A thread for Democrats Only
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UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
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Why does the US Military lose war after war after war?
“The Spoils of War”: How Profits Rather Than Empire Define Success for the Pentagon
In the introduction to “The Spoils of War,” an extraordinary new book by Andrew Cockburn, he makes a straightforward assertion about the U.S. military. “War-fighting efficiency has a low priority,” he writes, “by comparison with considerations of personal and internal bureaucracies. … The military are generally not interested in war, save as a means to budget enhancement.”
Cockburn aptly quotes one Pentagon weapons designer in the 1960s telling new hires that they would be making “weapons that don’t work to meet threats that don’t exist.”
The array of panjandrums in Cockburn’s compendium of avarice and folly at the top of the military world therefore appear like an expanded, hyperviolent version of the Roy family on the HBO show “Succession” — that is, they spend 98 percent of their time jockeying for wealth and power within the organization, and at most a residual 2 percent attempting to do what the organization purportedly exists to accomplish.
Even the most wised-up cynic might rebel at this worldview. Can it possibly be true that the U.S. military — which converts wedding parties in Pakistan into scraps of wet red flesh with drones piloted from 8,000 miles away and possesses the ability to end human civilization in 30 minutes — is simultaneously this venal and preposterous? But Cockburn relentlessly piles fact upon fact until readers have no option but to admit that the answer is yes.
Here are a few of the many, many examples that Cockburn provides:
During the first winter of the Korean War in 1950-51, half of American casualties were caused by frostbite. Incredibly enough, U.S soldiers hadn’t been equipped with warm boots and were forced to raid North Korean positions to steal their functional footwear. U.S. military spending had jumped following the beginning of hostilities, but much of the increase went to things that had nothing to do with the war, such as B-47 strategic nuclear bombers, a Boeing product far more profitable product than boring old boots.
. . .
Cockburn, currently the Washington editor of Harper’s Magazine, has been covering the Pentagon for decades, and it shows. He possesses a uniquely detailed knowledge of the arcane, lucrative machinations of this world, as well as a deep historical understanding of the forces that built it. And while the specifics change, the stories he tells all have the same shocking moral. “People say the Pentagon does not have a strategy,” he quotes a former Air Force colonel as saying. “They are wrong. The Pentagon does have a strategy. It is: ‘Don’t interrupt the money flow.’”
If you’re still not convinced, the proof of this unpalatable pudding is in the eating. Consider America’s just-concluded 20-year war in Afghanistan. As the Taliban took over the country in days, it might have seemed that the whole thing was a colossal failure. But if you check your portfolio of defense contractor stocks, and visit the enormous mansions in the northern Virginia suburbs surrounding the Pentagon, you’ll see that, in fact, it was an incredible success.
More at https://theintercept.com/2021/10/27/pentagon-budget-book-spoils-war-an
drew-cockburn/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
If you have five minutes, watch it all.
I did. Thanks.
The problem iz she makes sens. GoPs dont do sensible any more. Its been out uv fashion for them sins at least Bush jr. and Trump led them even further down the road to madness.
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DUZ XaT SEM RiT TQ YQ? - Jubal Early
The real pandemic solution: http://uvpk.net/
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Quote:The GOP Congressmen are NOT crazy. They know for a certainty that if they do their duty, their voters will abandon them, drive them from office, and maybe even burn down their houses. Liz Chaney has asked the GOP Congressmen to destroy their careers: "I ask my colleagues please consider the fundamental questions of right and wrong here. The American people must know what happened. They must know the truth. All of us who are elected officials must do our duty to prevent the dismantling of the rule of law and to ensure that nothing like that dark day in January ever happens again."
Originally posted by JO753:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
If you have five minutes, watch it all.
I did. Thanks.
The problem iz she makes sens. GoPs dont do sensible any more. Its been out uv fashion for them sins at least Bush jr. and Trump led them even further down the road to madness.
Only a very few GOP politicians, Marjorie Taylor Greene for one example, are as crazy as the people who vote for Republicans. The rest of the GOP politicians are sane enough to know what terrible things will happen to them if they don't pander to their mentally unsound and emotionally fragile voters. Let's get a little distance by looking at Governor Sam Houston of Texas. He would NOT agree to Texas joining the Confederacy because the idea was crazy and would end with a bloody military defeat. To Houston it was as obvious as the sun rises that the Confederacy would fall. He was removed from office within days of letting the voters know. Careful and intelligent speeches that Houston gave changed few minds about rebelling. Not many GOP politicians today are as brave as Sam Houston was. Most will follow along with the passions of their voters, hoping that the worst possible doesn't happen, another Civil War.
Who is the Republican extremist Marjorie Taylor Greene?
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/feb/06/who-is-marjorie-taylor
-greene-republican-qanon
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by JO753:
I did. Thanks.
The problem iz she makes sens. GoPs dont do sensible any more. Its been out uv fashion for them sins at least Bush jr. and Trump led them even further down the road to madness.
I don't even know how we're living on the same planet dude.
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"I think a full investigation would show that Trump didn't actually win the election in 2016. He lost the election, and he was put into office because the Russians interfered on his behalf." – Jimmy Carter
https://www.politico.com/story/2019/06/28/jimmy-carter-russia-investig
ation-trump-lost-1387634
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
"I think a full investigation would show that Trump didn't actually win the election in 2016. He lost the election, and he was put into office because the Russians interfered on his behalf." – Jimmy Carter
https://www.politico.com/story/2019/06/28/jimmy-carter-russia-investig
ation-trump-lost-1387634
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
LOL. Jimmy Carter.
He's getting jealous that Biden* is taking his record for Worst President from him.
Sorry Jimmy. Speedrunning wasn't a thing back in your day. Joe* is a Pro.
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Vaccinated People: "You need to get muh vaccination shots that don't work because I got muh vaccination shots that don't work and I'm afraid of people that didn't get muh vaccination shots that don't work because muh vaccination shots that don't work don't work."
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Quote:In 2016 and through the early part of Trump’s presidency, there was often an edge of Friars Club comedy to Trump’s rally performances: not very nice comedy, a little out of style in tone and sensibility, but comedy all the same. Not in 2021. Now it’s all dark and bitter.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
LOL. Jimmy Carter.
He's getting jealous that Biden* is taking his record for Worst President from him.
Here’s video from a Georgia television station of the entirety of Trump’s Perry rally. Trump’s own speech starts at 1:37:38. Tell me if you detect even a moment of humor, Friars Club or otherwise. The most quoted bit — Trump’s quasi-endorsement of the Democrat Stacey Abrams as a better governor for Georgia than the Republican Brian Kemp — is not any kind of joke. It’s a deliberately delivered challenge, lower jaw jutting beyond the upper teeth, eyes slitted with anger.
That’s the guy who wants to return as the 47th president.
In Trump’s first term, the country was protected to some degree by his ignorance and ineptitude. He kept trying to do bad things, but it took him a while to figure out how the controls operated, where the kill-switches were located. By the time of his attempt to extort the Ukrainian president, in 2019, Trump had achieved a higher degree of mastery. But by then it was too late. Then the pandemic struck, and Trump bumped into a new wall of failure. In a second Trump presidency, however, the burglars will arrive already knowing how to bypass the alarms and disable the locks. He’ll understand that it’s not enough to install an ally as attorney general—he must control the secondary and tertiary ranks of the Justice Department too. He won’t allow himself to be talked into another chief of staff with an independent sense of duty, such as John Kelly, who averted much harm from the middle of 2017 to the beginning of 2019. It’ll be Mark Meadows types from day one to day last. And he’ll bring with them a new generation of Republican officeholders whose top priority will be rearranging their states’ election laws so that Republicans do not lose power even if they lose the vote.
That’s the future Trump is preparing.
Be ready.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/10/trump-running-presid
ent-2024-election/620502/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Can't wait.
This shitshow only has 1 more year of steam in it, then we have to sit through 2 years of nothing getting done.
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Scholars are mapping the international precursors of Nazism.
Scholars have long been aware that Hitler’s regime expressed admiration for American race law, but they have tended to see this as a public-relations strategy — an “everybody does it” justification for Nazi policies. Whitman, however, points out that if these comparisons had been intended solely for a foreign audience they would not have been buried in hefty tomes in Fraktur type. “Race Law in the United States,” a 1936 study by the German lawyer Heinrich Krieger, attempts to sort out inconsistencies in the legal status of nonwhite Americans. Krieger concludes that the entire apparatus is hopelessly opaque, concealing racist aims behind contorted justifications. Why not simply say what one means? This was a major difference between American and German racism.
American eugenicists made no secret of their racist objectives, and their views were prevalent enough that F. Scott Fitzgerald featured them in “The Great Gatsby.” (The cloddish Tom Buchanan, having evidently read Lothrop Stoddard’s 1920 tract “The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy,” says, “The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged.”) California’s sterilization program directly inspired the Nazi sterilization law of 1934. There are also sinister, if mostly coincidental, similarities between American and German technologies of death. In 1924, the first execution by gas chamber took place, in Nevada. In a history of the American gas chamber, Scott Christianson states that the fumigating agent Zyklon-B, which was licensed to American Cyanamid by the German company I. G. Farben, was considered as a lethal agent but found to be impractical. Zyklon-B was, however, used to disinfect immigrants as they crossed the border at El Paso—a practice that did not go unnoticed by Gerhard Peters, the chemist who supplied a modified version of Zyklon-B to Auschwitz. Later, American gas chambers were outfitted with a chute down which poison pellets were dropped. Earl Liston, the inventor of the device, explained, “Pulling a lever to kill a man is hard work. Pouring acid down a tube is easier on the nerves, more like watering flowers.” Much the same method was introduced at Auschwitz, to relieve stress on S.S. guards.
When Hitler praised American restrictions on naturalization, he had in mind the Immigration Act of 1924, which imposed national quotas and barred most Asian people altogether. For Nazi observers, this was evidence that America was evolving in the right direction, despite its specious rhetoric about equality. The Immigration Act, too, played a facilitating role in the Holocaust, because the quotas prevented thousands of Jews, including Anne Frank and her family, from reaching America. In 1938, President Roosevelt called for an international conference on the plight of European refugees; this was held in Évian-les-Bains, France, but no substantive change resulted. The German Foreign Office, in a sardonic reply, found it “astounding” that other countries would decry Germany’s treatment of Jews and then decline to admit them.
Hundreds of thousands of Americans died fighting Nazi Germany. Still, bigotry toward Jews persisted, even toward Holocaust survivors. General George Patton criticized do-gooders who “believe that the Displaced person is a human being, which he is not, and this applies particularly to the Jews who are lower than animals.” Leading Nazi scientists had it better. Brian Crim’s “Our Germans: Project Paperclip and the National Security State” (Johns Hopkins) reviews the shady history of Wernher von Braun and his colleagues from the V-2 program. When Braun was captured, in 1945, he realized that the Soviets would become the next archenemy of the American military-industrial complex, and cannily promoted the idea of a high-tech weapons program to ward off the Bolshevik menace. He was able to reconstitute most of his operation Stateside, minus the slave labor. Records were airbrushed; de-Nazification procedures were bypassed (they w
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Scholars are mapping the international precursors of Nazism.
Good.
They can start with the star of David Biden* is unsuccessfully trying to have everybody forced to get shot in their arm.
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Vaccinated People: "You need to get muh vaccination shots that don't work because I got muh vaccination shots that don't work and I'm afraid of people that didn't get muh vaccination shots that don't work because muh vaccination shots that don't work don't work."
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