I am beginning to become scared that Romney/Ryan will win. Can smart people please post here and say reassuring things to convince me that he won't?

i don't see any daylight between romney + obama on foreign affairs + war on terror except re tone. obama is more subtle, serious, discursive, romney would be more aggressive, threatening, both would probably deploy same # of drones, both would probably execute iranian strategy in same way (i think, this one i'm not sure of)

i don't mean discursive

but like analytic maybe

if Mitt wins only death will get a lib to leave the Supremes.

Too bad for Romney the death squads will be dismantled when he presumes office.

(i.e. panels; I'm out of practice)

i bet you $10,000 that if romney wins he won't touch obamacare

So let's say Romney wins, the house maintains a GOP majority, but the senate stays DEM. Any chance at all Obamacare actually gets repealed? Mitt can't veto anything, right? And it's already passed Supreme Court muster. I guess he could repeal with an executive order, but maybe he couldn't.

romney much more likely to bring back torture -- can't really see obama reversing himself on that one.

Ryan and the GOP already have a plan to pass his budget through another reconciliation magic trick, I read yesterday on Chait's site. I don't know if that's possible.

oh yeah, torture for sure coming back.

thank god the mormons wait until jews are dead before they forcibly convert us whew

http://nymag.com/news/politics/elections-2012/obama-romney-economic-plans-2012-10/

i don't see any daylight between romney + obama on foreign affairs + war on terror except re tone.

Diplomatic skill, genuine interest and empathy, etc.

that's just a morbz open basket imho

"empathy" there

Oh well.

well who knows what romney would do re foreign policy if elected, the fact that all hes said abt it basically amounts to get tough leads me to believe he could be quite a bit worse than obama, unless hes just blustering and war w/iran is not really a thing he wants, which is completely w/in the realm of possibility

WHO DO YOU TRUST MORE ON IRAN

hes just blustering and war w/iran is not really a thing he wants, which is completely w/in the realm of possibility

All of his wild west foreign policy words have been put in his mouth imo. Of course, if he'll do it in a campaign, he'll be just as much a piece of clay in office.

my impression is that the circumstances that determine whether we go to war w/ iran or not has very little to do w/ whether obama or romney is in office

our torture has just been outsourced

like, obama has said that military intervention is on the table re stopping nuclear iran. that he will not allow iran to get nuclear weapons. and he's actually president! to believe that obama won't go to war w/ iran takes a bigger leap of faith than believing romney won't go to war w/ iran.

The Libya thing...I'm not bothered that it took 3 weeks to get the story out to the public correctly. I am bothered that there was an intelligence breakdown that allowed it in the first place. Weird how the media seems to be focusing on the former.

I said on one of these half dozen threads last week that this typical CIA botch job for which the State Department will get the blame and accusations that it's run by striped-pants pansies.

*that this IS

Diplomatic skill, genuine interest and empathy, etc.

― timellison, Tuesday, October 16, 2012 3

how do you gauge these things?

Is war really in the cards? Seems more about whether there's going to be strikes on their facilities. Much prefer Obama for dealing with the whole region on the issue.

Intuition.

like, obama has said that military intervention is on the table re stopping nuclear iran. that he will not allow iran to get nuclear weapons. and he's actually president! to believe that obama won't go to war w/ iran takes a bigger leap of faith than believing romney won't go to war w/ iran.

― Mordy, Tuesday, October 16, 2012 3:57 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

of course either of them would go to war w/iran depending on circumstances, that doesnt mean that itd require the same circumstances for both tho, duh

Diplomatic skill, genuine interest and empathy, etc.

how do you gauge these things?

Obamajesus

re: differences between obama and romney -- i don't actually believe that gore, if elected, would have gone to war in both iraq and afghanistan. i imagine it would have been a clusterfuck either way but i think the mess would have been a bit less sloppy.

so i think obama while not exactly a pacifist could handle things differently, just as the previous prez handled it differently than gore likely would have.

no one except bush and his cronies was going to war in iraq, that shit was so left field

Pretty sure Al Qaeda would've been so scared of a Gore administration that Osama would have vetoed the attacks.

woulda been interesting cause the gop woulda pinned 9/11 on gore in a fairly cynical way for the 2004 elections. he possibly woulda prevented it, also.

yeah, i don't think romney is going to invade like north korea. he seems a lot more practical + pragmatic than bush to me

I don't believe it for a second, Mordy. That's what Bush was in 2000 too.

romney is a total cypher but one thing that i think does emerge from the biographical fog is that he is v risk adverse

bush never struck me as practical or pragmatic

^^ what lag00n said

on the other hand i dont think he has much of a backbone and could totally be bullied by the gop into doing just abt anything

romney is a total cypher but one thing that i think does emerge from the biographical fog is that he is v risk adverse

that's true, and if you're adverse to pissing off your base, and your base is essentially the tea party now (witness Akin pulling an Akin and then everyone quietly going back to his corner once the fury died down a bit), then you're more likely to do the bidding of the far right, no?

i mean alienating his party is a risk too

He didn't look that way to me either but that's how he presented himself: all that compassionate conservative palaver and "humility" in foreign policy.

I can't think of a major policy point on which Romney has repudiated Bush.

as w bush it's not so much a question about the man as about his patrons; romney is clearly a technocrat with no discernible principles but as he also has no discernible spine i'm not partic comfortable w the idea of him being c-in-c while PALLING AROUND w the same kind of violently idealistic war nerds who got to institute their dream project in 2003

and "humility" in foreign policy.

not even in retrospect, but even at the time i think there was enough evidence to see this was pretty much a lie. the "humility" idea was put out there contra clinton's democratic-internationalism (yugoslavia, somalia). but if you read james mann "the vulcans" (which i dimly remember) bush's vaunted foreign policy wonder crew was all Team B hyperhawks from cheney on down.

romney pals around w/ the billionaires who steal peoples money not the billionaires who make bombs, it's just really hard to imagine him as a war president

he would probably outsource our military to mexican and chinese soldiers anyway

I policy I support ftr

http://t.imgbox.com/adz4svpC.jpg

Josef Stalin and his Merry Band of Bolsheviks! I want ideas from you people, that is what you're paid for.

well, that's my point, goole: I think it's a myth that Romney will govern as a moderate.