It takes on a patina of credibility when one tries to drive through Washington DC. That city’s layout is insanely confusing to navigate without a GPS. After spending undergraduate at a school in the DC suburbs, I grew to loathe the layout of that city.
And also General Winter.
Yeah, I’ve been lost there many a time. I used to have a good quality compass mounted on the dashboard of my old Pontiac specifically to navigate DC! It’s easy to lose your sense of direction in those diagonals and circles after dark.
There was one post Gulf war one in DC:
And @navarro is correct that the civil war and first world war were the only other times we’ve had these.
This is an aberation, because it’s being done not at the end of a long, exhausting conflict, but literally just to stroke Trumps ego.
Sure, but the difference is that it was to remember the fallen, and was likely locally organized. This is at a national level for no reason whatsoever.
no. there is a reason. unfortunately…
next.level.dictator.bullshit.
If that’s our interlude of hope and joy…
Right?
Low fucking bar.
Anyone want to bet his trumpness wants to ride in the lead tank sitting in the cupola like he is the big el jefe general?
I like military hardware, I like parades but having one just because the “king” wants one is absurd, wasteful and, since I doubt he can formulate such concepts: Every bit of hardware out there on parade is hardware that cannot be deployed for a fair while before and after your show.
And showing “appreciation” for the military by loading a sh*t load of extra work on everyone involved is just so aristocratic as to make me gag.
I keep seeing him as a genuinely evil 'Calvin" with no Hobbes to sort him out.
You want to honor them? Give them some decent raises, fix the problems the VA has with their health care and pull them the hell out of some of the waste pits where we seem to be fighting permanent wars with no goal in mind to “help” people who will go right back to their tribal wars and near stone age religious practices as soon as we clear out just as they have done since the time Alexander the Great went through those regions.
Trump is trying to distract the people from serious issues.
He is succeeding.
Eh, it’s the same as always. Trump isn’t really doing this to distract people, he’s doing this to call attention to himself and/or to satisfy his childish urges.
As other have said, he is demanding a triumph without first delivering a victory.
I don’t understand why people have difficulty believing that he is as shallow, vain and stupid as he appears to be. I guess it’s the same impulse the leads one to believe that Lee Harvey Oswald was at the head of a giant conspiracy instead of a lone, disaffected nut-job.
I think it’s both. Probably more your suggestion than mine, but there’s a fine line between “distract people” and “call attention to himself”. He also wants to provide entertainment for his base.
I think it’s, ultimately, the same thing that drives most conspiracy theories: a desire to have the world make sense, for there to be order and meaning to things. It’s a lot more comforting to think that Trump is some kind of a cunning manipulator and at least competently evil, than to admit he is exactly as idiotic and ignorant and incompetent as he looks, and that his election was a case of the American body politic shitting itself out of stupidity.
Certainly not any good reason. The rest of the world already knows we are ridiculously well (over) armed, and we’re both a nuclear power and a spacefaring nation. Foreign powers aren’t going to be more scared of us; as a threat, an American military parade is sort of faintly embarrassing.
But, well, it’s really right in line with the whole dictator chic thing. He wants a May Day parade like the Soviets used to have (and he probably doesn’t realize that parade commemorated the Haymarket Riots in Chicago).
Indeed. I suspect his policies with regards to the current conflicts in the Middle East and Afghanistan are only going to prolong what’s’ happening there.
except in the way that one might be concerned about a four year old who has mistaken a real gun for a toy, and who has begun waving it around