It was just plain cruelty in action.

A little more than a year after his election, President Obama said his administration has laid the groundwork for success on global and domestic matters.

“I think that we’ve restored America’s standing in the world, and that’s confirmed by polls,” he told CNN’s Ed Henry in a wide-ranging interview this week during his trip to China.

“I think a recent one indicated that around the world, before my election, less than half the people — maybe less than 40 percent of the people — thought that you could count on America to do to the right thing. Now it’s up to 75 percent.”

The president said that makes it easier for world leaders to cooperate with the United States, noting Chinese and Russia involvement in nuclear talks with Iran.

Obama has visited 20 countries during his first year in office, more than any other U.S. president.

But there is HOPE on the horizon, just over the edge of the world. Obama isn’t sure he will run again..apparently he thinks he is doing a bang-up job and only needs one term. Or something like that. http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/

But when it comes to the 2012 race, Obama didn’t discount the possibility he may sit out on a reelection bid.

“You know, if – if I feel like I’ve made the very best decisions for the American people and three years from now I look at it and, you know, my poll numbers are in the tank and because we’ve gone through these wrenching changes, you know, politically, I’m in a tough spot, I’ll – I’ll feel all right about myself,” Obama told CNN’s Ed Henry during an interview in China. “I said to myself very early on, even when I started running for office, I don’t want to be making decisions based on getting reelected, because I think the challenges that America faces right now are so significant,” the president also said. “Obviously, if I make those decisions and I think that I’m moving the country on the right direction economically, in terms of our security interests, our foreign policy, I’d like to think that those policies are continued because they’re not going to bear fruit just in four years.”

But in the next breath the president quickly sounded like someone who would relish taking his case to the American people in 2012, saying he’s tackling big issues like health care and Iran that he’s confident will bear fruit in the future.

I wonder if anyone has told him that the US economy is tanking while he is on his little trips sucking up to anyone he can. Seems to me that the only people doing well are Obama and his corporate masters. They seem to be doing fine while the rest of the country is hemorrhaging jobs at an unprecedented rate.

But I thought you all would like to know that, thanks to Obama, the world loves us again.

Galt (glad to see you back, by the way),

Thanks!

I have no love for the japs and what they did during WW2 but returning evil for evil does no good. When will it end?

We smashed ‘em. They surrendered. Let that be the end.

Let go of your hate and move on.

What he did was bow to his waist…which is what a lowly official would do. So I doubt the Japanese would have been impressed. They’d either think him a damn fool, or a foolish try hard. Obama probably saw it on some stupid show and thought he’d act all worldlylike. AT LEAST MAKE THE EFFORT TO DO SOME RESEARCH DUMBASS!!

Someone remind me how this damn fool became president again?!! WHY THE HELL DO WE KEEP GETTING MORONS?!!! FFS…

More Japanese would have died in the invasion if the atom bombs had not ended the war.

Hundreds of thousands of Japanese had already been killed in the firebombings of their major cities and those firebombings would surely have been used even more widely prior to any American invasion.

BTW, will Obama mourn and say a prayer for the tens of thousands of Americans fiendishly tortured, starved and beaten to death by their Japanese guards?

I am sure he won’t. He’s too busy humiliating America everywhere he goes.

I started reading this article because of the lessons we could learn from Truman’s difficult but wise decision to drop the atomic bombs. It is a shame that we are instead being deflected into inane name-calling and selfish partisanship.

Every working day I try to help veterans, of WWII through the current crises in Asia, get the benefits they so richly deserve. Those veterans fought for a good, united America, not one that wastes its strength in trying to tear down its fellow citizens.

May God Bless America!

Trading civilian casualties for military casualties is going to present a moral issue, and discussing the bombings without addressing “just acts” in times of war leaves an incomplete picture.

Expand on this — address the question of when attacks on civilian targets are justified to further military and/or geopolitical goals.

Destroy several hundred thousand Japanese CIVILIANS or commit to the credible possibility of one million or more US MILITARY casualties over the next two years.

[CAPS added]

YES, a pure numbers comparison seems “stark” — HOWEVER, how can you stop there? What about analyzing moral acts in war? What about the long history of philosophical discussion of the (im)morality of attacks on civilians?

This lady agrees!

Seriously, all the judgement and hyper-sensitivity over what people say must be a real burden and a huge kleenex bill.

However by Summer 1945, the DoD believed that the Japanese were capable of fielding 5 million or more men with weapons in defense of the homeland, which would raise the estimates to three quarters of a million at best

The DoD was not created until 1949.

http://www.defenselink.mil/pubs/dod101/