Relevant bit:
They’re referring to this attack:
Relevant bit:
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Imagine if they trusted him and believed in him. Bad enough as it is.
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Sounds remarkably like why we said we had soldiers in Iraq.
how’d that go?
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In addition, he routinely and pre-emptively blames everyone else. Try a google search for various variants of [trump “I don’t know” “somebody told me”] for many many examples
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My first thought was: ‘That hat though…’
Not sure if I’m misinterpreting something here, but this was on the other side of the continent. The US Army Special Forces in Niger have been specifically avoiding taking part in combat operations since 2013. It’s possible that this changed under Trump, which would go some way to explaining the reluctance to talk about it.
The article I posted about the Somalia bombing was referring to the earlier US/Somali Government attack.
I wasn’t posting that as a direct statement about the recent deaths in Niger; I was posting it as a demonstration of why “we’re just assisting the local authorities” is not a particularly convincing justification.
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Well, he’s still good for pissing off liberals, and that’s what counts.
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Liberals are becoming the by-catch in some of these.
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If the assistance includes going on raids then I completely agree.
Does it really make it better if you’re “just” training, equipping and supporting local forces?
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That Woman is a National Treasure, and that hat too.
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It depends on the specific circumstances. In the case of Niger, yes, it’s better than going in, hunting and killing people, then leaving others to clean up the mess. It’s also better than doing nothing. The training isn’t limited to weapons and tactics, it also places an emphasis on diplomacy and community engagement.
Without that, there’s a good chance that Trans-Saharan Africa would have been completely taken over by the likes of Boko Haram after the Arab Spring caused Egypt and Libya to focus inward. Niger, Chad, and others in the region have played a huge role in preventing that from happening.
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As soon as I saw Rep. Wilson’s hat, I just thought: You’re making it so easy for Fox News to caricature you. Why do this? Why give them an easy opportunity to ding the messenger instead of the message? You’re talking about a serious subject, so look serious. As it is, she looks like she was caught on the way to the office Halloween party.
EDIT:
Cheers to all the so-brave people who point out that Fox News is a racist and partisan organization. That had never occurred to me! Are all the Fox viewers also irredeemably racist/partisan? Since they’re obviously non-critical and susceptible to argumentative tricks (they’re watching Fox News), should we help them be more partisan?
EDIT2: Wow.
It sure it awful when other people undermine her important first-hand witness account by making repeated demeaning remarks about her looks. [eyeroll.gif]
She is just so foolish, right? /s
(if she took off the hat, she still wouldn’t be a white man, as required for being taken seriously)
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As if they would do otherwise regardless to how conservatively she decided to dress.
Newsflash:
She’s a woman, and she’s Black; the petty opportunists at Fox will already automatically marginalize and disregard anything she says, just based on those traits and the fact that she’s not toadying for 45.
That’s at least the 3rd comment I’ve read talking about something so frivolous and completely irrelevant to the actual subtance of the story.
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If you are unable to look beyond trivial differences like that, i’d say that the problem lies with you, not the hat.
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it’s one thing to know FOX will trivialize it, it’s another to have internalized that debasement to such a degree that you tone police self and others, for them, preemptively.
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That is rather highly debatable, although since it’s based in hypotheticals (“what would have happened if the US had not done what it did?”) it’s not an argument that can be conclusively settled.
“Completely taken over” strikes me as extremely hyperbolic, however. Most of the terrorist groups active in Africa consist of dozens of people rather than thousands. The biggest, such as Boko Haram, have less than twenty thousand. Nigeria alone has a military of 160,000+.
There’s some useful background here:
