Didn’t the Good Guys, like, sell stereos and shit?
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Oh FFS are we required to cheer for World War I now?
When Trump dodged the draft that was not a bad decision or a bad thing to do
If a Republican president thinks war is stupid Democrats don’t have to say “war is good actually”
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Trump needs to join the losers… one way or another. 
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I don’t think anyone is saying war is good. But I will say that I feel quite strongly that calling 10,000 people who laid down their lives fighting for their country a bunch of “fucking losers” is wrong. I might denigrate the command structure and the society who sent them there to suffer and die, but I would never do what Trump does, and shit all over their memory, even if I believe their sacrifice was tragically misguided. If anything, believing that they died in vain would make me more supportive of them.
That’s the thing that bugs me about Trump attacking John McCain: I disagree with McCain on just about everything, and certainly his decision to put hillbilly trash like Sarah Palin anywhere near the levers of power was wholly disqualifying, but I would never denigrate his service or mock his suffering at the hands of his captors, no matter how I might feel about the war itself.
War is an admission of a total failure of civil societies to function as civil societies. Yet sometimes it is necessary. There are rarely any true good guys and bad guys, but a standing military is necessary, because that’s just the world we live in, and someone has to staff it.
We should always be careful to direct our ire properly: at the people who start the wars, not the poor saps – many of them dirt poor, with few alternative opportunities – who fight and suffer and die in them.
I’m not saying that’s what you’re doing, misdirecting your ire. I’m trying to explain that I can both be firmly against America’s imperialistic, opportunistic, self-serving foreign policy (especially coupled, as it is, to a bunch of shallow, jingoistic propaganda about how we are a shining light in the darkness, and blah blah blah Murica, hell yeah!) and yet at the same time supportive of the troops individually, because, again, many of them are specifically targeted for recruitment by the armed forces because they are basically seen as disposable by our society.
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This is because he has a stunted, crippled sense of morality that makes Ayn Rand seem altruistic. He is incapable of understanding why anyone would do anything that wasn’t for personal gain, and the core of why he so badly misunderstands governing.
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It’s the warriors fighting he has problems with not the wars. Remember when he wanted to take the oil?
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That is the crux of it. Back before the 2016 election, when Trump was ranting about how it was “rigged” against him, I said at the time: he really believes it.
I honestly believe he was more shocked than anyone that he won, because he genuinely believed he could not win, because Obama and Hillary would rig it. Why was he so convinced of that? Because he knew to a certainty that if he were in charge, he’d be rigging for all he was worth.
He literally cannot conceive of having a potential advantage and of choosing not to use it purely out of moral or ethical concern. His brain just doesn’t work that way.
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Well, that was the Standard Operating Procedure for the Bush Administrations. Render unto Halliburton that which Halliburton covets.
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And then Obama swept to power and … swept it all under the rug.
The lawlessness, the corruption, the war crimes, the millions dead, displaced, and immiserated. It’s time to move forward, it’s time to heal, it’s time to come together, it’s not time to focus on the past.
And so they all got away with it. And no matter what happens in November, for the most part Trump and his gang are going to get away with it, too. America does not have the stomach for the long, hard period of unflinching introspection it would take to root this evil out and expose it to the sunlight that would kill it, and so, whoever wins in November, it’s going to fester.
Even if Trump succumbed to his KFC addiction and fell over dead right now, so what? Every awful thing that put him where he is would still be right there. His cultists would be if anything even more unhinged.
And most of America would still be doing its level best to pretend not to see just how deep and vast the rot at the heart of the republic really is. And if we refuse to see it and ruthlessly cut it out, it will only continue to spread. I am not hopeful for the future of … well, much of anything.
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Beyond believing that they would rig it. He believed that they would be “suckers” and “losers” if they didn’t do so. Trump’s egoism is not just an epistemological stance but an ethical one. His values are such that if you aren’t cheating, you aren’t “good” and deserving of success.
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Well, we are talking about Germany here…
Doesn’t matter if it’s the Kaiser, or Hitler, I’m pretty sure that German conquest can’t possibly be a bad thing in tRump’s senile syphilitic brain.
And having an idiot’s understanding of the process, and just how widely distributed control over US national elections is, he just assumed that Obama and Hillary could and would do it.
That’s his chief frustration right now, I imagine: that a national US election is a huge, complex, and mostly local affair, and even if he wants to “rig it,” that’s not easy to do. Too many eyes, too many variables, all that stuff.
So he decides to take a sledge hammer to the whole system. Break the post office. Sow chaos and confusion. He is tearing the fabric of the republic to shreds and a solid 40%+ of the population is, if not actively cheering him on, at least okay with it.
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I think that’s an error that Biden is trying to avoid. When Obama came into office, he had limited resources, and prosecuting the previous administration seemed at odds with his goals of getting the economy up and running again, and with getting health care reform through congress. His miscalculation was thinking there would be Republicans willing to work across the aisle, and on that premise prosecuting would have hindered the larger goals of helping US citizens in the here and now of 2009.
The biggest error was instead of simply putting it on lower priority, he took it off of the table entirely. This was a mistake, and I recall hearing Obama say in an interview that he does regret it.
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The fact that he will cheat (or, “cheat”) is an important part of his allure for many of his supporters, I think. To them, it means that he will go all out, for himself, for them, and for America, because if you follow the rules then you are just holding back. Some things he does may be “illegal” by some interpretations, but after all, whatever you do, it’s okay as long as you get away with it.
Think outside the box, break the rules, win, win, and win again - it’s the American way.
Obama? Pissy pants who failed to fill the supreme court vacancy because he didn’t have the guts to make an out-of-session override of the senate. So, a loser. Not willing to go all the way. All this power, squandered, for no reason other than lack of imagination and intestinal fortitude. And him, representing the country? He can’t even make himself properly rich while if office, how is he supposed to beat China?
These are not institutionalists.
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And yet there is a certain wistful allure in that.
The cultists wake up every day knowing that they have someone at the top who will do literally anything to “win.” That must be a nice feeling, in a way.
And yet it’s also horrifying to think about, because that is a certain path to a very dark place that it is damned near impossible to get back from. If anything goes, then anything goes, and there is no depravity or barbarity that can’t be normalized and rationalized and compartmentalized safely way.
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I’d never heard of this particular one. That’s one of those that would lead to impeachment and criminal charges in any other administration.
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Exactly this. It’s all about empathy. They feel a noble calling to defend their country and fellow citizens, a warrior’s tradition. If their king and his advisors are corrupt dumbasses, that doesn’t matter when you can see the opposite side advancing on your village. (VERY simplistic analogy). It’s all about the nobility of protecting one’s people or ideals or answering the king’s call, etc.
For example, I would NEVER ever ever spend a single breath telling my husband all of the ways that I consider the Iraq War and all the stuff around it (WMDs, etc) to be wrong. Why?
He lost men there, his men. He lost friends there, his friends. He suffers physically as well as psychically and always will. It’s traumatic, folks.
It would be downright CRUEL to bring up why I think that whole thing was a fiasco and I’ll never do that.
(Sidebar: that scene in Return of the King when Faramir and his men charge out of Minas Tirith makes him weepy every damn time)
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Of course the lying wankpuffin denies it. But he’s a liar. https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/04/politics/trump-service-members-ceremony/index.html
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Question 1: Rambles for five minutes about “bad Germans”, and “maybe there were some Jews who died, I’ll have to ask Jared about that”, then launches into diatribe about how Angela Merkel is a fat loser.
Question 2: Rambles for five minutes about how the Federal Reserve is deliberately making him, personally, look bad.
Question 3: Rambles for five minutes about how America has roads, so many roads, although he never drives himself, he flies everywhere, but he sat in that truck that one time and blew the whistle, but whistle-blowers are losers who hate him because he’s so great, and hate America too, I guess.
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So I’m struggling to understand the motivation/strategy of shutting down Stars and Stripes so soon before the election. Obviously Trump hates the press in general and this isn’t about cost savings, but ending a military publication that’s been in circulation since 1861 seems like it could only piss off military voters and families without any obvious benefit to his campaign.
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