Ransom
- Thread starter stollcpa
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Your second question includes a "that" that refers to some part of the first question. To which part did it refer? Be careful when answering, because one answer will leave you dead in these shark-infested waters.
No I am not. I really need to hire one of my smart ass golf buddies to help me. I am going to see if I can get him to him me after we play and while we're eating steaks tomorrow night. He builds roads in Illinois and depends on crooked Dems so he will probably side with you guys.
Once again, it must be noted your partisan nonsense was answered with genuine facts. You ignored them and simply repeated your partisan nonsense. This thread is going downhill primarily because you, like many republicans here, have become fact-immune.
Gotta love the literal answer to the rhetorical question. Also, too much information.
I asked 3 questions.
I think the payment of the $400M is a payment of an old disputed debt with Iran. Paying it as part of getting the hostages back wasn't a good idea.
So you admit that it wasn't a ransom, but you're still mad about us paying a ransom?
How does your brain not explode?
Well, you know, that's an unremarkable statement, unlike your inflammatory OP. Maybe in the future you should start here, before the ridicule drives you here.
Reportedly, there were divisions within the Obama administration about giving Iran back some of the money we owed in such close proximity to the prisoners' release. That's the sort of thing about which reasonable minds could differ.
Where did I get mad? Well I did get bothered by the goat reference by the unsuccessful old white guy. So was paying $400M as part of getting the hostages back a good idea? How do you think the Iranians looked at the whole deal?
Forgive me for being difficult, but I don't think stoll is being reasonable at all. I think stoll is simply trying to find a way to absorb new information while maintaining outrage at Obama. "Okay, yeah, but..." is not the discussion style of a reasonable person.
Even your language choices betray you. "As part of?" You clearly can't drop the idea that the payment was some sort of ransom, even after admitting it was probably not. You are displaying the same bizarre logic of your presidential nominee.
You're right. I do have a lot of outrage when it comes to President Obama but he's a credit to Hillary.
Speaking as the "Did you have sex with goats" guy -- also, sorry about that -- I'm not conceding much here.
What? So you readily admit it wasn't ransom, then ask if paying it as part of getting the hostages back is a good idea?
The intellectual leap you have to make to get to that is mind numbingly stupid. It makes zero sense and HAS ZERO BASIS IN FACT.
Are you related to Ladoga?
Do you think it's a good idea to agree to pay a disputed $400M debt as part of negotiations to get back 4 hostages?
To me doing it quasi-secretly-but-not-really was pretty stupid. I don't know why Obama didn't publicly say that an international tribunal said we owed this money, so we used it to get these hostages back. Stick it to the Iranians. That's not ransom, that's state-of-the-art Trumpian negotiation.
Bottom line, though, is Obama got the hostages released for a debt we owed anyway.
Okay. Thank you. That's reasonable. I should have started with that statement but I suspect Rock would have berated me anyway.
Republicans were going to explode with nonsense either way, so Obama had two choices. Bring Americans home with bad timing and deal with a lot republican nonsense or leave them in Iran and deal with maybe less republican nonsense. Obama is a grown up, so he brought Americans home.
You don't have to be very smart to see its a bad idea to include cash in negotiations for release of the hostages. A few minutes ago I watched an interview with Hillary. She was asked about this and refused to say she agreed with the exchange of cash.
I can only respond to what you say, and not to what you (erroneously) wish you would have said. Note that I leave the vast majority of your posts alone. In the nicest possible way, I don't care about you -- at least in this narrow sense.
Every time I harbor fantasies of finally bolting the Democratic Party, a discussion with a fact-averse Republican puts me right back in line.
What was Obama thinking? An unmarked plane with $400M in foreign currency? To Iran, a known terrorist country with openly evil intentions for Israel? Instead of saying, okay, the tribunal says we owe you but not until we and our international partners agree to lift such sanctions that allow us to transfer the money legally and without violating our agreements.
That's the real story here, not whether it was ransom or not.
Edit: Corrected the $500M to $400M.
That's the real story here, not whether it was ransom or not.
Edit: Corrected the $500M to $400M.
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anon_mlxxvlbug9dpa
Guest
Sounds like you're not interested in facts of this matter. I guess you should return to your chain emails.
A
anon_mlxxvlbug9dpa
Guest
Speaking seriously, Goat, I think it's a mistake to think in terms of "finally bolting the Democratic Party." I'm not a Democrat, I'm a liberal. As an operational matter -- because I care about what happens in the world -- this mostly means that I vote for Democrats, even though I'm routinely more liberal than the Democrats I vote for.
But I don't ever vote as a means of self-expression. If I'd voted for Nader in 2004 I could never forgive myself. Those assholes elected George W. Bush, and the recognition that that was a f#cking disaster explains why Jill Stein will get jack squat in November. I detest Bernie Bros as the ultimate expression of effete dilettante self regard.
This isn't to say that we should disregard principle, but any principle that knowingly produces bad outcomes is a vacuous and dangerously self-absorbed principle. What matters is not our own self-expression, but what actually happens in the world.
Having read your posts, I understand that you don't disagree. I just want to be more emphatic.
Everyone has their interpetations of facts. I have no idea what you're talking about with chain emails. I waste my time on here but I don't spend anytime with chain emails.
Yes that's fair. I've voted third party once. It was Bush vs Gore, which happened right while young, silly me was leaving the GOP behind, but I was confused and didn't like either candidate (obviously, in hindsight, I'd gladly be stuffing fraudulent ballots for Gore), and I knew my vote didn't matter anyway. Every presidential election since then, I've voted in Ohio, and never considered wasting my vote as a protest. But since I see a value in protest voting in a state where the outcome is unimportant, I'm keeping that option open now that I've moved back to Indiana. Won't get into the detailed political theory behind that, as I'm on my phone, and trust you're familiar with it anyway.
We could spit across the distance between us on this. I only wished to make a couple of points explicitly.
Does it really matter? Geopolitics are a complex business, if this was a situation where you can kill 2 birds with one stone, I don't see why that's necessarily a bad thing.
Iran is an adversarial nation, that causes immense turmoil in the region.....but considering our "allies" in the region are just as, or more, terrifying in their ideology and behavior, they aren't super high on my hate list.
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