A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
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Farewell to Donald Rumsfeld
Rumsfeld survived Watergate to serve in the next administration as President Gerald Ford’s chief of staff, with Dick Cheney as his deputy. Then, at age 43, he was named secretary of defense — for the first time. One of Rumsfeld’s most notable actions was his participation in the creation and promotion of “Team B,” a special CIA project to challenge the agency’s estimates of Soviet strength.
Filled with hard-right ideologues, Team B predictably came to conclusions that were wildly alarmist and largely fantasy: The Soviet economy was growing at a blistering pace, as were its weapons systems, and it was poised to strike the West at any moment. Rumsfeld himself later said, “One of the most significant events in my adult life has been the massive shift in power away from the United States to the Soviet Union.” The intellectual integrity of Team B and its ethos can be judged by the fact that the Soviet Union collapsed and disappeared in 1991.
Rumsfeld returned to the Defense Department with the election of President George W. Bush. With many of the Team B personnel back in power, it should have been expected that the case for war with Iraq would consist of similar delirious falsehoods — and it did. Rumsfeld himself lied in a particularly jarring way in a late 2002 interview:
“The only way Iraqi weapons of mass destruction will ever be found, in my view, effectively is if you find people who have been involved in it who are willing to come and talk to you about it, and tell you where they are. The last time the inspectors were in, that’s how it happened. Two sons-in-laws of Saddam Hussein defected, went into Jordan, and the word came out and they told where these inspectors could go look, they went and looked, and they found weapons of mass destruction.”
In reality, two sons-in-law of Saddam did in fact defect to Jordan in 1995. Soon afterward, Iraq turned over a hidden cache of documents about its 1980s WMD programs — but no actual weapons. And one of the Iraqis, Hussein Kamel, who’d run the programs for his father-in-law, specifically said to the United Nations, the CIA, and even on CNN that Iraq no longer had any WMDs. This, of course, turned out to be completely true. Thus the lesson of Rumsfeld’s tale was exactly the opposite of what he claimed: Iraq could successfully hide pieces of paper from inspectors, but that was it.
Later, in Rumsfeld’s memoir “Known and Unknown,” he would claim that the U.S. was effectively right about the WMD issue. John Nixon, a CIA analyst who interrogated Saddam after he was captured, has said he was motivated by the “gibberish” in books like Rumsfeld’s to write his own to set the record straight.
More at https://theintercept.com/2021/06/30/donald-rumsfeld-death-iraq-war/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Too bad there's (probably) no hell.
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Fox News did not cover Trump administration corruption because it did not want to. Fox News wants to cover Biden administration corruption, but is not for a different reason.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:Quote:We don't hear about the corruption happening now because the corrupt media is in love with the current corruption.
Originally posted by second:
Remember When the US Presidency Was Gleefully Corrupt? This brings back memories:
https://jabberwocking.com/remember-when-the-us-presidency-was-gleefull
y-corrupt/
Turns out that's not good for the bottom line though since only 29% of Americans now trust the media and their ratings have never been lower.
What's your point? I don't care about Fox. I don't watch Fox.
In a country where 90% of the media lies the same lies about everything, there's always going to be somebody else lying different lies about everything.
None of them are trustworthy, and I've said that any time that it's come up before.
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And he who is not sufficiently courageous to defend his soul — don’t let him be proud of his ‘progressive’ views, and don’t let him boast that he is an academician or a people’s artist, a distinguished figure or a general. Let him say to himself: I am a part of the herd and a coward. It’s all the same to me as long as I’m fed and kept warm.
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Quote:
Originally posted by 1KIKI:
Too bad there's (probably) no hell.
Makes you hope though, dunnit'?
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And he who is not sufficiently courageous to defend his soul — don’t let him be proud of his ‘progressive’ views, and don’t let him boast that he is an academician or a people’s artist, a distinguished figure or a general. Let him say to himself: I am a part of the herd and a coward. It’s all the same to me as long as I’m fed and kept warm.
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LOLOLOLOLOLOL
Go NYC! In a time where trust in America's elections are at an all time low, you go right ahead and fuck up a major election that only has relevance to Democrats who are more likely to still have faith in the election system after mail-in fraud ballots were fraud.
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And he who is not sufficiently courageous to defend his soul — don’t let him be proud of his ‘progressive’ views, and don’t let him boast that he is an academician or a people’s artist, a distinguished figure or a general. Let him say to himself: I am a part of the herd and a coward. It’s all the same to me as long as I’m fed and kept warm.
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Quote:Donald Rumsfeld wasn’t thrown out of polite society so why would he be punished in the afterlife?
Originally posted by 1KIKI:
Too bad there's (probably) no hell.
Rumsfeld's Iraq War was wildly popular in 2003 among Republicans and enjoyed majority support even among Democrats. In all, 72% of the country was in favor of the war. Rumsfeld's torturing of prisoners was popular, too. Fundamentally, both the Iraq War and the torture of prisoners was popular. Given that, it makes sense that Rumsfeld was popular and won't be tortured in the afterlife. (The assumption is that typical Americans don't deserve punishment in the afterlife for what they do and believe. That assumption might be incorrect and God will torture them in the same ways as Rumsfeld tortured prisoners.)
Statistics about Donald Rumsfeld from
https://jabberwocking.com/heres-why-donald-rumsfeld-wasnt-thrown-out-o
f-polite-society/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Neoliberalism’s Bailout Problem
Mainstream economics ignores the massive government interventions that “free market” capitalism requires.
As bailouts have prevented full-scale market crashes—and thereby allowed market speculators to escape the full consequences of their excesses—financial institutions and market trading have, accordingly, grown exponentially under neoliberalism. For example, as of 1980, stock market trading in U.S. markets was double what corporations spent on productive investments, such as machines, buildings, land, and R&D. As of 2019 U.S. stock market trading had ballooned to 30 times the amount spent on productive investments. In other words, the ratio of stock market trading to productive investments has increased fifteen-fold in the neoliberal era.
Bailout operations have occurred with clockwork regularity throughout the neoliberal era, beginning with Reagan. In 1983, under Reagan, the U.S. government reached a then-peacetime high for federal deficit spending, 5.7 percent of GDP. At the time, the U.S. and global economy were still mired in the second phase of the double-dip recession that lasted from 1980 to 1982, while Reagan faced a re-election campaign for 1984. Of course, both as a political candidate and throughout his presidency, Reagan preached that big government was the problem, not the solution. Yet Reagan did not hesitate to flout his own rhetoric in overseeing a massive fiscal bailout when he needed it.
After the 1983 bailout, we then saw global stock market prices fall even more sharply than in 1929, on Black Monday in October 1987; the savings-and-loan crisis in 1989 and 90; the “emerging markets” collapse of 1997–1998; and the bursting of the dot-com Wall Street bubble in 2001. Each of these would have easily produced a 1930s-style meltdown without full-scale government bailout operations.
The 2001 intervention ended up being just a warmup to the 2008–09 rescue operation. Defenders of the global neoliberal order apparently seeing no contradiction between the persistent requirement to bail out neoliberalism from impending disasters and their bedrock belief that “trying to defy global market forces is in the end futile.”
A careful 2017 study by Better Markets estimated the overall level of financial market support between 2009 and 2012 at $12.2 trillion, about 20 percent of GDP per year. Moreover, this total figure does not include the full funding mobilized in 2009 to bail out General Motors, Chrysler, Goldman Sachs, and the insurance giant AIG—all of which were facing death spirals at that time. It is hard to envision the form in which U.S. capitalism might have survived at that time if, following true free market precepts as opposed to the actual practice of neoliberal champagne socialism, these and other iconic U.S. firms would have been permitted to collapse.
Together the CARES and COVID Relief Acts amounted to about 14 percent of U.S. GDP in 2020, an unprecedented expansion of federal government deficit spending in peacetime. Yet these massive stimulus measures were exceeded by nearly $4 trillion spent on Federal Reserve interventions—nearly 20 percent of U.S. GDP—to ensure Wall Street stayed afloat.
Financial crises and recessions serve a purpose in the operations of a free-market economy, even while they wreak havoc on the lives of hundreds of millions of innocents who never invest a dime on Wall Street. Without crises, a free-market economy has no way of discouraging investors’ natural proclivities toward greater risks in pursuit of higher profits.
In the wake of the Great Depression, the British economist John Maynard Keynes led the intellectual revolution that aimed to design a policy framework within capitalism that could supplant financial crises as the system’s built-in regulator. This was the context in which the post-World War II system of big-government capitalism was created. The package included two basic elements: regulations designed to limit speculation and channel financial resources into socially useful investments, such as
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Donald Rumsfeld wasn’t thrown out of polite society so why would he be punished in the afterlife?
Originally posted by 1KIKI:
Too bad there's (probably) no hell.
Murdering babies is legal.
If there is a god, something tells me that he doesn't need money from rich donors when he makes his judgements.
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And he who is not sufficiently courageous to defend his soul — don’t let him be proud of his ‘progressive’ views, and don’t let him boast that he is an academician or a people’s artist, a distinguished figure or a general. Let him say to himself: I am a part of the herd and a coward. It’s all the same to me as long as I’m fed and kept warm.
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Insane diversity hire Chicago Mayor Blackface Beatlejuice comes out saying that 99% of her critics are racists and sexists.
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And he who is not sufficiently courageous to defend his soul — don’t let him be proud of his ‘progressive’ views, and don’t let him boast that he is an academician or a people’s artist, a distinguished figure or a general. Let him say to himself: I am a part of the herd and a coward. It’s all the same to me as long as I’m fed and kept warm.
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Quote:You know what else is legal? If Satan did not give life to infectious diseases, that leaves God to have sent those diseases to kill billions of babies. Assuming God takes responsibility for what He does, since Satan didn't do it, God has some explaining to do about why He created diseases in His lab and released the diseases to murder babies.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Donald Rumsfeld wasn’t thrown out of polite society so why would he be punished in the afterlife?
Originally posted by 1KIKI:
Too bad there's (probably) no hell.
Murdering babies is legal.
If there is a god, something tells me that he doesn't need money from rich donors when he makes his judgements.
On the other hand, if Satan gave life to childhood diseases, God must take responsibility for Satan's crime wave of infant murder. Perhaps God is squeamish about executing Satan and thus stopping future infant deaths? Since God's Word is Law, it must be perfectly legal and highly moral for God to not stop Satan's crime wave of infanticide. Why expect people to be more legal and moral than their God?
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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