Do you ever get tired of playing childish partisan games and demonizing your opponents? Seriously. Playing the “Darth Cheney” card is sooo 2008 shaun.

So shaun, if a bully keeps punching you in the nose, and one day you punch him back, does that make you a bully too?

I guess Obama, Hillary and a host of Democrats are stealing “conservative Republican” plays every time they refer to “real Americans.” I guess it’s good to know that “real Americans” is a phrase that originated from conservatives. That’s good to know. Now if we could only get Democrats to stop stealing it. lol.

Being prepared for war means more than having weapons and men at arms. It means having the will to use them. Right now I would say that the United States is DEFINITELY unprepared for war.

I am unaware that the U.S. is not prepared for war. Yes, our forces are stretched awfully thin because of a war that did not have to be fought and a war that did but was bled because of the other way.

Your schoolyard analogy is so Cheney: The best way to keep the peace is to bully other nations.

Hey, did you catch Ahmadinejad stealing a trick from the conservative Republican play book by calling the people at his rallies “real Iranians?”

Why do people like you accuse people like me of not trying to figure out ways to preclude one?

The best way to avoid war is to prepare for war. Geopolitics is not much different than a school playground. If you want to stop the bullies from taking over, you have to be prepared to punch them in the nose from time to time.

This is not an academic debate shaun. The real world is playing out in real time right in front of us. Stay tuned and pay attention, and we’ll see how successful Obama’s attempts to appease and “reason with” our sworn enemies turns out to be.

President Obama pointedly did not comment on US preferences for the Iranian election during his Cairo speech, and was careful not to make any official statement of suppoort for reformist candidate Mir Hossein Moussavi over the weekend. Vice president….

Read my post again. I state that the U.S. would most likely be drawn into a war whether it wants to be, so Obama’s point of view — of primary importance to you — certainly would be subsumed.

Speaking of mindsets, why do people like yourself operate from a presumption that war would be a not bad thing as opposed to trying to figure out ways to preclude one?

Thanks for proving my point about why we can’t engage Iran militarily now. Excellent example of the mindset I was talking about.

Isn’t it illuminating how frequently people like Shaun resort to sexual imagery at the drop of a hat? Very instructive, that.

Trap #1 is that “last vestige of democratic legitimacy.” Unless my memory is faulty, Iran has NEVER had much going for it in the way of democracy and the genesis of the mess we see now is substantially a result of the 1979 embassy hostage siege and subsequent revolution, as well as the Bush administration’s rebuff of Iranian overtures after 9/11. Long story short, U.S. policy toward Iran has be screwed up since Woodrow Wilson was president.

Trap #2 is your U.S.-centric view of everything that occurs in Tehran and that Obama’s annoying habit of trying to open dialogues with enemies as opposed to the saber rattling of his predecessor is solving erectile dysfunction problems in Qum.

Trap #3 is your implicit support of the Netanyahu-U.S. neocon axis, which would like nothing more than Israeli air strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities, a foolish move that almost certainly would drag the U.S. into a war. We’ve got two wars going already; why would you want a third?

Not sure if W would have intervened though. His experience in being demonized for five years for a war the demonizers actually voted for in the first place probably would have made him think long and hard about any new conflict. Which is why I opposed the Iraq war in the first place, for precisely this reason. I said at the time that the likely result of going to war with Iraq would be to make it impossible for us to go to war with Iran when we needed to.

And that has now come to pass.

It’s gonna be a bad four years folks. This, I’m afraid, is just the beginning. When Israel launches their proactive attack and Obama throws them under the bus, it’s gonna be touch and go in the Middle East, with the nuclear specter hovering over the whole area.

While China teases North Korea about their own opportunities with an American administration that has essentially pledged “peace in our time” with the same likely results as 60 years ago.