Yes, the OP and your post both involve the surge. There can be more than one related but different topic about the surge. The OP is discussing who gets credit for the potential achievement Biden was talking about, which you and I agreed earlier was "a successful withdrawal of troops leaving Iraq relatively stable." The part of it that you specifically quoted is addressing that question by saying that the surge was instrumental in that achievement, and someone who opposed the surge shouldn't take credit for that achievement. Your post was talking about whether Republicans focus on the surge rather than taking their lumps for screwing up before that. See the difference? How can you not? Republican hypocrisy is irrelevant to whether Obama/Biden deserve credit for the achievement. The failures of the Bush administration on the Iraq War are irrelevant to the question of whether their strategy resulted in the achievement. It shouldn't be that hard to follow. Did you read the four points in post #73?
But why? What does Republican hypocrisy on taking credit and blame have to do with actual correlations between actions and results? If person X implemented strategy Y, and it achieved result Z, then person X gets credit for achieving Z. The end. Discussing anything else might be interesting, but it's tangential to that question.
you are making this too complicated. i don't care about repbulican hypocrisy, i'm not giving bush any credit for accomplishments in a war where he didn't accomplish his goals. as i've stated for the umpteenth time, the surge is a result of poor planning in the first place. it only served to fix what was unecesarily broken. BUSH DID NOT ACHIEVE HIS GOALS AND THE WAR WAS A MISTAKE he doesn't get credit that's not a very hard concept to understand. as I said before, this has been my position long before obama became president.
Fair enough. For the umpteenth time, that is an illogical position to take. Not giving credit where credit is due because of separate failures is just wrong. You're free to do it, but that doesn't make it right, and it doesn't make others wrong for being able to give the credit where it is due. Person X made decisions A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H and I that were horrible. That shouldn't prevent you from recognizing that decision Y led to achievement Z. That fact that you'd prefer not to admit that is the kind of hypocrisy you rail on people like basso for.
