Thread: Malaysian Plane 290+Dead

Originally Posted by Xavsnipe

What´s going on in Holland, is what I´m wondering...the majority of passengers were dutch!

There is nothing going on!
People are mourning the dead, everyone is disguested by this. Yet our leader is also lacking a backbone and no further steps will be taken. It is highly unlikely that our politicians are going to declare war against Russia. Maybe they will try to slap Putin on the wrists and tell him not to do it again.

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Originally Posted by Nuckle

I am just glad our leader attended his $32k per plate fundraiser tonight. Makes sense to me.

You're right, he should have gone straight to Ukraine instead and start helping find and analyze evidence.

Seriously, who cares? There isn't shit all to be done by any leader at the moment, not going to the fundraising wasn't going to suddenly solve anything. It's stupid partisan bullshit.

Originally Posted by deathgodusmc

You miss the point. No one thinks Obama should have gone back to do research. What he should have done was take this this incident with the amount of seriousness it deserved and canceled his showing to go do his job. The best part about your comment is it was ignored by many when the planes hit the towers and Bush sat there for a few seconds to gather his thoughts. At that time many people flamed Bush for not jumping into action and that was just a few seconds. This guy went to dinner and still has people defending him.

Are you comparing 9/11 to this?

Next time we'll elect a president who will rip open his suit and reveal a big S shield on his chest who flies off to save the day every time something happens halfway around the world. Got it.

No cape needed, just be a leader.

President Reagan's Address to the Nation on the Soviet Attack on a Korean Airliner (KAL 007) - YouTube

Originally Posted by Nuckle

No cape needed, just be a leader.

President Reagan's Address to the Nation on the Soviet Attack on a Korean Airliner (KAL 007) - YouTube

There have been plenty of shoot-downs of civilian aircraft, and the president (whoever it was at the time) hasn't responded to them uniformly.

The KAL incident was in a cold-war world. Two sides in clear opposition (though not shooting at each other (mostly)). Reagan showed a good public presence, and public leadership, but his address was a no-brainer. There were two superpowers and the Reagan administration was already painting the opposition as good-guy-bad-guy stuff. Two things made his address the right move:

1) KAL 007 was an excellent why-they-are-the-bad-guys moment, but much more importantly...

2) A US Congressman was on the plane.

Neither of those things apply right now, and if they did you can bet that Obama would make an address. It would have been solemn, and hard-hitting, and well-scripted, and very leadershipy - just like Reagan's. I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes The President has to address The People and that's how it works.

[a comparison that I don't see made very often is the similarity between Reagan's and Obama's effectiveness at speaking as The President]

I don't think that the world is more complicated now than it was then, but it certainly doesn't lend itself to the same simplifications that were easy in the cold war.

At the moment there is less certainty over what exactly happened. I think the smart money is on pro-Russian Ukrainian rebels having shot it down. But there are at least two other possibilities, and you can't get up and make a Reagan-style speech while relying on the smart money (neither, by the way, did Reagan).

So I don't care that Obama didn't interrupt his schedule, and I don't see that as a failure of leadership. Reagan's speech was 4 days after the event, and they had a pretty good idea what had happened. They took 4 days to decide how to respond.

I think Obama's failure here is worse. The situation in the Ukraine is bad. There's some real shit going down there and it's a complete mess. I still don't think that the US has direct vital interests there, but we're certainly an interested party. As a citizen (who has access to no more information that anyone else here), I don't know where we stand.

I understand in this case why, politically, it's harder to make a simple public statement of policy. This is a much more complicated political snarl. But it still pisses me off. I want to feel like the US has a position, and I want a statement from the nation's leader that makes it clear.

Cheers,


AetheLove

There are intercepted communiques between the rebels and their Russian operators along with social media talk from the "head" of the rebels confirming it was the rebels. The communiques have been confirmed by more than just the Ukranian government. The rebels thought it was a Ukranian cargo plane. It's why the "head" deleted his comments (cached versions still available obviously), the SAMs are being relocated (there is video evidence), and the rebels took control of the crash site seizing anything that could link them to the crash (again, documented).

So, I think your money will earn dividends.

I guess, if we're judging by Reagan standards, then Obama still has 3 days to make a big speech.