originally posted by: FlyInTheOintment
a reply to: YourFaceAgain
Fair point I may have got the 'election campaign' bit wrong. I was trying to recall the details from memory. That was stupid - I should have
checked. I would have to re-read all of Farrell's books to find the exact reference to Obama's visit to San Carlos de Bariloche, the Bavarian town
inexplicably landed in Argentina.. But it certainly happened, and it may not have been 2016. As I said, I will have to check. Admittedly, trying to
recall the details from memory when in a thread which argues for a certain point of view, is silly. I apologise. But the basic point of what I said
is absolutely true.
Not really. Your point was that Obama took some sort of odd trip to Bariloche, and this is some sort of evidence of your theory.
But it wasn't an odd trip. He didn't fly all the way there to visit Bariloche and then leave. It appears to have been part of a larger trip to
Argentina, a geopolitical trip. Obama was making a lot of foreign trips then to try to shore up his foreign policy legacy. This was around the time he
visited Cuba as well.
On his Argentina trip. he flew into Buenos Aires. He had meetings with the new Argentinian president, which appears to have been the purpose of his
trip. Again, there was nothing unusual about it. Argentina had just elected a more pro-Western leader than they had had in decades, it seems natural
that the US president would want to meet him and try to bolster relations.
The Obamas did later go to Bariloche, but that only seems unusual if you don't know anything about Bariloche. It has a bunch of resorts that often
attract the rich and famous when they visit Argentina. It would be like someone visiting the US, stopping in Las Vegas, and someone being like "Oh,
they went to
Vegas!? That's so weird, nobody goes there!"
The characterization in the book that he flew down there just to go to Bariloche for seemingly no reason besides a vague reference to dedicating a
golf course is just not supported by the available facts. I'm not saying the trip itself didn't happen. It definitely appears that he went. I'm saying
the characterization of the trip is misleading at best.
Now you could easily say all of this was just to cover the real purpose of the trip, but there's no evidence of that. You might as well say that Obama
went there because I ordered him to go there. There's as much evidence for that as there is that he went there to meet with secret Nazi leaders. Zero
always equals zero.
I love conspiracy theories. But when there's a perfectly reasonable, mundane explanation for something and an alternative explanation for which there
is no evidence, I'm skeptical. You should be too.
However, trying to debunk the whole thing on the basis of one mis-remembered fact is stretching credulity a bit from your side, don't you
think?
I wasn't trying to debunk anything. It's entirely possible Obama did something else while he was in Bariloche. But it's also possible and wouldn't be
unusual that he just took his family there because its a resort area and lots of people visit there. There's no proof either way.
As I said in my post, the point was that if you can get easily checkable facts wrong, how do you know you're not wrong about the more abstract,
subjective parts? And if that author mischaracterized that trip, what else is he mischaracterizing? My point wasn't to debunk anything, it was to get
you to fire up the skeptic side of your brain and question things that don't make sense.
edit on 4-3-2024 by YourFaceAgain because: (no reason
given)