They drift away from her

BULLY BOY PRESS &     CEDRIC'S BIG MIX -- THE KOOL AID TABLE

JOE BIDEN WAS GREETED LIKE A ROCK STAR IN DELAWARE.

THE VICE PRESIDENT RUNS LIKE A BIG DOG WHILE CRANKY CLINTON "HAS LOST ONE THIRD OF HER SUPPORT IN IOWA SINCE MAY."

REACHED FOR COMMENT, CRANKY SNARLED, "AMERICA DOESN'T ELECT ROCK STARS! IF THEY DID STEVEN TYLER WOULD BE A FORMER PRESIDENT, NOT RONALD REAGAN!"



FROM THE TCI WIRE:


Turning to US politics, Scott Walker is the governor of Wisconsin.  Supposedly, he's seeking the Republican Party's 2016 presidential nomination.


Supposedly, because I've never seen such a crap ass campaign and we covered Jill Stein's idiotic run in 2012.

Walker's in the news because he gave a "major foreign policy speech."

And you can find that out at NBC News, CBS News, etc.


You just can't really find it at his campaign website.

They're helpful enough to tell you how you can watch the now past speech "live" and they even offer five bulletin points from it.

Here's a clue for Scott Walker's campaign, come into the 21st century.

If you give a major speech, post it on your campaign website, you damn fool.

If you don't, why did you give it?

What a moron.

And that "moron" is due to his idiotic campaign website.

We long ago noted at Third, ten years ago?, that your website was your online office.  You need to run it effectively.


Bill Barrow (AP) reports:

Republican presidential candidate Scott Walker is calling for U.S. forces in Iraq to engage in direct combat to defeat "radical Islamic terrorists" in the Middle East.
Yet even as the Wisconsin governor predicts a "generational struggle," he continues to avoid calling for additional ground troops beyond the roughly 3,200 military security personnel, trainers and advisers now deployed.


Is that an accurate portrayal of Walker's view?

I have no idea.

He and his campaign were too stupid to post a transcript of the speech online.

Some partisan outlets (Vox, to name one) are treating the above position sketched out by Barrow as outrageous.

But this is US President Barack Obama's position -- though they never call him out.

He's the one who's put over 3,200 US military personnel in Iraq.

And this is close to the 3,500 to 4,000 he wanted to leave in Iraq after December 2011.

And their being in combat?

That's what he told the New York Times when he was first running for the Democratic Party's 2008 presidential nomination -- that after starting a withdrawal, if things went bad in Iraq, he was fine with sending troops back into Iraq.

Oh, is this news to you?

It's because the New York Times failed to report it.


They did a fluffy, frou-frou report based on an extensive interview with Barack.  We took the transcript of the interview and wrote the reality at Third in November 4, 2007's "NYT: 'Barack Obama Will Keep Troops In Iraq':"


Presidential candidate and US Senator Barack Obama who is perceived as an 'anti-war' candidate by some announced that he would not commit to a withdrawal, declared that he was comfortable sending US troops back into Iraq after a withdrawal started and lacked clarity on exactly what a withdrawal under a President Obama would mean.

Declaring that "there are no good options in Iraq," Senator Obama went on to explain that even with his 16 month plan for withdrawal, he would continue to keep US troops in Iraq, agreeing that he would "leave behind residual force" even after what he is billing as a "troop withdrawal."

"Even something as simple as protecting our embassy is going to be dependent on what is the security environment in Baghdad. If there is some sense of security, then that means one level of force. If you continue to have significant sectarian conflict, that means another, but this is an area where Senator Clinton and I do have a significant contrast," Senator Obama offered contrasting himself with his chief opponent for the Democratic presidential nomination. "I do think it is important for us not only to protect our embassy, but also to engage in counter-terrorism activities. We’ve seen progress against AQI [Al Qaeda in Iraq], but they are a resilient group and there’s the possibility that they might try to set up new bases. I think that we should have some strike capability. But that is a very narrow mission, that we get in the business of counter terrorism as opposed to counter insurgency and even on the training and logistics front, what I have said is, if we have not seen progress politically, then our training approach should be greatly circumscribed or eliminated."

The Senator insisted, "I want to be absolutely clear about this, because this has come up in a series of debates: I will remove all our combat troops, we will have troops there to protect our embassies and our civilian forces and we will engage in counter terrorism activities. How large that force is, whether it’s located inside Iraq or as an over the horizon force is going to depend on what our military situation is."

The positon of the majority of Americans in poll after poll is that all US troops need to be brought home by 2008. Senator Obama's strategy calls for bringing some troops home, should he be elected president, in his first sixteen months; however, he is not, by his own words, an advocate of a "Out of Iraq" strategy.

While maintaining that he would remove all combat troops in sixteen months he did agree that the forces left behind to fight "terrorists" would be performing "a combat function."

He also spoke of deployment, and presumably bases, "in places like Kuwait" in order "to strike at terrorist targets successfully."

Returning the topic of leaving US forces in Iraq even after what he's billed as a "withdrawal," the Senator delcared, "As commander in chief, I’m not going to leave trainers unprotected. In our counterterrorism efforts, I’m not going to have a situation where our efforts can’t be successful. We will structure those forces so they can be successful. We would still have human intelligence capabilities on the ground. Some of them would be civilian, as opposed to military, some would be operating out of our bases as well as our signal intelligence.

The senator also admitted that he was comfortable with sending troops back into Iraq after what he's terming a "withdrawal" though he wanted to split hairs on what constituted "armed force."  



Again, if that's news to you, take it up with the New York Times which had the above quotations and chose not to run with them.  As we said at the end of the above:

That's the story they could have written based upon the interview conducted by Michael Gordon and Jeff Zeleny. As C.I. noted in Friday's "Iraq snapshot," the interview the reporters conducted hit harder than the sop they wrote up on it that ran on Friday's front page of the paper. 


Walker's position is not significantly different from Barack's.  (And, for the record, I don't support either's position on Iraq.)


And for those really harping on Walker's position that US forces should be in combat, they already are.  Those bombs dropped from US war planes?

That's combat.

In addition, Wael Grace (Al Mada) reported this week on what the people of Nineveh Province were seeing: US forces joining Iraqi forces in combat.

The residents say this is not 'consulting' or 'advising' but that US forces are actually taking part in on the ground combat.


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