Skykid wrote:Personally I think there's a much bigger picture than the scrabbled details you tend to claw as examples of a working system, and it's mostly Sith Lords trying to conquer their own personal universes.
Nah, it's just the blind leading the blind.
Go read Legacy of Ashes and learn how a long line of incompetents in the CIA fed sitting presidents bullshit reports about the Soviets gearing up for WWIII to protect their own funding, and ultimately enabling all the worst of 20th century US foreign policy. After all, when WWIII starts proper, an anticommunist dictator would be a safer ally than a democratically elected socialist.
These are the historical facts I'm talking about. Kissinger was guilty of similar. It's usually inside personal interests that shape the broader political landscape, be it conquest or corporate, which is why carpet bombing middle eastern countries is more about cash grabbing than an actual "war on terror" *snarl* - yet these policies create the radical cells they were meant to be defeating in the first place.
Worthwhile reading tied into the same subject would be Confessions of an Economic Hitman: intriguing, shocking, and utterly fucking depressing at the same time.
Well Nixon was the exception, he wanted nothing to do with the CIA, he had all the paranoia you could want all by himself. In fact, his dealings with China took the CIA by surprise.
Two working class dudes, one black one white, just baked a tray of ten cookies together.
An oligarch walks in and grabs nine cookies for himself.
Then he says to the white dude "Watch out for that black dude, he wants a piece of your cookie!"
Ed Oscuro wrote:That is background information for understanding Western policies in the region, but it doesn't mean that people like Skykid and BryanM get to make lazy and false arguments saying that anybody who doesn't want to just forget the whole mess is a closet fascist.
.... please specify where I was lazy and/or false in my explanation for why we or someone like us would have to conquer the new country we made if we want to control them to the point where they will behave like how we want them to behave.
Thanks Jeff.
Last edited by BryanM on Wed Nov 04, 2015 6:13 am, edited 1 time in total.
Seriously, just going with Joe Biden's three state solution would have avoided so much of this goddamn nonsense. Not all of it, but it would have saved us the time of watching it get split into three anyway by warlords who are not us.
Cute way of aggressively dodging my question, Skykid.
So, let's see...somebody challenges Skykid to actually name some facts, and we get..."I don't read the news, it's all bad" and "you're a Republican" and "you're a fascist." I'm rather confused about what prompted this, except the usual famous Skykid non-debating tactics he somehow still manages to get away with. (But maybe not for much longer, because I'm going to start reporting posts if that keeps up.)
In all honesty, there's nobody here who's going to try to deny the fact of bad decisions and sometimes bad motives on the part of US foreign policy players - though the "cynical imperialism" angle is overused by people who don't know the history (as Mischief Maker points out, one can't underestimate the power of small bureaucratic players to screw everything up). Still, that's really neither here nor there.
This backstory doesn't really answer the question: What foreign policy should the US follow? I won't be offended if somebody actually offers up a very dovish take. I really have no idea what the various people in this thread think is workable, assuming that everybody agrees that there is a problem in the region beyond US intervention.
I already offered up a couple ideas about what we could do, and I didn't say anything about lobbing bombs. Which, I hope, goes some way towards explaining my take on BryanM's statement, which I see was just basically restating something that we already agreed about, as if I didn't. That's always welcome to see.
Don't let me stop anybody from feeling free to indulge in another five minutes' hate against viewpoints people don't actually hold in this thread.
At least we know where you're coming from now. Quite Hollywood, as expected.
Really though - you don't need that crap to explain the stupidity of Bush and his crew. They sat around like dumb cows in a pasture during all of August 2001, and if they ever wised during those eight years, they showed no sign of it. Hanlon's Razor, my friend. Besides, I can throw pretty much an entire library at you of books which show the other facets of the bad-decision-making process in action, in almost any context you could care to read, from people who were or are actually insiders, rather than this wannabe tough-guy with a secret.
The "economic hitman" hypothesis simply doesn't make sense here - we destabilized the region too much to extract any value, over any period, and the military-industrial complex doesn't need or even want a war to sell its goods. Trump wants the oil, but Trump's not going to get it. On the other hand, though, you get one bureaucratic or Administration ass-covering in the right place, and everything else follows blindly.
The "economic hitman" story only works sometimes; it would only make sense to do something like that if you could get away with it, and even in the times US or allied powers have tried, it hasn't always worked. There were close real-life examples over the years, and how well did they work out? Gen. Smedley Butler cites Honduras in 1903 and China in 1927 - the first arguably worked out for US interests, the second didn't. How about Iran in 1953, right in the backyard of the area we've been discussing? The CIA helped depose the elected President of that country to save an Anglo oil company a bit on taxes - not exactly the stuff of a master plan - and ultimately, in less that three decades, US and Britain got tossed out anyway. So that can't have been "according to plan" either. As a partial explanation to why things happen sometimes...well, there's much better documentation of it happening from sources that aren't half-insane infamy seekers who don't have their facts straight. Smedley Butler goes way back, but I think if you wanted an example of old-style economic hitmanship, he would be a much better choice of a source.
Although I have nothing against you, it does seem a legitimate waste of time trying to discuss certain topics with you.
You command an impressive ability with the written word and a simultaneous mastery of hyperbole. If there are any particular points you want to draw attention to and discuss in detail they tend to get lost in six paragraphs of accompanying margin and random roundabout factoids that seem neither here nor there.
Waste of time or not, I'd appreciate if you keep the unnecessary personal snipes to a minimum. A failure of communication shouldn't return instant character slurs.
I'm sure Bryan M may even shed his court jester persona to chime in on this point.
Skykid reveals his amazing sources
I've been aware of the criticisms and controversies of that book since I read it six years ago, but two paragraphs in Wikipedia detailing specific areas of questionability by a few individuals doesn't make the entire content in its several hundred pages a write off. You may have to make your own mind up about what you consider to be conspiracy theorist (or just 'theorist' as I prefer), but that doesn't stop it being a fascinating insight into how corporate power and political agendas are intertwined.
It's a bit sad that some people don't accept that it's reality that's the dark joke.
Fascism would be a better economic system and foreign policy than we have now, objectively. It would really, really blow for the 30% of us who aren't white, but this is how much we suck now.
Yes, despotic regimes whatever their nature might appear as a 'solution-reaction' for many people today - rich or poor crowds equally (funnily enough) - and no matter the focus/culture of choice, probably because the 'globalization' at all levels we've been fed ad-nauseam from school to coffee/beer-time news, actully means the crushing majority of the 7 billion idiots we are will never ever get the chance to step into the world elite's 'global village', we just get crumbs if we're lucky as the rich and powerful with no names nor faces don't have any borders or governements to stop them from manipulating us sheep into walking to the slaughterhouse with a smile.
When we were born in a world of nation-states, it's perfectly understandable that people would react with violence and hatred to the destruction of the alpha and omega of their societies, same for the younger for whom there are neither perspetive nor compassion.
It's too bad those feelings are all so perfectly channeled into getting us to blame/hate each other, when we should just all, around the world, take our tools and build brand new guillotines for the fat cats.
Sorry for sounding so negative but in my eyes it's too late for an healthy revolution, humanity is just perfectly ripe for a new Dark Age.
Unless Elon Musk builds afordable super-fast spaceships and at least half of humanity gets to escape this gigantic huis-clos maybe ?
Ed Oscuro wrote:The "economic hitman" story only works sometimes
This is true, but I'd argue that it's still played a far, far greater role than it should for a very long time now; just the existence, for example, of the School of the Americas is an utter travesty (and on a related note, I'd be curious to know how many Americans are aware that the term "banana republic" doesn't just refer to a clothing store).
In response to what you said earlier in terms of asking what sort of general foreign policy one would recommend the US follow, my first suggestion would be to take as much corporate influence out of political decision-making as possible - far too many executive, legislative and judicial actions alike are done at the direct behest of a handful of extremely wealthy and extremely self-interested private parties (ALEC serving as Exhibit A) who have gone all-in on the Ayn Randian "I don't care who has to die to line my pockets, I'm objectively better than them anyway" outlook on life. The government is supposed to serve the public interest at large, not whoever can self-righteously force their way in; if/when we finally tell the lobbyists and their bosses "You really want the government to leave you to your own devices? Okay, sure - now get the hell out of my office" we won't see nearly as many atrocities committed in our name.
I must say that watching those superior beings actually try to build their fortune from actual dirt and really all by themselves would make a fascinating 24/7 live reality show.
But lets give them that they're right in a way: we the masses don't even care to rebel, so we must be really stupid after all.
Xyga wrote:It's too bad those feelings are all so perfectly channeled into getting us to blame/hate each other, when we should just all, around the world, take our tools and build brand new guillotines for the fat cats.
Can we just all vote in the primary for the metaphorical guillotine first, though? Democracy was life insurance for the rich in the past, it could be, in theory, again. But of course if we fail this time there won't be a next time and we'll all sieg heil presidenté Trump.
The dark secret behind this terrifying image is it might not be a dank meme: the author might possibly be a raging anti-semitic nutcase so the only reason the old man isn't shooped too is because the author is like "he's a monster already and everyone can already see that"
except the usual famous Skykid non-debating tactics he somehow still manages to get away with. (But maybe not for much longer, because I'm going to start reporting posts if that keeps up.)
Lol, I misread this as 'reposting posts' before.
You're going to start reporting posts that don't fall into your particular preference for style and content?
Good luck with that!
If you could actually eke a mod warning out of post structure and delivery we could probably justify you being insta-banned in no time at all. (Just a joke Ed, just a joke. Don't take it too seriously - put that battering ram down.)
I'd genuinely like to see you try though. I think you'd be surprised to find a mod asking you to go look in the mirror.
Well, there is the point that you called me a Republican, which quickly led to an agreement that I'm a "closet fascist." I haven't said anything very strong in retaliation, except to simply point out the bad behavior. In pretty much every exchange you pointedly question my sincerity and intelligence, and try to bully anybody who doesn't swallow your worldview whole. This is what you do even in your realm of supposed competence, movie reviews, where you should simply be able to rely on having a better argument, but you never try to restrain yourself.
That said, if we're all going to step back from the precipice of assuming bad faith and name-calling, that would be great.
Two things: First, I asked people what they thought a US Administration should do, and I still don't see anybody attempting to answer that.
Secondly, against my better judgement I'll try to help Skykid out here. I know how you love to misinterpret my intentions, so let me be as clear as possible: I don't carry water for the Bush Administration's misdeeds, or for the Obama Administration's mistakes, either. But criticisms have to be grounded in fact. The "Economic Hitman" story isn't.
Some parts of the book seem plausible, and Perkins says a few things which are true (though mostly irrelevant, like his digressions into the emotional manipulations of intelligence handlers). However, there are a lot of reasons why it shouldn't be taken as a good source:
It's one book, and it doesn't even have a dedicated academic following. Even among serious critics of economic imperialism, it's not got many believers (discounting the tons of people who read this one book and think that suddenly they understand everything - if only it was that simple). I can point to tons of sources - including many leftist critics of the World Bank - who don't pay attention to his story at all.
Perkins is basically taking a very boring, prosaic set of observations - development projects often are wasteful and go to private interests - and turns it into a Young Adult's Adventure story starring himself, with lots of embellishments that end up showing the lie in his story. He basically strikes me as a modern day Col. L. Fletcher Prouty.
Even if you feel that Perkins is telling the truth about things that happened to him, that still is limiting us to one source describing the 1970s. Even then, long before he wrote his book, descriptions of bureaucracy, bungling in Presidential administrations, and the military-industrial complex were not new, and they adequately describe the fiasco in Iraq.
Perkins does, however, talk a lot about things that by his own admission he has no insight into. He will happily tell you that the police "should have investigated whether 9/11 was an inside job" and that the CIA killed John Lennon. He does not take great care with his own credibility.
Naturally, the kind of corporate collusion he's describing would require a lot of people to be holding secrets all at once, but nobody has been able to corroborate any of the interesting parts of his story. Lamely, he says that "threats and bribes" kept him from writing this book until now, but suddenly he's free - he's not watching his back, he's going about on book tours and living the good life. But the murders he claims the cartels committed, if they actually did, would still be closely guarded secrets for their political and legal repercussions. As far as I can see, Perkins conveniently fails to tie one real person to murder or conspiracy - basically, he makes no claims that could land him in court for libel.
Skykid, you have no problem swallowing the idea that a huge range of people all decided to keep quiet about murder - but you never seem to have thought whether one man could have been telling a risk-free lie in order to make a lot of money. By all accounts, Perkins hasn't suffered at all from having this book at the top of the bestseller lists. It certainly has sold much better than his insightful works on mysticism.
In the details, Perkins' cartel story fails repeatedly - first of all, as one of his critics note, multinational companies don't collude on projects like this. He's also quite wrong about the issue of debt - debt forgiveness has been standard at the World Bank for years. That sweeps the legs out from under the financial scheme Perkins describes.
I've already done my reading in this area - I studied development efforts under a visiting scholar from Nepal. There's a couple criticisms I'd add to the other ones raised:
If the cartels were so powerful, then why didn't they stop microlending projects and cooperatives, like Muhammad Yunus' Grameen Bank, or Verghese Kurien's? Incidentally, Kurien lived a a ripe old age, and Yunus is still alive - despite these people having done so much that would threaten the profits of the bank-cartel scheme Perkins describes.
The classic criticisms of World Bank efforts were that the consultants the World Bank (and affiliated projects) sent in had no understanding of local economies and needs. For example, one consultant in Africa wanted to change the local economy over to plant agriculture, without understanding that cattle farming was a status symbol and convertible good, so that effort failed as the local ranchers worked around the program. In another case, local people were told they needed a good, modern toilet, which they had no use for - so they simply converted it into a grain store. In other words, a lot of development effort just went towards spinning wheels locally.
In the cases where funds did go to the wrong place, they tended to drain into local power structures - sometimes in local corruption schemes so tightly woven that there was no way for any theoretical cartel to find the funds, as the money was split many ways, or else powerful men simply didn't divvy it up according to plan, which happened in Egypt. Again, there's no indication that the Egyptian (mainly military) beneficiaries of misappropriated development grants had any connections to any supposed cartels whatsoever. They simply got the money from dumb finance-diplomats, and they kept it for themselves.
Other people already noted two critical things: Perkins is wrong about not only debt forgiveness, but he's wrong about Indonesia. Two times where he makes critical claims, they are simply flat-out wrong.
If you wanted some good sources talking about economics and politics, I'd recommend instead:
Somewhere, David Harvey (a Marxist) had what seemed like a pretty good discussion of the neoliberal campaign from the Reagan/William F. Buckley, Jr./Friedman/even crazier people-era neoliberalism campaign in Latin America. It's probably on Democracy Now! But just do some searching on "Chile" and "neoliberalism" and you'll find quite a bit of good stuff.
For a good description of shenanigans in government, the very first "Inside the System" by Washington Monthly is great. This is all stuff that's well-reported and corroborated wherever you look. It shows people and individual companies acting roughly like Perkins says they would - you don't need a teetering framework of conspiracy to explain how things go to hell.
I might also be able to find some copies of the papers critical of the World Bank and other Western-led development efforts from the 1960s on.
I didn't say you were a Republican, I said it was a Republican viewpoint.
I said I was beginning to suspect you were a closet fascist in terms of discussion, not outright, ergo humour.
I didn't question your sincerity, intelligence, or try to bully you, I responded to an aspect of your post and stated my case for disagreement. This is called a debate.
You're very good at putting down the written word, but less so at interpreting it. It seems you misread everything as an outright character assassination.
I'm trying to focus on the topic at hand - which is why the bulk of my last post had to do with your sole cited source. It's not a very good debate when you don't show any interest in talking about anything other than the character of the other guy, and making jokes that actually aren't jokes, so I'd like to invite you to get back on topic.
In an example of putting the cart way before the horse, one of my fantasy scenarios involves a Sanders presidency that has Trump as a sort of GOP outreach director to get campaign finance reform and single payer health care passed. If Trump actually supports these things (god knows if he does), there is almost 0% chance he'd pass on the offer if it were made. He'd go down in history books (which will just be wikipedia in the future) as a goddamn hero. That's something no amount of money can buy.
In the unlikely chance we live in the 0.05% world line where that strategy is possible... I still feel bearish about it. GOP voters hate Christie forever for hugging Obama. Once Trump is a loser working with the enemy, would he still be beloved? That's a question my scanner can not clearly see. Nobody liked Christie in the first place; tons of people sincerely love Trump. If there exists a single republican on this planet that could get away with working with the Great Satan, it would have to be him.
That uncomfortable moment when you realize a vessel of true change might rest heavily in the hands of this racist goofball.
Please post your own political fanfiction ideas itt.
Ed Oscuro wrote:I'd like to invite you to get back on topic.
I've never been off-topic. Not wanting to get drawn into granular cyclical arguments over side comments like book recommendations is pragmatism, especially when said discussion will be one paragraph versus fifteen.
It's not a very good debate when you don't show any interest in talking about anything other than the character of the other guy
You should never have edited your original post, it was fine, because you have this real bad habit of blowing your own feet off every time you make an unnecessarily angered response.
It's like you can't actually digest the flow or tone of conversation without taking it so personally you end up on a tangent where you're either talking to yourself or just accusing other people of doing things they haven't done.
Case in-point, I think you'll find I had an interest in following the thread of discussion and that's what I did - it's you who keeps talking about the 'character' of the other guy. You keep trumpeting my user handle every time you want to declare some kind of non-victory, talking about me like I'm in display in a glass box and not actually around to read your comments, which is kind of annoying. You also told BryanM his usual persona was that of a court jester simply because he agreed with a comment I made.
No one is saying you're unintelligent or uninformed, so there's no need to be so sensitive simply because somebody has a different line of thinking.
I suggest typing less sometimes and taking stock of things before responding. I already explained to you that what you considered to be accusations and slurs were in fact nothing of the sort, and it's certainly not mandatory for me to respond in kind to every single sub-thread or tangent of information you suddenly want to throw a magnifying glass on. Be civil. I'm allowed to say my bit, same as you.
BryanM wrote:Please post your own political fanfiction ideas itt.
Each and every political and religious leader/minion, and the rich overlords who pay them, attend to a giant orgy in a castle, all celebrating their randian victory over the worldwide weak and stupid masses and their illusions of civilization and bright future.
Someone lights a cigar, François Hollande farts, they all die in the explosion.
The Earth and humanity are saved.
Ed Oscuro wrote:The whole problem can probably be summed up in two statements:
- Muslim extremism is a social cancer that will spread on its own if left alone
- All the powers in the region have their own agendas or biases (Iran towards Shi'a, while Russia had a policy of pushing extremists out of the Caucasus, only to now apparently feel like it has to deal with them)
Sure, I'll drink to that.
The question of "who's to blame" really doesn't matter anymore, unless you're 16 years old. If we broke it with Bush, didn't we buy it?
Some would argue that things were broken well before Bush came into the picture.
The question is simply what tactic to use. We could just leave it to the local powers, or we could try cooperation only - I don't think this is workable. We could also try sharing responsibilities while limiting our own involvement, which seems to be the Obama Administration policy. We could also try taking on the whole problem ourselves, without regard for other players, which was more or less the starting point for the Bush Administration.
My personal preference would be to look for a way to let self-interested, more local powers take charge of the situation, while trying to scare everybody straight just enough to keep a lid on the genocides and political massacres. The Obama Administration has tried this, for what it's worth, though they made a huge mistake with the "red line" talk they didn't intend to follow through on immediately. At the same time, it does seem that they had an about-face to let Russia handle more of the problem, which they should have done from the beginning.
So I guess this is the crux of your argument: that Obama didn't go guns blazing in Syria from the moment the opportunity arose?
I would argue that the opportunity didn't arise until just recently, and look where we are now.
The reason I brought this back up is because you flippantly dismissed the notion that Obama had started (or at the very least, helped start) the war in Syria. It was "fact allergic", in your words. But if that were the case, why have we been steadily escalating our level of involvement there? We started off supporting rebel factions that we really had no business supporting, then when we realized that was only making things worse we started to conduct airstrikes, and now Obama has gone back on everything he's said to the public by sending ground forces. Care to tell me how these actions aren't at the bare minimum a pretense to an invasion?
Well, I do agree that things were in a bad state before Bush. Like I said before, there were lots of reasons for unrest in Syria, and a lot of it has to do with that cancerous regime. Only relatively recently did the Lebanese manage to get rid of a Syrian occupation, for instance. And, of course, there is the history of often unhelpful actions from the West, though when it comes to Syria in particular I'm not sure what that would be. Then again, I wonder what kind of choices the strongmen of the region really have for governance, especially since much of their power and acceptance rests on tribal or sectarian grounds - it is hard to grow from there, as our own domestic politics show (Democrat vs. Republican).
I wouldn't 'flippantly' disparage the notion that Obama's Administration fell over on this one - I hope - that's a rather different statement from saying that Obama started the war, though. I can see where even that view comes from, but again, is there a history here, or isn't there?
Hindsight can be misleading if we don't know enough to really understand what's going on. Some of the Administration's actions (like setting up the "red line" and then backing down) are explained by wanting to let other regional powers put more skin in the game, while still sticking up for groups who have no other backers in the region. I disagree with your statement that we had "no business" backing some parties. Giving up on them, at this point, would constitute a real betrayal. Their choices seem to be fight, flee, or die. On the other hand, we can't just push for them to the detriment of everything else. I also think that if the calculation was that the armed groups would give us leverage to get concessions out of the al-Assad regime, that obviously didn't work, and I think you're also pointing out that this assistance can end up in the hands of people we don't want to have it - that's a good concern, and I'm just not sure anybody really has the clear picture of whether this happened.
It looks like we were too keen on wanting to push for overthrow or reconciliation between the main parties (aside from ISIS) without there being any chance for that happening. For his part, al-Assad can't step down for fear of meeting a similar end to Gaddafi. He probably has no compelling reason to want to concede anything to the moderate rebels (I think Austere would have called them the "real opposition"), and certainly Syrian policy going back to at least the 1980s massacre bears that out. Given the kind of hold on power he has, it does seem likely that if he was gone that part of the Syrian regime would collapse, or his replacement would be more of the same. It's hard for me to feel bad for the Syrian regime, whatever happens to them, but that measure of "justice" the Western nations are looking for can't come at the cost of destroying the people along for the ride with his regime, which of course would also threaten creating yet another power vacuum for ISIS to fill.
Diplomacy alone hasn't done much to help this problem - at this point, it looks like what's needed is diplomacy between the different parties intervening in the region, to try and create some breathing room for all the parties.
Ed Oscuro wrote:I also think that if the calculation was that the armed groups would give us leverage to get concessions out of the al-Assad regime, that obviously didn't work, and I think you're also pointing out that this assistance can end up in the hands of people we don't want to have it - that's a good concern, and I'm just not sure anybody really has the clear picture of whether this happened.
Any influx of US arms without US oversight is bad news, and you would hope that the people sitting in the situation room would have figured that out by now. Even with US forces providing them, there's just no substitute for the organization and tactics that our military has. We trained Iraqi police and military, and look how well that's turned out.
I wouldn't 'flippantly' disparage the notion that Obama's Administration fell over on this one - I hope - that's a rather different statement from saying that Obama started the war, though. I can see where even that view comes from, but again, is there a history here, or isn't there?
That's what it sounded like earlier. And if we're going to excuse misguided intervention on the basis of history, well then, I guess Bush wasn't such a bad president after all?
quash wrote:Any influx of US arms without US oversight is bad news, and you would hope that the people sitting in the situation room would have figured that out by now. Even with US forces providing them, there's just no substitute for the organization and tactics that our military has. We trained Iraqi police and military, and look how well that's turned out.
Yeah, I agree with this. As it turned out, 5000 trained fighters turned into 5. I couldn't say how much "aid" (lethal and otherwise) has gone into the state but anything that just went loose has the potential to make things worse.
If there was a critical mass of fighters, I think the potential for the Syrian fighters to be effective is there - they have a goal to fight for, whereas a lot of the problems with the Iraqi/Afghani forces are the result of corruption or mixed loyalties. But, of course, even with a critical mass of fighters, we had to face the reality that this could simply fracture the country. But it wouldn't be all bad - it would help their position (either from bargaining or just surviving) in relation to the Assad regime.
As far as Bush being a bad President, I didn't have confidence in him to do the smart (or the right) thing from the start; there was a lot of information which unambiguously painted Iraq as a failure - and a wild goose chase besides. My point about Syria and Obama is simply that hindsight isn't real without a fuller picture, and everybody is playing their cards close on this one.
Hindsight also makes complicated things look deceptively simple in retrospect - but sometimes things really are simple; there's no question that Iraq simply was the wrong war, fought for the wrong reasons.
Jim Webb wrote a thoughtful piece awhile back. If only he could have been half as eloquent as this when he had 15 million eyeballs on him.
Unfortunate. He and Chafee could have said anything with their time, and could have reinforced some very obvious things that really should be said. Constantly. 24/7.
Xyga wrote:Someone lights a cigar, François Hollande farts, they all die in the explosion.
The Earth and humanity are saved.
I knew that gasbag would be good for something : D
BryanM wrote:Jim Webb wrote a thoughtful piece awhile back. If only he could have been half as eloquent as this when he had 15 million eyeballs on him.
Running for the Democratic Party nomination was apparently his Plan B, though he would have been happy to push this reckoning off if he had made it. Back to Plan A then - revolution.
But you gotta wonder - that crowd was more than polite and receptive to candidates as different as Sanders and Clinton. I agree that Webb missed a golden opportunity to say "hey, the old politics isn't working."
I somebody has to tell the voters "you don't get everything you want." Somebody also has to tell the voters "and you don't have to keep accepting everything on the ticket except what you want." Right now there are just a few fringe groups that get everything they want (mostly related to wealth and tax policy) while the average voter is like "well, gay marriage is nice, but what about staying out of poverty?"
And a guy on another forum has a particularly wonderful fantasy for the future:
Some Guy wrote:2016: Trump begrudgingly selected as GOP nominee. Shortly thereafter, he makes a speech apologizing for his racist and wacky comments. He lays out solid plans for his Single Payer Healthcare, Immigration Reform with a Path to Citizenship, Infrastructure Renovation, National Energy Independence, Progressive Tax Reform, etc. In closing, he introduces his VP: Bernie Sanders.
Okay, the point this stopped being funny for me was after that delightful overwhelming week of leaving a sponge in a woman's brain/pyramid grain silos/magic knife-breaking belt buckles: When it was explained to me why it was so important that Ben Carson's story about being a violent "thug" as a youth, then redeemed by Jeezurs, was true. The unfortunate implications didn't occur to me; I honestly was naive enough to think he was doing well because he was the only person they had who didn't sound like a complete fake asshole when he speaks. Elected leader of the free world due to being A Nice Guy, you know?
Then the whole crowd beating up a black guy at a Trump rally thing. Then the whole surrendering entirely to ISIS because it coincides with their desire to minimize the number of tan people in the country. It's such a depressing reminder of how Osama Bin Laden is in charge of our foreign policy. Frankly we deserve this man to be put in charge, and we deserve to have the entire world burn in a fire. Countries that weren't disgusting buckets of shit who probably don't deserve what's coming up: sorry.
There's no other endgame for him. He's not looking for a book deal or a membership in a Martha's Vineyard golf club or a cameo in a Guy Ritchie movie. This election isn't a game to him; it's not the awesomely repulsive dark joke it is to me and many others.
And the only reason this attention-averse, sometimes socially uncomfortable person is subjecting himself to this asinine process is because he genuinely believes the system is not beyond repair.
Not all of us can say that. But that doesn't make us right, and him "unrealistic." More than any other politician in recent memory, Bernie Sanders is focused on reality. It's the rest of us who are lost.
(Just a joke Ed, just a joke. Don't take it too seriously - put that battering ram down.)
