwed up view of America. What no the crisis is all in our heads? It's just a mirage created by Wall St. Unemployment is what happens to other people...right, right.

Tell that to the millions of people who have become unemployed only in the last few months. Tell that to neighborhoods who are filled with abandoned houses going to ruin and rot, destroying what bit of equity those people still hanging on to their homes have left. Tell that to the people living in the tent cities in patches of woods near the freeway on the west side of Ann Arbor - and all over America and Japan. Tell that to the tens of thousands of people who lined up at Cobo Hall in downtown Detroit yesterday - waiting in line for literally hours at near freezing temps and cold strong winds for a job fair, when most of the jobs being offered were entry jobs such as dishwashing in casinos. Tell that to all of the people who have worked for their entire adult lives and have taken huge losses in their retirement accounts and might not be able retire now because they cannot afford it after a lifetime of working and saving.

Again, who wants any POTUS to fail - especially when the nation (and world) are standing at the brink of a cliff?

I was no fan of Bush, but I would have still been ecstatically happy of he could have pulled himself together and actually succeeded in facing down one of the many large challenges he had to face.

As my older son always says, Bush faced three major challenges in his eight years in office - the terrorist attacks, Katrina, and the economic crisis. While the jury might be out for years on the third, he clearly and terribly failed on the first two. And a lot of people died and a lot more suffered because of those failures.

You do not ever want the President of the United States to fail. When s/he majorly fails, people suffer and die.

Now now, we all know that what really matters is who was right.

--A