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Before you cast your vote, read this and remember - it is your decision. Read all media reports (not just the one-sided biased ones), do some fact checking of your own, and cast your vote. -BadMoneyBlog This week, all sides of this campaign have increased their ads, emails and pleas for more money, more support and more of our time. Within the last few days, a couple of ads and comments by President Obama have struck us as uncalled for, misguided, and downright misleading. Although you may think all sides are misleading with their ads, we expect our President to represent our country, and himself, with the highest of moral and ethical standard, so yes, we hold him to a higher standard. If he is not going to run for reelection on his own record, he most certainly should run on someone else’s. One of the latest “Obama approved” ads shows US Soldiers, albeit briefly, assumingly returning from war. This blatant exploitation of your psyche is simply unacceptable. We found it disingenuous and disturbing that a current President would use these types of visual images in an attempt to convince you that he is responsible for the withdrawal of US Troops from Iraq and Afghanistan. Have we forgotten that President Obama ordered a surge to Afghanistan sending an additional 33,000 troops and that there are still around 65,000 US Troops fighting in Afghanistan? Do these numbers shock you? It seems all he did was withdraw troops to their pre-surge level. Start watching President Obama’s latest campaign speech (posted on his website) from 13:30 minutes in where he says - “I said we’d end the war in Iraq, we ended it...”Well that is all great and lovely, but let’s examine a little more closely. Did President Obama end the war in Iraq? No. Did it technically end during his term in office? Yes. Could he have extended the war if he wanted to? Yes. As a matter of fact, his administration tried to do just that.
Don’t believe us? Let’s do some fact checking. On November 17th, 2008, under the administration of then President Bush (remember that guy; the guy still blamed for problems four years later), an agreement was signed and later ratified by the Iraqi Government which mandated the removal of all US Troops by 31 December 2011. So how is President Obama taking credit for this withdrawal? Is it because he was president when this withdrawal took place?
Here are just a few articles, from reputable sources, confirming what we just stated - - New York Times, 23 OCT 11, Secretary of State Hilary Clinton stated - “Remember, it was President Bush who set the timetable in motion by agreeing with the Iraqis that all troops would be out by the end of this year,” Mrs. Clinton said on the ABC program “This Week.” To view the entire article yourself, Click Here! - Foreign Policy Journal, 23 OCT 12, article stating - “Obama was critical of the SOFA, his publicly stated position being that the troops should be withdrawn sooner. “In contrast,” the New York Times notedat the time, “President-elect Obama had campaigned under a promise to withdraw all American combat brigades from Iraq by May 2010”. --- this obviously did not happen. View the entire article, Click Here!
- NBC News, 9 SEP 08, states Obama was running on a “pledge to remove all troops from Iraq within 16 months of becoming President” Click here! to read the full story. Just months before the withdrawal was set to begin, President Obama’s administration started the process of keeping US Troops in Iraq past the 2011 mandated out date. The Obama administration wanted to guarantee the immunity of US Troops against prosecution for certain crimes within Iraq. The Iraqi Government rejected the idea of immunity, so US Troops ultimately departed Iraq with the last troops leaving 18 December 2011, just days before the mandated deadline. A timeline set by then President Bush. How can we allow ourselves to forget this? As Americans, we tend to forget things rather quickly. As an example and a bit of test question for you the reader - What is the reason we actually invaded Iraq in the first place? The reason why we actually invaded Iraq is likely forgotten by most, Weapons of Mass Destruction. A joint resolution, approved by congress, authorized the invasion. Another example of America’s ever-increasing short-term memory is the terrorist attack on 9-11-01. This horrific event, like so many others, slowly finds its place in history as the latest 9-11-12 attack in Benghazi takes our focus elsewhere. Unless we were somehow directly involved or affected by what transpires, we seem to move on to the next shiny object without thinking about what happened in the past. Maybe that is a good thing, since we can always look to the future with hopes of prosperity and forget about the troubles in our past which can seem to haunt us and hold us down. We do not have all of the answers, and we do not think any candidate will truly live up to everything they promise. All we can do is ask you to vote for who you believe stands the best chance at leading our country into that prosperous future we all dream about - BadMoneyBlog