I am convinced the political well in America is good and truly poisoned. If so, the country is in for a long down hill slide regardless of who is President.
Consider the right wing monologue. In just about 75 days, the nation has slid down the road to facisim, socialism, nazisim, communism or any other ism that blows your skirt. As Jon Stewart said in the previous post, when Obama is not so busy being a big pussy allowing the Europeans to walk all over us-he’s flexing his muscle as a tyrant scheming to deprive all real Americans of their guns, land, and money.
All of the bad things that happen in America have all occurred in the last 70+ days. No seeds were planted before hand-no one else bears any blame for leading the country down a rat hole its all Obama’s fault. Even when the team-gets one for the good guys-he is still to blame for not acting quickly enough, or trying to steal the credit from the real brains who thought up the solution.
The left is actually guilty of many of the same things in the previous eight years-although I’d argue that at least Obama has not had time to invade a country that didn’t attack us yet and get 4500 Americans killed doing so. Give him time.
I’ve got a news flash for everyone. Regarding the piracy incident? It would have probably gone down exactly the same way if Bush was still President. Or if McCain was President.
It is just the way it is.
All the people who are screaming about how we should have whacked the fuckers and how limp-wristed we are for not preventing the incident, forgive my French, don’t have a f**king clue.
People who talk about sweeping these guys off the map should really look at a map. The US Navy did:
The east coast of Somalia is a vast stretch of water. To put it in perspective, it starts from — draw a box from Houston to Chicago to New York City down to Jacksonville, Florida.
It’s an immense body of water. When the “Maersk-Alabama” had their problem, our closest vessel from all the navies that were out there, we have 16 navies patrolling those waters, and the closest one was the “USS Bainbridge” and it was over 300 nautical miles.
The day before, they had made an announcement through their company that they were fending off some pirates and then when — and they said it was under control.
And then the next day when this one that they ultimately got on board, we were closing Bainbridge as quickly as we can, but 22 knots, 300 nautical miles, it take as while to get there.
And there’s about a 10 minute window from when the pirates are able to get on board that we have time to act. Up in the Gulf of Aden, north on the north coast of Somalia where it’s a little bit more concentrated, we’ve had more successful attempts when a ship was being attempted to be pirated where one of the navies of the 16 navies down that are down there that could react and assist with breaking up the attempt. But out on the east coast of Somalia, such a vast area, we simply do not have enough resources in order to cover all those areas.
In other words, even if Bush was still President, the Maersk Alabama would have still been sailing unescorted. Which was a big part of the reason the whole thing unfolded to begin with. And once the Captain was a hostage-well the actions taken then go down a slow and deliberate path.
Unless you want hostages to get killed.
Maersk is a Danish line that flies the US flag. If it had been a Filipino Captain on a Panamanian flagged freighter-and the same thing happened, think it would have been all over the news? There would still be hostages, just probably no rescue.
150 crewman from various ships are being held hostage as we speak. How come there is no outrage about shipping companies that are placing their ships in harms way just to save on their fuel bill? Why isn’t the area declared an exclusion zone?
Piracy is not new-its been going in South East Asia and off Somalia for about the last ten years. It is only in the last nine months or so that the Fifth Fleet has started to make attempts to get serious about it.
Probably because it was a little busy trying to be in four big stretches of water at once: The Gulf, The Red Sea, The Omani coast trying to stem the drug trade, or off the coast of Somalia and Aden.
There are a lot of ships there-go see Galhran for the latest list. However they are not under a single command structure.
Getting them to do so will be like herding cats. Maybe the one benefit of this particular incident is that it will enable the efforts that were already underway to get a boost.
And we could actually start convoying ships through the area with escorts and air surveillance.
The pirates are probably networked via the internet, with dock workers in Port Said and elsewhere. They know when the fat cargoes are coming through- throwing ships at the problem does not solve that right away. It is going to take time to make this become reduced, and given the example of the Malacca Straits, it is never going away totally.
I’d like to give the Navy some credit-they have been thinking this through for some time now. And that is one reason they performed so well.
But never mind, its all still Obama’s fault.
