No, you can't, because that would involve reading their minds. Unless you mean situations where the person explicitly states their political positions, but in that case, everyone who can read can discern who's who, too. There is no one way that individuals in any group behave.
That's part of the faculty of judgement. If you accept that one cannot make a judgement, then you volunteer insanity.
Has it ever occurred to you that just because you hate someone on one "side," that doesn't mean you're part of the Other Side?
Hate? I don't hate anyone. I hate what some people do. But hating strangers? Not my thing. And people who are leftist do often turn around and become decent human beings. I was a leftist myself when I was far less experience, less educated and more reactionary. Now that my faculties are more developed, I can discern rationally who's who. But that doesn't mean that certain postures that people take don't deserve denigration and derision. When the insane have taken the asylum, it's not a very good time to try to analyze them. First, they need to be stripped of power.
Um, the war is what we are talking about and it and most people now think it was a mistake. Bush owns that legacy. There would have been no Obama and Affordable health care act without it, so you can thank the Iraq war supporters for that. And it was Bush who signed the law. I'm a libertarian and I was against all that from day one.
I was talking about the war. The monetary cost of the war was a side issue brought by someone else and I simply responded to it. Anyone who thinks the war was a mistake doesn't get to brush it off as "everyone thinks it was a mistake". Just Bush gets to own that policy, you get to own your position. You have to have a damn good reason to justify status quo as it before the war. Oh, and the original comment to which I responded called it a war crime to even start that war (not a mistake -- a crime). I would love to see anyone try to defend that position.
I don't recall a wartime ally of Iraq attacking our naval base in Hawaii.
Not in Hawaii. no. But he was allied with Al Queda. He may have had nothing to do with attack on 9/11, but his allies did. Just like the allies of Germany attacked us. And Saddam Hussein was in a legal state of war with the United States, so the "Germany had declared war" comparison still holds.
The more important issue is that over 100K Iraqis died, with 4486 US soldiers dead and 32,223 wounded. And for what? We now have another dictator and Badgad is #1 on the most violent city list.
Different topic. A war gone badly is a mistake -- not a crime. But you simply don't know what the alternative would have been. Saddam was taking shots at US fighter planes all throughout the Clinton administration. You simply don't know that keeping him in power would not have proven more costly (in terms of lives) than what has happened. The was didn't turn a good situation into a bad one. It turned a bad situation into a different bad situation. But before calling it a mistake you'd have to show that the alternative would have been better.
You seem happy that we borrowed money from China to make Iran stronger, but the 90% who supported the war at the time is smarter now.
Your ability to read my from internet comments is unsurprisingly bad. But I don't blame you for it. Mood is hard to read from text for everyone -- not just you. The war went badly, sure. Rumsfeld should have been fired much sooner. But it wasn't costly considering what it did. And it certainly was not a crime considering what it attempted and what it accomplished.
Bush increased the debt by about 5 trillion in his two terms.
4.3 trillion. And he had to fight a war and deal with post-dot-com crash of the economy. And that 4.3 trillion included the 700+ billion of the bank bail out that both Obama and Hillary voted for (as senators).
They didn't have a budget. Obama assumed office in early 2009 and began work on implementing his policies
Are you really taking everyone to be an idiot? Does this idiotic, factually wrong, argument ever work on anyone? Here, idiot: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A... This was a spending act over and above the budget. It was passed under Obama in his 2nd month in office. It was entirely financed through deficit. It was 831 billion dollars. That alone is twice the largest deficit that Bush had ever ran (400 billion dollars).
The deficit has been reduced by more than half in 6 years. The national debt has increased greatly, because of the huge deficit which Obama inherited from Bush.
No, it hasn't. Even the smallest of Obama's deficits is larger than the largest Bush deficit. And tax receipts are highest in history, so it's not because of people not paying enough taxes. He is just too incompetent to do anything right (including managing government's finances).
A morsel of genuine history is a thing so rare as to be always valuable. -- Thomas Jefferson