“I respectfully disagree with the majority of Americans.” John McCain, last night, 60 Minutes.

This includes solar, wind, geothermal, tidal, etc.

On the other hand, it has been 25 years and the missile defense system has still not managed a single successful test in a real world situation.

Additionally, it was designed to combat a threat that collapsed in the 1980s.

Furthermore, it is a system that is easy to defeat, even if it worked as advertised.

Finally, building it only serves to provoke attacks.

It has Epic Fail written all over it. No wonder you support it.

I didn’t mention Libya because that would have been piling on. Libya gave up its weapons shortly after 9/11, when we demonstrated what we could — and would — do to a country that assed around with WMDs.

Survey sez…Bzzzt.

Clinton got that ball rolling.

While I don’t agree entirely with Clinton’s approach to North Korea, there is absolutely no question that Bush completely f*cked things up and dangerously ratcheted up tensions in the area. It’s horrifying to think that Obama might offer such tragic results as Clinton.

I’m also sure China is simply waiting for the U.S. to dismantle its nukes. It only seems prudent to attack the single largest importer of Chinese goods in the world and initiate a global conflagration. Besides, we’re doing a bang up job of destroying ourselves, just as bin Laden predicted, from the inside out (I personally can’t wait for the long awaited pitch to privatize the government, especially Social Security, by the very people who engineered the stratospheric debts that will destroy the Treasury Bonds the system depends on. Touche, ratf*ckers).

They seem to share a brain, so who knows …

Ah, right. This would be in response to your inability to show a single instance of John McCain declaring his continued support for amnesty during this campaign?

The joke sort of backfired on you didn’t it?

It was easy to come up with a direct quote from Obama refuting Jay Tea’s bullshit assertion. You with McCain on amnesty? Not so much.

So, Jay, we’re still waiting for you to drag Jay Tea over the coals for so willfully distorting Obama’s position. You gonna get around to that sometime soon in order or is it okay when the distortion comes from a fellow conservative?

Did diplomacy work with Libya? To an extent, yes. And you spent most of this thread arguing that diplomacy is useless and weak.

Shorter Jay: Diplomacy never works, except when it does.

Thank god you live in your mother’s basement and don’t hold a position of any real significance.

Diplomacy, they say, is the art of saying “nice doggie” while reaching for a stick. Qaddafi (or however the hell it’s being spelled this week) knew what may be in the offing for him.

As Von Clausewitz said, “war is diplomacy continued by other means.” It is the presence of those other means that makes true diplomacy — and diplomatic feats like the dismantling of Libya’s nuclear program — possible.

And before anyone says I’m making up the Iraq-Libya causative relationship, Italian prime minister Sylvio Berlusconi is on record as saying he received a personal call from Qaddafi whre Qaddafi acknowledged that the US invasion was the main reason he decided to come clean.

Oh, and Jaim, the “cursing to strengthen your position” is called “pulling a Strowbridge.” Please give credit where it is due.

J.

Douchebag.

No shit dummy. That’s the reason why I said it. I was pulling a ‘Fafaroo.’

Now you’re saying there’s no point in nuclear non-proliferation treaties and diplomacy because they can never work. B…b…but, you forgot Libya!

Your argument is the logical equivalent of Swiss Cheese, as usual.

O-dub is spot on — Obama is proposing sane, optimistic yet realistic actions in our national foreign policy. Pretty mild, logical stuff. And yet you and your wing-nut brethren think you can scream and piss your pants and that somehow makes Obama a fringe leftist.

It doesn’t though. It’s solidly in line with what the American people want in a foreign policy.

(And the fact that he knows where Spain is doesn’t hurt either.)

Whirr.

SPLAT!!

Once again, Jay loses his daily poo-slinging battles against the industrial-strength fan of TRUTH. Will he ever learn?

Jay, you wanna take this one? I think Jay Tea could really use your brand of ethical clarity right about now.

So he’s progressed from unilateral disarmament to bilateral disarmament. I can see a lot of people who would love to see the US and Russia get rid of their nuclear weapons.

People like those who control nuclear weapons in China, in Pakistan, or those who are seeking them, such as those in North Korea, Iran, etc. etc.

The only thing that might work is multilateral, universal disarmament, and that’s sheerest fantasy.

Much like Obama’s record on most anything — the talk sounds good, the reality turns out to be a vast wasteland of nothing.

J.

We are so past the era of requiring the resources of a superpower to build nuclear weapons. The toughest part — proof of concept — was done over 60 years ago. Plans for atomic/nuclear weapons are readily found for anyone determined to go looking. The only thing that makes it challenging is the materials, and the years of shoddy controls in Russia make that a hell of a lot easier.

Further, Pakistan and North Korea are pretty damned shaky right now.

Nuclear weapons are here, and here to stay. No matter how much you Hope that will Change, it ain’t. Hope is about as much of a defense strategy as it is a birth-control method. The big difference is that in birth control, a failure creates a life; in defense, it ends lives, usually measured in very high digits.

And I’m still wondering just how we can continue to use and develop nuclear power with a ban on fissile material. (He very well may have meant “non-weapons-grade fissile material,” but that’s not what he said (remember, “words matter”) and Iran is busily showing the world how to convert non-weapons-grade material into weapons-grade material.) Or how we can develop new weapons systems if we only spend money on “proven” ones. Or why he needs another bureaucracy to review defense spending, on top of the presidency’s own resources and congressional oversight and all the commissions and whatnot already involved.

Or why we should expect China to stop blowing up things in orbit, when they’ve already shown they don’t give a rat’s ass about what any other nation says about it. The debris from their little tests is endangering a lot of other satellites — at least when we tested our systems and shot down that satellite, we made sure the debris came back to earth and didn’t stay in orbit, adding to the already horrid problem of “space junk.”

J.