Obama has done it better

Another great stand up by Bill Maher, and this time it's online. It's mostly about American politics, but at about 25 minutes he compares Obama's foreign policy to George Bush's. Very funny satire. He also made good points, including: Bush spent a trillion dollars to get Saddam, and then Obama spent a billion dollars (1000 times less than a trillion) to get Qadhafi.

Maher says Obama did it better, and it's true. "It's called doing things smart," Maher says. Obama was lucky he didn't have to deal with Iraq, I've said before, but it's not over for Obama. The conflict in Syria could explode. World powers are calling for intense pressure on Assad.

At 20 min he talks about John Steinbeck's quote about socialism, which I happened to see on fb today: “Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” Bill Maher replaced "embarrassed" with "inconvenienced" but I think he got the message across. Great show.

Qadhafi is dead

Haha. The talk in the US media is a lot about the killing of Qaddafi, and a US drone was involved, according to Lawrence O'Donnell. Many commentators on MSNBC are comparing it to how the US acted against Iraq. It is a valid comparison, but they don't go into how Iraq and Libya were very different. It is interesting how some Republicans are reacting - they're playing down American involvement, don't want to give too much credit to Obama.

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Rachel Maddow is portraying it as a "Responsibility to Protect", as in protect civilians. America will "work with others" and liberals are praising the way Obama has conducted his foreign policy. It is impressive, even though he doesn't have to deal with major civil war in Libya.

I wonder how different Iraq would have been if the US had helped Iraqis kill Saddam. It would have taken serious help, and the US should have done it in 1991, after bombing the shiite out of the place.

Anyway, it is always good to see a dictator go down. I hope Libya becomes a progressive democracy!

Will Qadhafi pull a Saddam?

'Like Saddam, Gadhafi is thought to have access to millions of dollars stashed away over the years. He has loyalists who benefited from his long rule and who, like the Iraqi leader's Baathist followers, believe they have nothing to gain and everything to fear from a new Libyan government.

"What we've learned is that finding one individual particularly in a tribal area is tough, despite all of technology we have, with our ability to collect intelligence sources together," said retired Lt. Col. John Nagl, who served in Iraq's al-Anbar province in 2003.

"The good news is Libya has a long coast line and the population is clustered close to the shore," said Nagl, who now heads the Washington-based Center for a New American Security. "The bad news is we have few, if any, Americans on the ground, and this is a society we don't understand very well." '