houndawg wrote: ↑Wed Jun 05, 2024 5:32 am
GannonFan wrote: ↑Tue Jun 04, 2024 11:00 am
Agreed. You have to be a leftie to just say everything is fine, nothing to see here. Inflation is just one of way too many things that have gone wrong with this administration over the past 4 years, and that by itself is a huge one considering the hit to the average real wages of most Americans. Heck, beyond what UNI said,
not being able to negotiate Putin into not invading Ukraine is up there as well (and could have been influenced by the reckless pullout from Afghanistan that cost lives - Putin knew we would be limited in our response to an invasion and he was right). And as well as Biden has done to put together a united front that stands with Ukraine, the reality is Ukraine is going to be a smaller country when all of this is over, and because we didn't want to impact the global oil market at a time when inflation was already playing havoc with the economy, we've left multiple avenues for Russia to continue to finance their war by letting them sell oil to the world through Iran and China and others.
The only bright sides of a Biden victory in November would be that Biden couldn't run again in 4 years, Trump wouldn't be President for the next 4 years, and we would get a chance to see the 25th amendment in operation as he's clearly incapable of handling the job now let alone in 12 months from now.
Not so.
Putin has been in Ukraine for over 10 years; his dreams of restoring the Soviet Union are what drives him and nothing short of NATO troops will change his mind. NATO has the military muscle to drive him back to Russia and
we should press for that because its going to happen anyway and better that it happens while the military advantage is ours.
Hey, I'm the first to agree that Putin likely has ambitions far more than just Ukraine. However, the facts remain that Putin seized and held onto Crimea, as you say, more than 10 years ago (oddly, when Biden was again in the Executive branch as the VP) and we've done nothing to dislodge him from there. For whatever reason, and despite your continued insistence that Trump was a puppet for Putin, he didn't seize any more area of the Ukraine during that Presidency. He waited until more than a year into Biden's own Presidency to launch an overt attack on Ukraine, supporting the troops they already had in the country for the previous decade. I don't have the answers, but why did he wait for Biden to again enter government before attacking more of Ukraine?
My biggest issues with Biden and Ukraine are 1) we have no long term plan with what to do - are we going to supply Ukraine with arms for as long as it takes? 1 year? 5 years? A decade? What happens if they continue to lose land? 2) We made a real show of it in terms of cutting Russia off from the global economy and trying to cut off any and all funding for their military adventures. However, we purposely didn't do anything to stop them from using their biggest export, oil, to be sold freely throughout the world, especially to the likes of China and others. So we said one thing (punish Russia economically for their war) but then did the exact opposite (allowed them to sell their most important export). 3) If we really need to militarily engage with Russia, and I'm not entirely sure that we have to, then we need to be saying that, and should have been saying that since Putin launched the overt invasion. Biden's said nothing of the sort, and we have repeated warnings throughout government that we're not funding the military enough to even keep it at its current strength, let alone building capability to project enough force to move Russia back out of Ukraine with American and NATO forces. That's the opposite of leadership.
