Jim Swift's piece this morning on Lucas Kunce was the Bulwark at its best. Kunce sounds like just the guy to relieve the country from the Horrendous Hawley. Godspeed!
The assertion that “all men are created equal” was of no practical use in effecting our separation from Great Britain; and it was placed in the Declaration, nor for that, but for future use. Its authors meant it to be, thank God, it is now proving itself, a stumbling block to those who in after times might seek to turn a free people back into the hateful paths of despotism. They knew the proneness of prosperity to breed tyrants, and they meant when such should re-appear in this fair land and commence their vocation they should find left for them at least one hard nut to crack...
... an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of reappearing tyranny and oppression.
As a nation, we began by declaring that 'all men are created equal.' We now practically read it 'all men are created equal, except negroes.' When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read 'all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.' When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty – to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.
Abraham Lincoln
Although with all due respect, Abe, I'd rather you stay and DeSantis and co. go to Russia where they can shed the base ally of hypocrisy and enjoy Putin's "vertical of power."
I'm listening to 'Just Between Us', and the section on Wax. I will start by saying that I agree that it is a mistake for students who find her abhorrent to use the heckler's veto to silence her. Period, end of sentence.
But I will go on to say this: There is a battle forming in this country between defense of the constitution and the rule of law and the alternative. That is January 6. There is a battle beginning in the world between democratic government and self-rule and its alternative. That is Ukraine.
We can pay attention to how people react to performative idiots like Wax and Fifth Circuit Judge Duncan, and agree that their reaction is improper. But for me the only reason to do so is in the interest of electoral politics. People like Wax and Duncan are doing and saying what they are to goad the reaction. We must not go for the bait.
But we cannot lose focus on the threat. Whether or not Wax or Duncan are able to exercise their first amendment rights (as if that is an issue for Federalist Society members, Tenured Professors, and Circuit Judges) is important, but is only a threat insofar as it impacts the electoral mission, which is to defeat the Party that is fighting to destroy the constitution and the Replublic.
Georg Will (mentioned in another thread) writes a column once or twice a week. He is a big fan of issues related to Wax and Duncan--Bully for him. I think he is an opponent of January 6, and of Trump. There is only one President, and presumably soon to be candidate for re-election that is defending the Republic When was the last time George Will said something in support of him?
To borrow from Mr. Twain, "If DeSantis was a Florida Man, and DeSantis was an asshole, but I repeat myself."
As for Professor Wax, I sure am tired of libtard commie Woke warriors poking everyday people in the eyes just to see them howl because Wokesters get such joy from the pain of others . . .
Oh, wait. She's a White Power MAGA. Never mind. That what they do.
Once upon a time, other Americans agreed with the British prime minister & the French that “it’s only a territorial dispute, lots of the people are ethnic Germans, and he will stop there. Neville Chamberlain said the Munich Agreement would bring “Peace in our time.” That was in 1938. For most of my life, “Remember Munich” came right after “Remember Pearl Harbor.” Now with another madman in Europe who wants to restore Russia to the USSR, the extreme wing of both parties are deciding that Putin is less dangerous than Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro, not to mention Stalin and Khrushchev. Amazingly blind.
Couldn;t help thinking that the graph under the 'hyper-partisan' section looks like MTG is giving everyone the middle finger. Which..............seems an appropriate description of her belief system. (such as it is!!)
2. Shouldn't the bar for retaining tenure be a bit higher than not murdering someone and maybe include avoid naked bigotry and not truckling with white supremacy?
I certainly think so. But Charlie is deeply offended that they changed some of the blatantly racist lines in the James Bond novels so, you know, he’s a purist.
In some cases, it's actually pro-Putinism. It's possible that a pro-Putin bias might sometimes begin with "Liberals say that Putin is bad; therefore, he must be doing something right." But years ago, tradcons were writing things like "Putin gets it; why don't we?"
Some believe that his strategic alliance with the Orthodox Church reflects a sincere commitment to Christian values -- and that liberals are misguided in being so critical of little things like the assassination of critics and rivals. Some no doubt believe that anti-LGBTQ policies justify all that.
The savagery of the attack on Ukraine does present a bit of a challenge to the "Christian values" and "national sovereignty" defense of Russia, so the radical natcons are digging deep in the effort to find a greater evil in Ukraine -- biolabs! Nazis! -- that might justify bombing Ukrainian apartment blocks, abducting Ukrainian children, and even threatening other parts of the world with starvation by destroying Ukrainian croplands and grain exports.
I don’t understand how a non-white student could possibly take her class and think that they were going to get a fair shake. I mean fire her or don’t but she cannot possibly be allowed to continue to teach.
It occurs to me this morning that we already have three political parties in this country -- and Putin's party is the noisiest, most vocal, most air and screen time, but not the biggest. We have the Democratic Party, which is kinda wimpy and has an extreme faction or two but is mostly center-of-the-road which is unknown to many of its voters. We have the Old Republican Party that had values and principles and presumably is still what we used to think of as Conservative. And we have the MAGA Putin/Trump Republican Party which controls the assets and money of the Old Republican Party and is made up of gerrymandered slavering untethered far-over-the-edge-right extremists with its own TV network.
So: Democrats, Old Republicans, MAGA Putin-Trumps. The MAGA party simply cannot be allowed to win any more elections. In practice, that probably means the Old Republican voters will have to hold their noses and vote for Democrats for the next four to 10 years. And meanwhile hold on and keep our head down.
Not a bad analysis, but I would have to say that your "Old Republicans" no longer have any group cohesion. A minority of us do vote for Democrats -- sometimes enthusiastically, sometimes holding our noses to varying degrees -- and will until we either give up or develop the courage to say "enough!" and start a new Center-Right party to replace the Republicans. We're overrepresented here at the Bulwark, but even if ALL the others suddenly turned never-Trump and meant it, I think that we'd still be outnumbered by the MAGAs.
The larger share are people like Paul Ryan, as ably outed by Charlie's recent interview: they deplore the things that Trump and the MAGAs say and do, but that doesn't keep them voting, with whispered apologies, for MAGAs because if they didn't, they'd have to vote for *gasp!* Democrats! They may not be full MAGAs, but they are absolutely Fellow Travelers. It also doesn't keep them from accepting fat MAGA sinecures, like Fox directorships, if they're prominent enough to be offered them.
I get that. I think Liz Cheney is in that camp. But I think there is a blue dog dem camp, also decimated, that can be revived and provide a home for centrists. No politician will love it but it would serve the country and the people through this treacherous time. Third Way is another such bunch I think. Those who are willing to share govt and not demonize opposition.
I sometimes wish you were right, but it's not just my natural aversion to "irrational exuberance" that makes me think that you're not. I'll be a stalwart ally of the Democrats in the struggle to save the country from the far Right, and vote for as many Democrats as it takes to do that. I also agree with the Democrats on a number of policy issues, like civil rights, equality, the need to address climate change and structural racism, and infrastructure. But I know who the Democrats are, and there's no place for me in their party.
You use the right word when you say that the "Blue Dog Dem Camp" has been "decimated", because they're being intentionally eliminated, as Pro-Life Democrats already have been. There's no secure home for centrists in the Democratic Party, and eventually there will be none at all. The case of Joe Manchin is instructive. His seat was crucial to the Democrats for the first two years of Biden's administration, and whenever any portion of Biden's program made it into law, it made it because Joe Manchin supported it. Yet, the attacks on him from his own party have been unrelenting and absolutely merciless, and sometimes came from the Administration itself, even while he was saving their bacon. I think that a majority of the current Democratic base and a strong plurality, if not a majority, of Democratic officeholders, would rather lose that West Virginia seat, no matter how much they need it, than see Manchin re-elected. That's a negative for me.
I laud the Democrats for defending the Constitution against Trump, but I understand the limits of that defense. It's more situational than philosophical, more opportunistic than normative. They don't really accept the principle that the Constitution imposes limits on the power of the federal government to act; for me, that's the essence of the Constitution. We can collaborate on policy, but we're on different planets philosophically.
The last fiscally responsible Democratic President was Bill Clinton. It's often said that Joe Biden instinctively gravitates to the center of the Democratic Party, and God bless him, he does that! Right now, the center of the Democratic Party seems to believe that the People's Money is nobody's money, so it should just be handed out to whoever most deserves it, and who deserves it more than people who need it? Ethical questions and even legal questions be damned, because it's RIGHT! And deficits and debt don't really matter. That's where policies like student loan cancellation and the SVB bailout come from. Nope, won't be part of that. To steal from Tim Miller, "not my party". Never will be.
We (and the rest of the world) do that all the time. Rwanda comes glaringly to mind, but there are crimes upon crimes going on all over the world that we choose not to get involved with (or publicly wring our hands over). Foreign policy is sadly about national interests, and rarely are humanitarian concerns alone enough to move the needle if doing so requires force.
I doubt DeSantis would make a coherent case why getting entangled in a territorial dispute between Taiwan and China is any more a pressing US interest than doing so re Ukraine and Russia - even in the unlikely event that he could.
We have European allies who would be prejudiced if Russia got away with murder, and Asian ones who are threatened by Chinese imperial ambitions.
DeSantis's main rival for the GOP nomination hasn't shown perceptibly more sympathy for countries like South Korea, Japan and Australia than he has for members of NATO. (Except maybe Turkey, which is run by one of his favorite dictators.)
The big difference seems to be that Trump has made a personal fetish out of insulting the Senate Minority Leader's Taiwan-born wife, whose family has important business ties to China. So I guess DeSantis wouldn't want to play second fiddle.
To understand DeSantis' pivot on Ukraine, you must first understand MAGA's pivot on wars we get involved in that don't start with us being attacked, and even then, after Afghanistan, MAGA is very skeptical of wars we get into because we got attacked.
We're coming up on the 20-year anniversary of the Iraq War, a war that was mostly fought by and for old school republicans. It turned out that the leaders they had faith in (the Bush admin) were not only wrong about why we went into Iraq, they were also quite ill-prepared for the insurgency and civil war that followed the power vacuum we created by removing Saddam. Republicans fought that war almost all by themselves, and I know this because I was a soon-to-be liberal when I served in that war as a teenage Marine, and let me tell you the USMC is filled to the brim with conservatives. They watched their leaders fail them, they watched their leaders not get held accountable for that failure, and they watched liberals become mostly indifferent to the conflict as a whole outside of the maybe two days of protests that liberals did at the beginning of it after Michael Moore released Fahrenheit 9/11. Grass roots republicans felt betrayed by their failed leadership and their indifferent countrymen after fighting 20 years of ultimately useless wars that nobody seemed to actually care about. THAT is why they are now isolationist as fuck and oppose most interventions of any kind, including arms supplies that could escalate into conflict, because they understand that if another war pops off, they'll ultimately be the ones fighting it while America fucks off at the mall and forgets about them all over again while they risk life and limb. Republicans want nothing to do with war now because they've been fighting three of them (AFG, IRQ, SYR) for 20 years for an indifferent American public. They know what that experience was like, and they don't want to repeat it--least of all for liberals who are mostly too anti-war to ever think about serving themselves (there are exceptions, but few exist and they mostly choose non-combat jobs when they go in).
If liberals want a society more willing to provide arms to other nations at the risk of getting involved ourselves when things escalate (Vietnam and Korea come to mind here), then maybe more of them aught to consider not just serving like the rest of red America does, but maybe being more supportive of the troops who do serve as well--especially those in combat arms branches who do the actual fighting. Liberals have a lot to say on foreign policy, but very few often put their own lives where their mouths are. Just some food for thought for anyone asking themselves why the GOP base that loves to serve in the military and loves guns so much might be so isolationist now.
The top states of origin of US military personnel by raw numbers are California, Texas, Florida, New York, Georgia, North Carolina, Ohio, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Virginia.
By percentage of the respective state population they are South Carolina, Hawaii, Alaska, Florida, Georgia, Colorado, Alabama, Texas, North Carolina and Nevada.
This implies that, not unexpectedly, red states are somewhat more likely to produce military recruits, but also that blue and purple states account for the overall majority.
I doubt you can infer from that that bicoastal liberals are responsible for rushing naive Americans into wars, unless of course you include the Bushes in that category.
Now consider that California has the highest total number of conservative voters in any US state. On a per capita basis *within* blue states, who do you think serves more, the conservative voters or the liberal ones? I know that when I served from 2004-2008 in a combat arms job that there was nary a liberal in sight, even though liberal NYC was quite literally Ground Zero for the war's initiation (global war on terror that is). Know how many liberals I saw at MEPS in NYC? Very few. I served with 85+% conservatives and was forgotten about by liberal friends back home VERY quickly after joining. I imagine that anyone who came from liberal America who joined around that time met a similar fate.
I agree. I expect that even a lot of the Californians, New Yorkers, Ilinoisans, and Pennsylvanians come from the redder parts of those big, diverse states.
Check the "under-represented states" map in this link and you'll see that I'm basically right. At best, California hits the median only because of the rural conservatives joining + the conservatives in places like San Diego.
What years did you serve during and what was your MOS? I'll probably be able to tell you why we had different experiences just based off of the answer to that question.
That, good sir, is why we had very different experiences. I gather by the length of your service/contract and the chosen word "flew" that you were an officer yes? If so, those first few years were dedicated to you earning your wings. Depending on what kind of 130 it was, you MAY have been on fire support missions if it was an AC variant, but if not you were probably shuttling troops/equipment back and forth to the combat zone or doing fuel runs.
Blacks and Hispanics make up about half the US military. Are you suggesting the vast majority of them voted for Trump?
Moreover, knowing the obvious risks, why would isolationists be so eager to join the military?
The obvious inference is that the latter is the best available source of employment and job training for a large number of people with no particular foreign policy bent.
In other words, they are not joining because they want to pick up guns and shoot them at the enemy.
In which case perhaps the military itself is guilty of false advertising. Though how large numbers of recruits could have been fooled still escapes me.
Take a look at racial breakdowns of *combat arms jobs*, not just servicemembers. The bulk of the dudes I saw on foot patrol with the infantry were white or latino and were not liberal. Were there black dudes out there? Sure there were. But the infantry and ground combat jobs in general are mostly filled with white/latino conservatives.
Isolationists will join because of patriotism, family roots in the military, or good old poverty. Others will join simply for college benefits while staying away from combat jobs. They will try to learn a technical trade and then use their GI Bill plus military experience in that trade to make something of themselves when they get out. Only 1-in-every-9 jobs in the US military is a ground combat job. The rest are logisticians, supply clerks, bulk fuel specialists, ordnance handlers, helicopter crew chiefs, etc. The bullet-dodgers are mostly the kids with the lower ASVAB scores who can't make it into technical jobs. I was one of the crazy kids who got a 110+ GT score and could choose and job I wanted, but asked for infantry because I didn't want poor rural kids from W Virginia or Pennsylvania doing the fighting for me when it was my city that had gotten hit, my people who were jumping 1300+ feet out of skyscrapers to their deaths. That's why I joined. I saw a lot of different reasons why others joined only after I got into the service.
So you're implying that you volunteered for combat as much out of guilt as outrage, and it apparently annoys you that more well heeled liberals didn't do likewise. Meanwhile you suggest that most "bullet dodgers" were assigned from the bottom of the achievement scale. That sounds more like an indictment of the military than of the proverbial chicken hawks.
Are you saying that anyone who doesn't qualify for jobs outside of the ground combat ones are somehow at the bottom of the achievement scale? Just because someone doesn't have higher aptitude doesn't mean they should be looked at like a sub-human. Do you get why MAGA hates people like you who look down on the lower-aptitude cohort now? No offense, but you come off as sounding like someone from one of the higher rungs of society in Brave New World here.
Don't forget that it was GWB who deliberately didn't ask us to sacrifice stateside (during Iraq). He told us to go shopping, so we fucked off at the mall. This is not in contradiction to your larger point - in fact it probably supports it. Not only did the "volunteer" (coercion of poverty aside) army do all the heavy lifting, we didn't pretend at home that we had any responsibility, either by raising taxes to pay for it or by doing anything else other than saying "thank you for your service" to soldiers when we saw them.
And, I still think it's a terrible idea to sacrifice Ukraine to Putin.
Agree with everything you wrote here. Bush put both wars on the national credit card because taxing the rich to pay for the war would have been too unbearable for the conservative mind back then. He wouldn't even sell war bonds to pay for the fighting, and instead followed the model Nixon set forth. So much of what we have today started with Nixon. He got us off of the gold standard to pay for Vietnam and got rid of the draft to stamp out public opposition to the Vietnam war by military-aged college kids. So now we put our wars on the credit card and recycle the contract-service volunteers to combat over and over because there aren't enough new volunteers to replace them with.
I can only imagine what the contract service will be like when we get into a shooting war with China some day. "Hey Mr. 19-year-old contract-volunteer, I know you just survived your first tour in Taiwan where your unit took 40% casualties, but there aren't enough fresh bodies at our manpower disposal right now, so you're going to get about 5 months stateside and then you're coming back out here again for another 8 months with a fresh crop of boots. Good luck, and may the odds forever be in your favor!"
Literally on the credit card. I got a f'ing check from the government during that blighted, neo-con- birthed war with a go-spend encouragement. I immediately emailed the constantly begging for $ D party that until that war ended they wouldn't get another cent from me. ( The Iraq War is a particularly sore point with me. ) Have you seen the movie Shock and Awe? I recently watched it on A Prime. A slight clunker as a movie, but told the real story. The movie implied that the search for Bin Laden in Afghanistan was put on the back burner so the Iraq War might be seen as somehow getting Bin Laden. Viet Nam was a very, very bad mistake. But it might have, could have, had the upside of providing a lesson learned. Nope. There is a class of arrogant, denialist, humility-less (usually) men who will not learn lessons that are contrary to their hardwired mindset. They don't pay the price, but SO MANY others do.
And BTW Travis, are you now a happily married man enjoying your family and looking forward to all that your family's future holds? I hope so.
GWB diverted resources and attention from the war that we HAD to win, the one in Afghanistan, to wage a war of choice in Iraq, and he lied to get us into it. I'll never forgive him for that. And I don't think that we've finished paying the full cost yet for his blunder putting Afghanistan on the back burner; the Afghans certainly haven't.
I am a happily-engaged man with a step-daughter, so I'm getting there. I'm a worrier by nature, so looking forward to the future is a heavy lift for me, even with the blessings of loved ones and a good job that can support them. I fear for this country and its future. I fear for what the country has already become. We're a nation of individuals in economic and cultural competition with each other, which isn't exactly what I'd call a "country" exactly in the real sense of the thing. I fear for the world my step-daughter will inherit after I'm long gone. I don't think our national values are ever getting back to where they used to be. I think we'll just keep worshipping and supporting the rich at the expense of normal folks.
Whenever I hear Charlie/Will say we need to give Zelensky everything he asks for in order to win, I remember that most of The Bulwark came from The Weekly Standard.
I don't mind sending everything we can get to the Ukrainians, I just understand that if this ever escalates to a world war in a year or two, it's mostly going to be poor kids on active duty getting recycled to a conflict that mostly-liberals risked us getting into, while many of said liberals would never put their own lives or the lives of their children on the line. They'll just say "oops, it's a world war and we're involved now, better go recycle those poor conservative kids again while putting everything on the national credit card again while my kid goes off to a 4-year institute of learning where he will be told over and over again that war is wrong in all of its forms." It'll be Clinton liberals sending low-income/patriotic MAGA kids off to die in a war that the Clinton liberals would never allow their own children to be a part of in the first place while simultaneously rooting it on and talking about how important the preservation of democracy overseas is. And they wonder why MAGA hates their guts lol.
Do... do you know who makes up about 80% of combat arms jobs? There's a big difference between the military at large and the people who hold combat arms jobs. In fact, there are *strict* differences in physical requirements between the two types of jobs, which is why the Navy/AF are allowed to be fat in uniform while the Army/Marine ground combat jobs are not. A bulk fuel specialist and an infantryman have VERY different standards of living in the military, and they often come from very different walks of life.
Cool. So we're in agreement that the majority of infantrymen are non-minority then yes? Now breakdown the minority men bracket and you'll probably see that the vast majority are latino.
Agreed wholeheartedly. Giving Ukraine everything they ask for would, IMO, be a mistake. (We have not had great luck arming groups in the past and having it not bite us in the ass.) Of course Zelensky wants more, as he should. But wanting more and us being willing to give more are not the same thing. Troops on the ground would be a bridge way too far for war-skeptical public. We need to strike a delicate balance, and thus far I think we've done so brilliantly.
I agree. I've found the best talking point to sell MAGA on Ukraine is "what will Xi Jinping think of his future campaigns of conquest in the Pacific if he understands that America is too afraid of war to even send weapons let alone a physical response? The quickest way to make Xi Jinping more aggressive is to have Putin's example that land conquests still work and America is too scared to even send arms to prevent them from happening."
Iraq was a mistake in every form that war can be a mistake. The thing is, the only people who paid for that mistake were innocent Iraqis and US service members. Nobody at the intelligence agencies who botched the recommendations ever had to pay a price, and nobody in the Bush admin ever had to pay a price. The only people who paid any price were Iraqis and American service members. That's it. I joined to go to Afghanistan as soon as I turned 17 because I witnessed 9/11 happen with my own eyes ears and nose. The Bush administration sent me to Iraq 3x instead. Nobody else paid a price for those errors except for Iraqis and the less than 1% of the American populace who serves on active duty when admins like the Bush admin make horrid mistakes in foreign policy.
And the thought that occurs to me is that with that and lets call it the last decade in Afghanistan somehow the right thinks it is wokeness that leads to recruiting problems.
Of course, with a train and bank crash now being added to the list of casualties of woke, I'm prepared to believe they'll blame losing your keys on wokeness too.
Jim Swift's piece this morning on Lucas Kunce was the Bulwark at its best. Kunce sounds like just the guy to relieve the country from the Horrendous Hawley. Godspeed!
The assertion that “all men are created equal” was of no practical use in effecting our separation from Great Britain; and it was placed in the Declaration, nor for that, but for future use. Its authors meant it to be, thank God, it is now proving itself, a stumbling block to those who in after times might seek to turn a free people back into the hateful paths of despotism. They knew the proneness of prosperity to breed tyrants, and they meant when such should re-appear in this fair land and commence their vocation they should find left for them at least one hard nut to crack...
... an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of reappearing tyranny and oppression.
Abraham Lincoln
As a nation, we began by declaring that 'all men are created equal.' We now practically read it 'all men are created equal, except negroes.' When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read 'all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.' When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty – to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.
Abraham Lincoln
Although with all due respect, Abe, I'd rather you stay and DeSantis and co. go to Russia where they can shed the base ally of hypocrisy and enjoy Putin's "vertical of power."
I'm listening to 'Just Between Us', and the section on Wax. I will start by saying that I agree that it is a mistake for students who find her abhorrent to use the heckler's veto to silence her. Period, end of sentence.
But I will go on to say this: There is a battle forming in this country between defense of the constitution and the rule of law and the alternative. That is January 6. There is a battle beginning in the world between democratic government and self-rule and its alternative. That is Ukraine.
We can pay attention to how people react to performative idiots like Wax and Fifth Circuit Judge Duncan, and agree that their reaction is improper. But for me the only reason to do so is in the interest of electoral politics. People like Wax and Duncan are doing and saying what they are to goad the reaction. We must not go for the bait.
But we cannot lose focus on the threat. Whether or not Wax or Duncan are able to exercise their first amendment rights (as if that is an issue for Federalist Society members, Tenured Professors, and Circuit Judges) is important, but is only a threat insofar as it impacts the electoral mission, which is to defeat the Party that is fighting to destroy the constitution and the Replublic.
Georg Will (mentioned in another thread) writes a column once or twice a week. He is a big fan of issues related to Wax and Duncan--Bully for him. I think he is an opponent of January 6, and of Trump. There is only one President, and presumably soon to be candidate for re-election that is defending the Republic When was the last time George Will said something in support of him?
It's time to set our priorities--all of us.
Sorry. Could be. I think we agree even if I’m the confused one!
To borrow from Mr. Twain, "If DeSantis was a Florida Man, and DeSantis was an asshole, but I repeat myself."
As for Professor Wax, I sure am tired of libtard commie Woke warriors poking everyday people in the eyes just to see them howl because Wokesters get such joy from the pain of others . . .
Oh, wait. She's a White Power MAGA. Never mind. That what they do.
Love this from Mona's piece: Don’t punish her speech—refute it.
And I would only add, cause I'm not in a great mood this am, and if you can't, shut up.
Once upon a time, other Americans agreed with the British prime minister & the French that “it’s only a territorial dispute, lots of the people are ethnic Germans, and he will stop there. Neville Chamberlain said the Munich Agreement would bring “Peace in our time.” That was in 1938. For most of my life, “Remember Munich” came right after “Remember Pearl Harbor.” Now with another madman in Europe who wants to restore Russia to the USSR, the extreme wing of both parties are deciding that Putin is less dangerous than Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro, not to mention Stalin and Khrushchev. Amazingly blind.
Many see Putin as less dangerous than Joe Biden, Zelensky, NATO, etc.
Couldn;t help thinking that the graph under the 'hyper-partisan' section looks like MTG is giving everyone the middle finger. Which..............seems an appropriate description of her belief system. (such as it is!!)
The Philadelphia Tribune disagrees with you about Amy Wax.
Two questions . . .
1. Is anti-anti-Putinism just Putinism?
2. Shouldn't the bar for retaining tenure be a bit higher than not murdering someone and maybe include avoid naked bigotry and not truckling with white supremacy?
I certainly think so. But Charlie is deeply offended that they changed some of the blatantly racist lines in the James Bond novels so, you know, he’s a purist.
In some cases, it's actually pro-Putinism. It's possible that a pro-Putin bias might sometimes begin with "Liberals say that Putin is bad; therefore, he must be doing something right." But years ago, tradcons were writing things like "Putin gets it; why don't we?"
Some believe that his strategic alliance with the Orthodox Church reflects a sincere commitment to Christian values -- and that liberals are misguided in being so critical of little things like the assassination of critics and rivals. Some no doubt believe that anti-LGBTQ policies justify all that.
The savagery of the attack on Ukraine does present a bit of a challenge to the "Christian values" and "national sovereignty" defense of Russia, so the radical natcons are digging deep in the effort to find a greater evil in Ukraine -- biolabs! Nazis! -- that might justify bombing Ukrainian apartment blocks, abducting Ukrainian children, and even threatening other parts of the world with starvation by destroying Ukrainian croplands and grain exports.
I don’t understand how a non-white student could possibly take her class and think that they were going to get a fair shake. I mean fire her or don’t but she cannot possibly be allowed to continue to teach.
It occurs to me this morning that we already have three political parties in this country -- and Putin's party is the noisiest, most vocal, most air and screen time, but not the biggest. We have the Democratic Party, which is kinda wimpy and has an extreme faction or two but is mostly center-of-the-road which is unknown to many of its voters. We have the Old Republican Party that had values and principles and presumably is still what we used to think of as Conservative. And we have the MAGA Putin/Trump Republican Party which controls the assets and money of the Old Republican Party and is made up of gerrymandered slavering untethered far-over-the-edge-right extremists with its own TV network.
So: Democrats, Old Republicans, MAGA Putin-Trumps. The MAGA party simply cannot be allowed to win any more elections. In practice, that probably means the Old Republican voters will have to hold their noses and vote for Democrats for the next four to 10 years. And meanwhile hold on and keep our head down.
Not a bad analysis, but I would have to say that your "Old Republicans" no longer have any group cohesion. A minority of us do vote for Democrats -- sometimes enthusiastically, sometimes holding our noses to varying degrees -- and will until we either give up or develop the courage to say "enough!" and start a new Center-Right party to replace the Republicans. We're overrepresented here at the Bulwark, but even if ALL the others suddenly turned never-Trump and meant it, I think that we'd still be outnumbered by the MAGAs.
The larger share are people like Paul Ryan, as ably outed by Charlie's recent interview: they deplore the things that Trump and the MAGAs say and do, but that doesn't keep them voting, with whispered apologies, for MAGAs because if they didn't, they'd have to vote for *gasp!* Democrats! They may not be full MAGAs, but they are absolutely Fellow Travelers. It also doesn't keep them from accepting fat MAGA sinecures, like Fox directorships, if they're prominent enough to be offered them.
I get that. I think Liz Cheney is in that camp. But I think there is a blue dog dem camp, also decimated, that can be revived and provide a home for centrists. No politician will love it but it would serve the country and the people through this treacherous time. Third Way is another such bunch I think. Those who are willing to share govt and not demonize opposition.
I sometimes wish you were right, but it's not just my natural aversion to "irrational exuberance" that makes me think that you're not. I'll be a stalwart ally of the Democrats in the struggle to save the country from the far Right, and vote for as many Democrats as it takes to do that. I also agree with the Democrats on a number of policy issues, like civil rights, equality, the need to address climate change and structural racism, and infrastructure. But I know who the Democrats are, and there's no place for me in their party.
You use the right word when you say that the "Blue Dog Dem Camp" has been "decimated", because they're being intentionally eliminated, as Pro-Life Democrats already have been. There's no secure home for centrists in the Democratic Party, and eventually there will be none at all. The case of Joe Manchin is instructive. His seat was crucial to the Democrats for the first two years of Biden's administration, and whenever any portion of Biden's program made it into law, it made it because Joe Manchin supported it. Yet, the attacks on him from his own party have been unrelenting and absolutely merciless, and sometimes came from the Administration itself, even while he was saving their bacon. I think that a majority of the current Democratic base and a strong plurality, if not a majority, of Democratic officeholders, would rather lose that West Virginia seat, no matter how much they need it, than see Manchin re-elected. That's a negative for me.
I laud the Democrats for defending the Constitution against Trump, but I understand the limits of that defense. It's more situational than philosophical, more opportunistic than normative. They don't really accept the principle that the Constitution imposes limits on the power of the federal government to act; for me, that's the essence of the Constitution. We can collaborate on policy, but we're on different planets philosophically.
The last fiscally responsible Democratic President was Bill Clinton. It's often said that Joe Biden instinctively gravitates to the center of the Democratic Party, and God bless him, he does that! Right now, the center of the Democratic Party seems to believe that the People's Money is nobody's money, so it should just be handed out to whoever most deserves it, and who deserves it more than people who need it? Ethical questions and even legal questions be damned, because it's RIGHT! And deficits and debt don't really matter. That's where policies like student loan cancellation and the SVB bailout come from. Nope, won't be part of that. To steal from Tim Miller, "not my party". Never will be.
The shameful positioning of some of the "old Republican" stalwarts, like Chris Sununu also fall into the "fellow travelers" category.
Far too many of them rationalize holding their noses to vote MAGA and say that "Well, obv, I can't vote for Biden..."
It is a bleak time indeed
How can the 'greatest country in the world' watch murder and do nothing?
We (and the rest of the world) do that all the time. Rwanda comes glaringly to mind, but there are crimes upon crimes going on all over the world that we choose not to get involved with (or publicly wring our hands over). Foreign policy is sadly about national interests, and rarely are humanitarian concerns alone enough to move the needle if doing so requires force.
Which greatest country in the world are you referring to? Does it actually qualify?
I doubt DeSantis would make a coherent case why getting entangled in a territorial dispute between Taiwan and China is any more a pressing US interest than doing so re Ukraine and Russia - even in the unlikely event that he could.
We have European allies who would be prejudiced if Russia got away with murder, and Asian ones who are threatened by Chinese imperial ambitions.
DeSantis's main rival for the GOP nomination hasn't shown perceptibly more sympathy for countries like South Korea, Japan and Australia than he has for members of NATO. (Except maybe Turkey, which is run by one of his favorite dictators.)
The big difference seems to be that Trump has made a personal fetish out of insulting the Senate Minority Leader's Taiwan-born wife, whose family has important business ties to China. So I guess DeSantis wouldn't want to play second fiddle.
To understand DeSantis' pivot on Ukraine, you must first understand MAGA's pivot on wars we get involved in that don't start with us being attacked, and even then, after Afghanistan, MAGA is very skeptical of wars we get into because we got attacked.
We're coming up on the 20-year anniversary of the Iraq War, a war that was mostly fought by and for old school republicans. It turned out that the leaders they had faith in (the Bush admin) were not only wrong about why we went into Iraq, they were also quite ill-prepared for the insurgency and civil war that followed the power vacuum we created by removing Saddam. Republicans fought that war almost all by themselves, and I know this because I was a soon-to-be liberal when I served in that war as a teenage Marine, and let me tell you the USMC is filled to the brim with conservatives. They watched their leaders fail them, they watched their leaders not get held accountable for that failure, and they watched liberals become mostly indifferent to the conflict as a whole outside of the maybe two days of protests that liberals did at the beginning of it after Michael Moore released Fahrenheit 9/11. Grass roots republicans felt betrayed by their failed leadership and their indifferent countrymen after fighting 20 years of ultimately useless wars that nobody seemed to actually care about. THAT is why they are now isolationist as fuck and oppose most interventions of any kind, including arms supplies that could escalate into conflict, because they understand that if another war pops off, they'll ultimately be the ones fighting it while America fucks off at the mall and forgets about them all over again while they risk life and limb. Republicans want nothing to do with war now because they've been fighting three of them (AFG, IRQ, SYR) for 20 years for an indifferent American public. They know what that experience was like, and they don't want to repeat it--least of all for liberals who are mostly too anti-war to ever think about serving themselves (there are exceptions, but few exist and they mostly choose non-combat jobs when they go in).
If liberals want a society more willing to provide arms to other nations at the risk of getting involved ourselves when things escalate (Vietnam and Korea come to mind here), then maybe more of them aught to consider not just serving like the rest of red America does, but maybe being more supportive of the troops who do serve as well--especially those in combat arms branches who do the actual fighting. Liberals have a lot to say on foreign policy, but very few often put their own lives where their mouths are. Just some food for thought for anyone asking themselves why the GOP base that loves to serve in the military and loves guns so much might be so isolationist now.
We need the draft back! If nothing else for all kids to serve the country in some way.
The top states of origin of US military personnel by raw numbers are California, Texas, Florida, New York, Georgia, North Carolina, Ohio, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Virginia.
By percentage of the respective state population they are South Carolina, Hawaii, Alaska, Florida, Georgia, Colorado, Alabama, Texas, North Carolina and Nevada.
https://acrobat.adobe.com/link/track?uri=urn:aaid:scds:US:7a63e706-a9ea-3e4b-b8ec-f655fb1e3d1f
This implies that, not unexpectedly, red states are somewhat more likely to produce military recruits, but also that blue and purple states account for the overall majority.
I doubt you can infer from that that bicoastal liberals are responsible for rushing naive Americans into wars, unless of course you include the Bushes in that category.
Now consider that California has the highest total number of conservative voters in any US state. On a per capita basis *within* blue states, who do you think serves more, the conservative voters or the liberal ones? I know that when I served from 2004-2008 in a combat arms job that there was nary a liberal in sight, even though liberal NYC was quite literally Ground Zero for the war's initiation (global war on terror that is). Know how many liberals I saw at MEPS in NYC? Very few. I served with 85+% conservatives and was forgotten about by liberal friends back home VERY quickly after joining. I imagine that anyone who came from liberal America who joined around that time met a similar fate.
I agree. I expect that even a lot of the Californians, New Yorkers, Ilinoisans, and Pennsylvanians come from the redder parts of those big, diverse states.
Check the "under-represented states" map in this link and you'll see that I'm basically right. At best, California hits the median only because of the rural conservatives joining + the conservatives in places like San Diego.
https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/demographics-us-military
You and I had very different experiences after we joined. And I joined from a liberal part of NY.
What years did you serve during and what was your MOS? I'll probably be able to tell you why we had different experiences just based off of the answer to that question.
2005-2012, I flew 130s in the AF.
That, good sir, is why we had very different experiences. I gather by the length of your service/contract and the chosen word "flew" that you were an officer yes? If so, those first few years were dedicated to you earning your wings. Depending on what kind of 130 it was, you MAY have been on fire support missions if it was an AC variant, but if not you were probably shuttling troops/equipment back and forth to the combat zone or doing fuel runs.
Blacks and Hispanics make up about half the US military. Are you suggesting the vast majority of them voted for Trump?
Moreover, knowing the obvious risks, why would isolationists be so eager to join the military?
The obvious inference is that the latter is the best available source of employment and job training for a large number of people with no particular foreign policy bent.
In other words, they are not joining because they want to pick up guns and shoot them at the enemy.
In which case perhaps the military itself is guilty of false advertising. Though how large numbers of recruits could have been fooled still escapes me.
Take a look at racial breakdowns of *combat arms jobs*, not just servicemembers. The bulk of the dudes I saw on foot patrol with the infantry were white or latino and were not liberal. Were there black dudes out there? Sure there were. But the infantry and ground combat jobs in general are mostly filled with white/latino conservatives.
Isolationists will join because of patriotism, family roots in the military, or good old poverty. Others will join simply for college benefits while staying away from combat jobs. They will try to learn a technical trade and then use their GI Bill plus military experience in that trade to make something of themselves when they get out. Only 1-in-every-9 jobs in the US military is a ground combat job. The rest are logisticians, supply clerks, bulk fuel specialists, ordnance handlers, helicopter crew chiefs, etc. The bullet-dodgers are mostly the kids with the lower ASVAB scores who can't make it into technical jobs. I was one of the crazy kids who got a 110+ GT score and could choose and job I wanted, but asked for infantry because I didn't want poor rural kids from W Virginia or Pennsylvania doing the fighting for me when it was my city that had gotten hit, my people who were jumping 1300+ feet out of skyscrapers to their deaths. That's why I joined. I saw a lot of different reasons why others joined only after I got into the service.
So you're implying that you volunteered for combat as much out of guilt as outrage, and it apparently annoys you that more well heeled liberals didn't do likewise. Meanwhile you suggest that most "bullet dodgers" were assigned from the bottom of the achievement scale. That sounds more like an indictment of the military than of the proverbial chicken hawks.
Are you saying that anyone who doesn't qualify for jobs outside of the ground combat ones are somehow at the bottom of the achievement scale? Just because someone doesn't have higher aptitude doesn't mean they should be looked at like a sub-human. Do you get why MAGA hates people like you who look down on the lower-aptitude cohort now? No offense, but you come off as sounding like someone from one of the higher rungs of society in Brave New World here.
Don't forget that it was GWB who deliberately didn't ask us to sacrifice stateside (during Iraq). He told us to go shopping, so we fucked off at the mall. This is not in contradiction to your larger point - in fact it probably supports it. Not only did the "volunteer" (coercion of poverty aside) army do all the heavy lifting, we didn't pretend at home that we had any responsibility, either by raising taxes to pay for it or by doing anything else other than saying "thank you for your service" to soldiers when we saw them.
And, I still think it's a terrible idea to sacrifice Ukraine to Putin.
Agree with everything you wrote here. Bush put both wars on the national credit card because taxing the rich to pay for the war would have been too unbearable for the conservative mind back then. He wouldn't even sell war bonds to pay for the fighting, and instead followed the model Nixon set forth. So much of what we have today started with Nixon. He got us off of the gold standard to pay for Vietnam and got rid of the draft to stamp out public opposition to the Vietnam war by military-aged college kids. So now we put our wars on the credit card and recycle the contract-service volunteers to combat over and over because there aren't enough new volunteers to replace them with.
I can only imagine what the contract service will be like when we get into a shooting war with China some day. "Hey Mr. 19-year-old contract-volunteer, I know you just survived your first tour in Taiwan where your unit took 40% casualties, but there aren't enough fresh bodies at our manpower disposal right now, so you're going to get about 5 months stateside and then you're coming back out here again for another 8 months with a fresh crop of boots. Good luck, and may the odds forever be in your favor!"
Literally on the credit card. I got a f'ing check from the government during that blighted, neo-con- birthed war with a go-spend encouragement. I immediately emailed the constantly begging for $ D party that until that war ended they wouldn't get another cent from me. ( The Iraq War is a particularly sore point with me. ) Have you seen the movie Shock and Awe? I recently watched it on A Prime. A slight clunker as a movie, but told the real story. The movie implied that the search for Bin Laden in Afghanistan was put on the back burner so the Iraq War might be seen as somehow getting Bin Laden. Viet Nam was a very, very bad mistake. But it might have, could have, had the upside of providing a lesson learned. Nope. There is a class of arrogant, denialist, humility-less (usually) men who will not learn lessons that are contrary to their hardwired mindset. They don't pay the price, but SO MANY others do.
And BTW Travis, are you now a happily married man enjoying your family and looking forward to all that your family's future holds? I hope so.
GWB diverted resources and attention from the war that we HAD to win, the one in Afghanistan, to wage a war of choice in Iraq, and he lied to get us into it. I'll never forgive him for that. And I don't think that we've finished paying the full cost yet for his blunder putting Afghanistan on the back burner; the Afghans certainly haven't.
I am a happily-engaged man with a step-daughter, so I'm getting there. I'm a worrier by nature, so looking forward to the future is a heavy lift for me, even with the blessings of loved ones and a good job that can support them. I fear for this country and its future. I fear for what the country has already become. We're a nation of individuals in economic and cultural competition with each other, which isn't exactly what I'd call a "country" exactly in the real sense of the thing. I fear for the world my step-daughter will inherit after I'm long gone. I don't think our national values are ever getting back to where they used to be. I think we'll just keep worshipping and supporting the rich at the expense of normal folks.
Amen!
Whenever I hear Charlie/Will say we need to give Zelensky everything he asks for in order to win, I remember that most of The Bulwark came from The Weekly Standard.
I don't mind sending everything we can get to the Ukrainians, I just understand that if this ever escalates to a world war in a year or two, it's mostly going to be poor kids on active duty getting recycled to a conflict that mostly-liberals risked us getting into, while many of said liberals would never put their own lives or the lives of their children on the line. They'll just say "oops, it's a world war and we're involved now, better go recycle those poor conservative kids again while putting everything on the national credit card again while my kid goes off to a 4-year institute of learning where he will be told over and over again that war is wrong in all of its forms." It'll be Clinton liberals sending low-income/patriotic MAGA kids off to die in a war that the Clinton liberals would never allow their own children to be a part of in the first place while simultaneously rooting it on and talking about how important the preservation of democracy overseas is. And they wonder why MAGA hates their guts lol.
“Low income/patriotic MAGA kids.”
Do…do you know who makes up about 50% of the military?
Do... do you know who makes up about 80% of combat arms jobs? There's a big difference between the military at large and the people who hold combat arms jobs. In fact, there are *strict* differences in physical requirements between the two types of jobs, which is why the Navy/AF are allowed to be fat in uniform while the Army/Marine ground combat jobs are not. A bulk fuel specialist and an infantryman have VERY different standards of living in the military, and they often come from very different walks of life.
48% of 11Bs are minority men.
Cool. So we're in agreement that the majority of infantrymen are non-minority then yes? Now breakdown the minority men bracket and you'll probably see that the vast majority are latino.
Agreed wholeheartedly. Giving Ukraine everything they ask for would, IMO, be a mistake. (We have not had great luck arming groups in the past and having it not bite us in the ass.) Of course Zelensky wants more, as he should. But wanting more and us being willing to give more are not the same thing. Troops on the ground would be a bridge way too far for war-skeptical public. We need to strike a delicate balance, and thus far I think we've done so brilliantly.
I agree. I've found the best talking point to sell MAGA on Ukraine is "what will Xi Jinping think of his future campaigns of conquest in the Pacific if he understands that America is too afraid of war to even send weapons let alone a physical response? The quickest way to make Xi Jinping more aggressive is to have Putin's example that land conquests still work and America is too scared to even send arms to prevent them from happening."
Iraq was a mistake in every form that war can be a mistake. The thing is, the only people who paid for that mistake were innocent Iraqis and US service members. Nobody at the intelligence agencies who botched the recommendations ever had to pay a price, and nobody in the Bush admin ever had to pay a price. The only people who paid any price were Iraqis and American service members. That's it. I joined to go to Afghanistan as soon as I turned 17 because I witnessed 9/11 happen with my own eyes ears and nose. The Bush administration sent me to Iraq 3x instead. Nobody else paid a price for those errors except for Iraqis and the less than 1% of the American populace who serves on active duty when admins like the Bush admin make horrid mistakes in foreign policy.
And the thought that occurs to me is that with that and lets call it the last decade in Afghanistan somehow the right thinks it is wokeness that leads to recruiting problems.
Of course, with a train and bank crash now being added to the list of casualties of woke, I'm prepared to believe they'll blame losing your keys on wokeness too.
MAGA hates "woke" because to be woke is to be anti-hierarchy, and there's nothing that conservatism loves more than some good old fashion hierarchy.
As long as they are above others in said hierarchy. Not that you don't know that.