[BartSimpson]

llama66 llama66:

CNN is reporting the 'Pro-Russian' separatists have handed the Black Box Flight Recorders over to a Malaysian Delegation, now lets get them to hand over the remains, so the families can have some measure of closure.

Smart move on the part of the Russians.

[BRAH]

BartSimpson BartSimpson:

BRAH BRAH:

The investigation has already been compromised as the scene has been contaminated and any evidence linking the Russian rebels has already been removed or tampered with.

There's already enough evidence of direct Russian involvement to start drawing conclusions.

The repercussions will come in the form of indirect and direct aid to Ukraine in repelling the Russian forces on their soil.

Let's hope so because if something doesn't change this is bound to happen again.

[PostFactum]

BartSimpson BartSimpson:

llama66 llama66:

CNN is reporting the 'Pro-Russian' separatists have handed the Black Box Flight Recorders over to a Malaysian Delegation, now lets get them to hand over the remains, so the families can have some measure of closure.

Smart move on the part of the Russians.

I wonder if they are original and in good conditions.

[llama66]

Thats the million dollar question.

[Strutz]

llama66 llama66:

CNN is reporting the 'Pro-Russian' separatists have handed the Black Box Flight Recorders over to a Malaysian Delegation, now lets get them to hand over the remains, so the families can have some measure of closure.

They had no damn business picking them up the first damn place.

If these so-called "pro-Russian separatists" were truly innocent of any wrong-doing then they would have allowed investigators immediate access to the crash scene. Instead, they have had the opportunity to tamper with, and remove, valuable evidence and Lord knows how much has been looted from the innocent victims of this tragedy.

[Zipperfish]

Strutz Strutz:

llama66 llama66:

CNN is reporting the 'Pro-Russian' separatists have handed the Black Box Flight Recorders over to a Malaysian Delegation, now lets get them to hand over the remains, so the families can have some measure of closure.

They had no damn business picking them up the first damn place.

If these so-called "pro-Russian separatists" were truly innocent of any wrong-doing then they would have allowed investigators immediate access to the crash scene. Instead, they have had the opportunity to tamper with, and remove, valuable evidence and Lord knows how much has been looted from the innocent victims of this tragedy.

Yeah, too little too late for those boys. They were taking trophy shots with the wreckage, coordinating with high ranking Russian intelligence officials. Pretty stupid really. There was no advantage in being dicks about the whole thing.

[Thanos]

Zipperfish Zipperfish:

Strutz Strutz:

llama66 llama66:

CNN is reporting the 'Pro-Russian' separatists have handed the Black Box Flight Recorders over to a Malaysian Delegation, now lets get them to hand over the remains, so the families can have some measure of closure.

They had no damn business picking them up the first damn place.

If these so-called "pro-Russian separatists" were truly innocent of any wrong-doing then they would have allowed investigators immediate access to the crash scene. Instead, they have had the opportunity to tamper with, and remove, valuable evidence and Lord knows how much has been looted from the innocent victims of this tragedy.

Yeah, too little too late for those boys. They were taking trophy shots with the wreckage, coordinating with high ranking Russian intelligence officials. Pretty stupid really. There was no advantage in being dicks about the whole thing.

There is when your intent is to clearly show the entire world how morally and ethically depraved you are and how low you will willingly sink in order for your cause to win. Looting the luggage of the people they deliberately murdered and having no reticence or shame about it at all is entirely typical of a mindset, culture, and society of "people" that haven't even come close to sinking to their lowest level yet.

[Zipperfish]

Thanos Thanos:

There is when your intent is to clearly show the entire world how morally and ethically depraved you are and how low you will willingly sink in order for your cause to win. Looting the luggage of the people they deliberately murdered and having no reticence or shame about it at all is entirely typical of a mindset, culture, and society of "people" that haven't even come close to sinking to their lowest level yet.

Well they certainly succeeded on that count. Ar least, for the most part, we're hearing less fawning over Putin by the rabid right, for the most part. Stuff like this…

[Thanos]

The neo-cons show absolutely no shame at all for their responsibility for all the damage they caused and all the lives they wasted. As such it's no surprise that they'd be enamoured of a fellow psychopath like Putin. Pimp-strut and all, this is how idiots like that probably genuinely think about things.

[rickc]

Zipperfish Zipperfish:

Thanos Thanos:

There is when your intent is to clearly show the entire world how morally and ethically depraved you are and how low you will willingly sink in order for your cause to win. Looting the luggage of the people they deliberately murdered and having no reticence or shame about it at all is entirely typical of a mindset, culture, and society of "people" that haven't even come close to sinking to their lowest level yet.

Well they certainly succeeded on that count. Ar least, for the most part, we're hearing less fawning over Putin by the rabid right, for the most part. Stuff like this…

Yeah and we are also hearing zero laughter from the left about how Mitt Romney called Russia our #1 geopolitical foe.

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/20 ... tical-foe/

Remember that? President Obama was caught on an open mike telling Russian President Medvedev that he would have "more flexibility" after the election to dismantle the missile defense shield. An American President kissing a Russian Presidents ass, and asking for more time to meet his demands. That worked out well didn't it? I see you talking tough in this thread, you want Putin to be contained. To bad you have Neville Chamberlain reincarnate sitting in the White House. All the lefties can just sit back and reminisce about the good old days when President Obama was yukking it up at Mitt Romney for being right about Russia being our #1 geopolitical foe.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/2 ... 03927.html

That video is the last time I remember seeing President Obama smile.I hope he had a good laugh. Now he is the laughing stock of the world. Now that his own base has turned on him, Hillary is stabbing him in the back, President Obama's ratings are worse than any Presidents ratings since WW2, and Mitt Romney was proven to be right, he does not have much to smile about, does he?

[Thanos]

Russia's big enough that, to be convincing, the United States has to speak with one determined voice in order to credibly confront someone like Putin. Instead America is ripping itself apart from the inside out with rampant polarization, reckless ideological posturing, and the grotesque need to score political points on each other.

I have no illusions about President Obama being a good foreign policy president, although I think he is significantly less worse than George W. Bush proved himself to be. In reality though Obama has to reason to ever believe that the GOP will support him on ANYTHING, not even in the face of international crises. They want him destroyed far more than they want a stable world order, and they've repeatedly shown themselves quite willing to operate against their own American best interests than to ever co-operate with President Obama on any issue.

[Thanos]

Good article here on how internal American domestic disputes is encouraging international instability.

$1:

It’s been the most depressing two weeks of the Obama presidency. The child border crisis, the new Gaza war, the Russian separatists shooting down that plane—these aren’t just infuriating political squabbles of the sort we follow every week but profound political crises with enormous human tolls. Any of the three on its own would have been dreadful enough. All three of them in succession, the incomprehensible suffering and death of innocent victims of calculation and avarice, are almost more tragic than the mind can bear.

The tragedy in each case is deepened by American impotence. It’s not that we couldn’t prevent these things that’s upsetting. The border crisis, despite what they say on the black-helicopter right, was not fomented by President Obama in an attempt to force Congress to act on immigration. It’s a function of nightmarish conditions in Central America from which destitute, desperate people are fleeing, and of a network of completely immoral hustlers at the border who exploit them. Israel makes an incursion into Gaza every few years, and we always have little choice but to let it play out. And Russian separatists, with a nudge from Vladimir Putin, are going to do what they’re going to do.

What’s maddening and emotionally exhausting is that we can’t seem to do anything about them. You can blame all this on Obama if you want to. He deserves some blame. He was slow to respond to the border crisis, and for a host of reasons, Putin and Bibi Netanyahu pretty clearly don’t even listen to him (wouldn’t matter in Bibi’s case if he did, since the U.S. position is largely defensive of Israel’s actions). Maybe different leadership in the White House would make some kind of huge difference.

I suspect not a lot, though. We don’t live in a country that can speak with one voice at a time of crisis. I don’t want to get carried away saying that there was a golden age of unity in American global crisis management. There never was any such thing. Politics never stopped entirely at the water’s edge, and in many cases that was a damn good thing. I for one am quite glad that there were ferocious critics of U.S. Vietnam policy, and I wish the Democrats had been considerably less craven when Bush and Cheney were leading us into Iraq atop that landfill of lies and false promises. So I do no Broderesque pining for a golden era that didn’t exist.

At the same time, there have been many occasions in our history when our leaders took partisan potshots at each other, and gave voice to legitimate disagreements, while they also behaved like statesmen behind closed doors and, at key moments, said or did the right thing in public. The motivation wasn’t to support the president. It was to support the country and show the rest of the world that the United States had the ability to act swiftly on the world stage when trouble was afoot.

Whatever that statesman gene was exactly, it’s basically gone. And yes, I do think it’s more the Republicans’ doing than the Democrats’. The Democrats largely behaved as Americans first in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, whereas I think we can be certain that all the radio and cable fatmouths on the right would have been howling for President Gore’s impeachment, and GOP elected officials would inevitably, on one timetable or another, have followed their lead. But even if you blame the parties equally, or blame the Democrats more, you should lament this: It harms the United States. And it strengthens the countries and interests that will step in to fill the vacuum created when the United States doesn’t act—Russia, China, Iran, the Islamic State, Hezbollah, border coyotes.

What, for example, was John McCain thinking last Friday when he said: “It’s just been cowardly, it’s a cowardly administration that failed to give the Ukrainians weapons with which to defend themselves.” What on earth is he talking about? First of all, the Ukrainian army has been winning that war. It’s making a final push to take back the two major cities of the east. The Ukrainians appear to be doing all right without these weapons of bravery. And second and more importantly, what in the world does that have to do with the Malaysian airliner? What, that if we’d been supplying the Ukrainians, they would have shot that missile down before it hit the jet?

It’s so horribly sad that of all the things McCain could have said in the wake of this tragedy for which Obama is no more responsible than he is for the outcome of the World Cup, this is what he chose to say (on Fox, egged on by Sean Hannity). And I wonder how the senator feels now, when he looks in the mirror, about all that rhetorical building up of Putin over Obama he and Lindsey Graham and others were doing when the Crimea and Ukraine crises started. Criticize Obama. Fine. He’s earned it. But build up Putin, as if this were just some video game?

And it’s not just words. Where’s the House of Representatives on the president’s border crisis bill? Debate it, change it, amend it; fine. Even denounce it. But do...something with it. Republicans think they’re hurting Obama by not doing anything with the bill. They’re hurting the United States, which appears to the rest of the world unable to handle its own crisis. And the rest of the world, when it is in crisis, will hear what the United States has to say and quite reasonably think, “Why should we listen to you?”

The saddest thing of all is that it’s probably gone forever, that old urge toward statesmanship at the crucial moment. Depression and the fight against fascism gave politicians on both sides certain touchstones through which to remember that a few things were more important than partisan advantage. We may need another Depression and global war. And the way we’re going, we may get them.

'Nuff said.

[Thanos]

Because this is genuinely how these vicious little shitheads WANT to behave.

[bootlegga]

$1:

"The Kremlin may not have pulled the trigger but it certainly loaded the gun and . . . put it in the murderer's hand," said Baird. "Russia is not fooling anyone."

I don't often agree with John Baird, but he hit the nail on the head with that comment.

[Zipperfish]

rickc rickc:

Yeah and we are also hearing zero laughter from the left about how Mitt Romney called Russia our #1 geopolitical foe.

Remember that? President Obama was caught ...

Obama Obama Obama. Learn a new tune, buddy.