Do you feel like the winds of change are blowing today too?
POSTED BY: 6ixStringJack
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 16:05
VIEWED: 185382
PAGE 402 of 479
Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
The thing about Trump as I see it, is that it shows those here who support Trump to be hypocrites of the umpteenth degree.
You look like the dumbest person in the world saying shit like this.
This is why you need to look at threads of shit you've said in the past when I repost them.
You are a hypocrite to the core, buddy.
Nobody gives a single fuck what you think about them. Take your opinions and shove them up your ass before I do it for you again.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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Trump Claims MRI on His Brain Found Nothing
Andy Borowitz | Dec 01, 2025
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report) — Boasting about his cognitive health, on Monday Donald J. Trump asserted that an MRI performed on his brain found nothing.
"I had a perfect MRI," he told reporters. "The greatest doctors in the country looked at my brain and came up empty."
Trump said there was no point in releasing his MRI because "there's nothing to see," adding, "It's like the East Wing."
___________________
Governor Newsom Press Office @GovPressOffice
Summary of Governor Gavin C. Newsom’s Advanced Imaging Results
Physician to the Governor
State of California
Memorandum
December 1, 2025
To The Media
From Dr. Dolittle, MD., PhD., Governor’s Physician, Chief of Peak Human Performance
For Immediate Release
As part of Governor Gavin Newsom’s annual physical, we conducted advanced imaging of his cardiovascular, musculoskeletal, and neurological health. I’m pleased to report that nothing about the Governor’s health is merely normal. Governor Newsom remains the healthiest human currently alive or recorded in medical history.
His cardiovascular scans are the best we’ve ever recorded. His arteries were described as shimmering, and his resting heart rate was so steady the EKG machine asked if he was meditating or just naturally enlightened.
His bone density is exceptional. A radiologist briefly wondered if we’d scanned a redwood, and his brain imaging showed no issues other than an unusually active region associated with intelligence, multitasking, and being wildly productive before sunrise.
While we do not typically comment on the health of other elected officials, we are aware of a letter released today from the White House claiming that President Trump is in excellent health. We simply note that Governor Newsom completes full workdays without falling asleep in meetings, does not require executive time to lie down and watch TV during work hours, and is able to stand upright without looking like the leaning Tower of Pisa.
If a side by side health chart were released, we recommend redacting it for the President’s emotional well being.
Governor Newsom remains the healthiest person alive and ever to live. Please direct follow up questions to my office.
Respectfully,
Dr. Dolittle
Physician to the Governor
California Department of Peak Excellence
Help this information get to more voters. A well-informed electorate is a prerequisite to Democracy.—Thomas Jefferson
https://www.facebook.com/voteinorout/posts/governor-newsom-press-offic
egovpressofficesummary-of-governor-gavin-c-newsoms-ad/1485572413570927/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Trump to Disaster Victims: Drop Dead
Sorry, but we don’t help the little people
By Paul Krugman | Dec 03, 2025
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/trump-to-disaster-victims-drop-dead
The Mississippi flood of 1927 was one of America’s greatest natural disasters. Some 27,000 square miles were inundated, in some cases by 30 feet of water. Hundreds, maybe thousands, died — many of the victims were poor and Black, and their deaths went unrecorded. Around 700,000 people were displaced — equivalent to about 2 million people today, adjusting for population growth.
How did America respond? Initially, President Calvin Coolidge was adamantly opposed to any federal role in disaster relief, declaring that “The Government is not an insurer of its citizens against the hazard of the elements.” His refusal to provide aid was, however, deeply unpopular, and he eventually gave in to demands from Congress to deliver government aid.
Ever since that catastrophic flood, providing government aid to the victims of natural disasters has been an integral part of the American Way: federal aid to disaster victims became the norm after the Mississippi flood. Yet it was often a haphazard, uncoordinated process until 1979, when the federal response to natural disasters was consolidated under the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Since then FEMA has become a well-established part of the American social safety net, especially in the face of worsening climate catastrophes. Americans have come to rely on FEMA as a first line of support after disasters. And when FEMA was seen to be falling down on the job, as it did after Hurricane Katrina virtually destroyed New Orleans in 2005, Americans were angry. The fact is, they want FEMA to be better, not smaller. In a July poll, only 9 percent of Americans wanted to see FEMA eliminated, and only another 10 percent wanted to see its budget cut.
Donald Trump, however, believes that he knows better than the majority of Americans. In June he announced his intention to dismantle FEMA and force the states to assume responsibility for disaster relief. While Trump publicly backed down after an intense public backlash, in practice he is gutting FEMA nonetheless. He is drastically scaling back federal emergency aid, even for communities in which the need for federal assistance is overwhelming.
The latest example of Trump’s stiffing those in need is in rural northern Michigan, where the power grid suffered severe damage from an ice storm last March. Rebuilding the power lines will cost thousands of dollars for each household served by the region’s power cooperatives. Without outside help, that cost will have to be paid by the cooperatives’ customers, a huge burden on a relatively poor part of the state. Yet FEMA has turned down the state’s request for aid, in an unprecedented break with past policies.
Adding further injury to Michiganders, who – by the way – voted to deliver the presidency to Donald Trump in 2024, the Trump administration has ordered another Michigan utility to keep an aging, unneeded, highly polluting coal-fired power plant operating, at a cost to ratepayers of $113 million so far, and ongoing at $615,000 per day.
Trump tried, unsuccessfully, to withhold wildfire aid from California unless it adopted voter ID. He has also tried to divert aid away from states that, in his view, aren’t cooperating with his immigration policies, although the courts stopped him. But the storm-hit areas that he is currently refusing to help are, or plausibly “were”, Trump country. The map on the left shows the areas covered by different Michigan electricity utilities; #3 and #7 are the utilities seeking FEMA aid. The map on the right shows the 2024 presidential vote by county, with deeper red corresponding to a higher Trump share:
Since this is not an
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Trump Claims MRI on His Brain Found Nothing
Andy Borowitz | Dec 01, 2025
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report) — Boasting about his cognitive health, on Monday Donald J. Trump asserted that an MRI performed on his brain found nothing.
"I had a perfect MRI," he told reporters. "The greatest doctors in the country looked at my brain and came up empty."
Trump said there was no point in releasing his MRI because "there's nothing to see," adding, "It's like the East Wing."
___________________
Wow, where did it go? Did they eventually find his brain?
too funny...
T
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A sickening moral slum of an administration
Regarding Venezuela, Ukraine and much more, Trump and his acolytes are worse than simply incompetent.
By George F. Will | December 2, 2025 at 1:47 p.m.
www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/12/02/trump-hegseth-rubio-ukraine
-venezuela-boats/
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth seems to be a war criminal. Without a war. An interesting achievement.
In 1967, novelist Gwyn Griffin published a World War II novel, “An Operational Necessity,” that 58 years later is again pertinent. According to the laws of war, survivors of a sunken ship cannot be attacked. But a German submarine captain, after sinking a French ship, orders the machine-gunning of the ship’s crew, lest their survival endanger his men by revealing where his boat is operating. In the book’s dramatic climax, a postwar tribunal examines the German commander’s moral calculus.
No operational necessity justified Hegseth’s de facto order to kill two survivors clinging to the wreckage of one of the supposed drug boats obliterated by U.S. forces near Venezuela. His order was reported by The Post from two sources (“The order was to kill everybody,” one said) and has not been explicitly denied by Hegseth. President Donald Trump says Hegseth told him that he (Hegseth) “said he did not say that.” If Trump is telling the truth about Hegseth, and Hegseth is telling the truth to Trump, it is strange that (per the Post report) the commander of the boat-destroying operation said he ordered the attack on the survivors to comply with Hegseth’s order.
Forty-four days after the survivors were killed, the four-star admiral who headed the U.S. Southern Command announced he would be leaving that position just a year into what is usually a three-year stint. He did not say why. Inferences are, however, permitted.
The killing of the survivors by this moral slum of an administration should nauseate Americans. A nation incapable of shame is dangerous, not least to itself. As the recent “peace plan” for Ukraine demonstrated.
Marco Rubio, who is secretary of state and Trump’s national security adviser, seemed to be neither when the president released his 28-point plan for Ukraine’s dismemberment. The plan was cobbled together by Trump administration and Russian officials, with no Ukrainians participating. It reads like a wish-list letter from Vladimir Putin to Santa Claus: Ukraine to cede land that Russia has failed to capture in almost four years of aggression; Russia to have a veto over NATO’s composition, peacekeeping forces in Ukraine and the size of Ukraine’s armed forces. And more.
Rubio, whose well-known versatility of convictions is perhaps not infinite, told some of his alarmed former Senate colleagues that the plan was just an opening gambit from Russia — although Trump demanded that Ukraine accept it within days. South Dakota Republican Sen. Mike Rounds, a precise and measured speaker, reported that, in a conference call with a bipartisan group of senators, Rubio said the plan was a Russian proposal: “He made it very clear to us that we are the recipients of a proposal that was delivered to one of our representatives. It is not our recommendation. It is not our peace plan.” Hours later, however, Rubio reversed himself, saying on social media that the United States “authored” the plan.
The administration’s floundering might reflect more than its characteristic incompetence. In a darkening world, systemic weaknesses of prosperous democracies are becoming clearer.
Harvard sociologist Daniel Bell’s 1976 book, “The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism,” argued that capitalism’s success undermines capitalism’s moral and behavioral prerequisites. Affluence produces a culture of present-mindedness and laxity; this undermines thrift, industriousness, discipline and the deferral of gratification.
Today’s cultural contradictions of democracy are: Majorities vote themselves government benefits funded by deficits, which conscript the wealth of future generations who will inherit the national debt. Entitlements crowd out
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The Last Big Case Against Trump Has Been Dropped
The U.S. justice and political systems have shown that they can’t hold the president and his allies to account for trying to steal the 2020 election.
By David A. Graham | December 2, 2025, 6:33 PM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/2025/12/trump-georgia-case-dro
pped-election-subversion/685119/
Even today, nearly five years later, listening to Donald Trump’s call is shocking.
“So look. All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes,” he told Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and a few aides on January 2, 2021. Trump warned Raffensperger, a fellow Republican, that if he didn’t act, he would face prosecution: “That’s a criminal, that’s a criminal offense. And you can’t let that happen. That’s a big risk to you and to Ryan, your lawyer.” And to underscore that he was asking Raffensperger to subvert the election results, he added, “So what are we going to do here, folks? I only need 11,000 votes. Fellas, I need 11,000 votes. Give me a break.”
The Washington Post obtained the call and published it on January 3. Three days later, a crowd of Trump supporters, whipped into a frenzy by the president, marched on the Capitol, attacked police, and sacked the building in an attempt to prevent the certification of Joe Biden’s victory. In the days, weeks, and years to follow, much more would be revealed: a long-running campaign, as dedicated as it was sloppy, to steal the 2020 election.
Trump and several associates were charged for their roles in the scheme in a splashy Georgia indictment, but the case’s dismissal last week, on the eve of the Thanksgiving holiday, received less attention. A judge acted at the request of Peter Skandalakis, the prosecutor appointed to handle the case after Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, who obtained the indictment, was disqualified from overseeing it. Skandalakis made both legal and practical arguments against the racketeering case, deeming the charges against some of the defendants weak. (The racketeering law allowed Willis to charge many people at once but created a sprawling case.) As for Trump, Skandalakis wrote, “There is no realistic prospect that a sitting President will be compelled to appear in Georgia to stand trial on the allegations in this indictment.” By the time he leaves office, “eight years will have elapsed since the phone call at issue.”
The Georgia case was the last remaining criminal case against Trump, and the last legal or political avenue to hold him accountable for the 2020-election plot. (It was also important because Trump cannot pardon himself or others if convicted in state court.) A federal election-subversion case against him was dismissed after he won reelection last November. State prosecutions against fake electors have not made much headway. And last month, Trump issued pardons to dozens of people implicated in the attempted subversion. In short, Trump has gotten away with his attempt to subvert the election: If the criminal-justice system is incapable of prosecuting attempts to steal an election, then stealing an election is de facto legal.
Each of these cases had its own wrinkles and reasons for failing. In the Georgia case, for example, Willis made grievous errors in judgment, intertwining her personal life and work by hiring a dubiously qualified special prosecutor with whom she was in a romantic relationship. Her racketeering charge was also ambitious but risky, as Skandalakis argued; the collapse of her case against the rapper Young Thug’s YSL group shows how such cases can go wrong.
The federal prosecution was set up for failure by Attorney General Merrick Garland’s decision to slow-walk prosecuting Trump to appear nonpartisan; the result was that by the time Special Counsel Jack Smith took over, he had little time to work. The Supreme Court used much of that time deliberating a challenge from Trump before issuing a startling opinion that gives presidents immunity for a huge range of “official” acts.
Political remedies haven’t worked eit
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Donald Trump’s Plan to Subvert the Midterms Is Already Under Way
Our election system is reaching a breaking point.
By David A. Graham | October 28, 2025
This article appears in the December 2025 print edition with the headline “The Coming Election Mayhem.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/12/2026-midterms-tru
mp-threat/684615/
Imagine for a moment that it’s late on Election Day, November 3, 2026. Republicans have kept their majority in the Senate, but too many House races are still uncalled to tell who has won that chamber. Control seems like it will come down to two districts in Maricopa County, Arizona. ICE agents and National Guardsmen have been deployed there since that summer, ostensibly in response to criminal immigrants, though crime has been dropping for several years. The county is almost one-third Hispanic or Latino. Voting-rights advocates say the armed presence has depressed turnout, but nonetheless, the races are close. By that evening, the Republican candidates have small leads, but thousands of mail and provisional ballots remain uncounted.
Donald Trump calls the press into the Oval Office and announces that the GOP has held the House—but he warns that Democrats will try to steal the election, and announces plans to send a legal team to Arizona to root out fraud. He spends the rest of the night posting threats and allegations on Truth Social. In the morning, Republican lawyers file to stop vote counting, arguing that any votes counted after Election Day are illegal under federal law. Attorney General Pam Bondi sends a letter to Adrian Fontes, Arizona’s Democratic secretary of state, and the county board of supervisors, instructing them to retain all documents and warning that the Department of Justice may intervene if it suspects anything untoward. On X, FBI Director Kash Patel reposts false rumors about fraud and announces plans to lead a group of agents to Phoenix. Meanwhile, Democratic candidates have pulled ahead in both races by Wednesday afternoon, but the margin is just 143 votes in the Eighth District, with many votes still not tallied.
By now, conservative outlets are running wall-to-wall coverage alleging fraud, offering tales of immigrants being bused to voting locations and accusing Democrats of treason. MAGA has learned its lesson since 2020, and Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell are nowhere near the cameras. Instead, administration officials like Bondi are the face of the allegations on TV. Behind the scenes, Trump is making phone calls. He’s unable to reach any county supervisors, whose lawyers have warned them not to speak with him, but he gets through to the county recorder, a MAGA loyalist elected as part of the backlash to the 2020 election. No one knows quite what is said—the call isn’t taped—but when Trump hangs up, he posts that the county has agreed to hand over control of voting machines to the Department of Homeland Security.
Fontes and the board of supervisors rush to court to block the move, and a judge quickly grants an injunction. But Trump declares a national emergency that he says supersedes the order; helicopters are en route from a Marine air base in Yuma to take control of the voting machines. By the time Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan, who is assigned to hear emergency matters from Arizona, issues an order blocking this, Marines have already commandeered ballots and machines. Patel, having just arrived in Phoenix, holds a press conference and announces, without providing evidence, that votes have been tampered with. He proclaims the Republican candidates the winners.
Despite Marines on the street, small but fierce protests erupt in Phoenix and elsewhere; Trump uses them as a pretext to invoke the Insurrection Act and announces “martial law in Democrat-run cities.” Who actually won the election can never be determined—the Marines and Patel have broken the chain of custody, as well as some of the machines themselves—but the state names the two Democrats as winners. House Republicans reject Arizona’s certification and instead seat
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Eggs, Lies and Gasoline
The unbearable lightweightness of being Kevin Hassett
By Paul Krugman | Dec 04, 2025
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/eggs-gas-and-lies
Last Sunday Kevin Hassett — chair of the National Economic Council, effectively the Trump administration’s chief economist — was interviewed by Nancy Cordes for CBS’s Face the Nation. Most observers expect Hassett to be appointed as the next chair of the Federal Reserve. Prediction markets give him a virtual lock.
So CBS was probably hoping that he would say something newsworthy. He didn’t.
But he did, in just a few sentences, make it clear that he is absolutely unqualified — intellectually and morally — to be Fed chair. And the fact that nobody took notice, that his ignorance and mendacity were accepted as par for the course, demonstrated just how far our standards for public service have been degraded.
Here’s the exchange that caught my eye:
NANCY CORDES: What’s your advice to holiday shoppers who don’t want to spend more this year than they did last year, or can’t afford to spend more?
HASSETT: Right. Well, as you know, it depends on what you’re looking at. Like egg prices are down. Gasoline prices drop below $2 a gallon in a lot of places, mortgage rates are down—
NANCY CORDES: --you mean below- gas prices on average are still at $3 a gallon.
HASSETT: Yeah that’s right for a few states they got below two.
Given the timidity of legacy media these days, Trump officials need to be really out there to get fact-checked in real time. But Cordes was right: average national gas prices are around $3 a gallon. And contra Hassett, there are no states in which gas prices are below $2, or even close:
Was Hassett lying, or just unaware of basic facts? Neither is what you want to see in a man who may soon be overseeing monetary policy.
Furthermore, if you’re trying to assess economic policy, it’s hard to come up with worse indicators than the prices of eggs and gasoline. Egg prices fluctuate wildly, not in response to policy changes, but because of the coming and going of bird flu. Gasoline prices mainly reflect the global price of crude oil, a price on which U.S. policy has at most a marginal influence.
So what are we to make of Hassett boasting about prices he should be ignoring if he becomes Fed chair?
Look, I’m not naïve. I understand that when you work for the president — any president — you’re expected to make the best case you honestly can for his policies. But “honestly” is the key word. Sycophancy toward a president who refuses to acknowledge reality, who insists that affordability is a “con job,” crosses that line.
It’s especially important that public officials not tarnish their reputations if they’re going to be moving on to jobs that are supposed to be apolitical — jobs like chairing the Federal Reserve.
The truth is that if Hassett becomes Fed chair, he’s likely to face some very hard choices. How will the Fed deal with the conundrum of weak labor markets combined with stubbornly elevated inflation? How will it respond to soaring electricity prices? If AI is a bubble, what will the Fed do when it bursts? If geopolitical conflict erupts, disrupting supply chains, how will the Fed react?
And the next Fed chair won’t just have to deal with these hard choices. He’ll have to build consensus among his colleagues. For crucial decisions about interest rates aren’t made by the chair, they’re made by committee.
To lead the Fed, then, requires both good judgment and gravitas. For the past two decades we’ve been blessed with chairs who possessed both. Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen were both highly regarded researchers who were able to combine intellectual excellence with strong management skills and a firm grasp on real-world concerns. Jerome Powell came from the world of
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Condemning Millions for One Man’s Crime
By George Packer | December 3, 2025, 10:13 AM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/12/trump-refugee-collective-pun
ishment/685115/
Most of us are lucky enough to avoid any direct encounter with the true nature of Donald Trump’s presidency. But over time, abstract nouns such as authoritarianism and xenophobia lose their hard edges with too much use. It can take some personal experience to bring home what the Trump administration is doing to human lives and values.
The solitary Afghan man who allegedly shot two members of the West Virginia National Guard near the White House last week, killing a 20-year-old woman and critically wounding a 24-year-old man, gave the president exactly the pretext he needed to crush the hopes of desperate people here and around the world. Trump started with Afghans, canceling all U.S. visas issued to Afghans abroad and barring visa holders from entering the country, including men and women who aided the 20-year American war effort in Afghanistan. He halted asylum hearings in the U.S. for all migrants; announced that green cards issued to migrants from 19 countries, including Afghanistan, would be reviewed; and promised to examine every asylum case approved under the previous administration. He wrote that any foreign-born resident of the U.S. found to be “incapable of loving our Country” or “non-compatible with Western Civilization” would be deported.
This broad assault against the right of refuge is being staged on a heap of lies. Trump suggested that he would never have allowed the alleged gunman—who had served in a CIA-trained unit during the war—and others like him into the country; in fact Trump criticized President Joe Biden for leaving Afghan allies behind after the fall of Kabul in 2021, and the alleged gunman was granted U.S. asylum in April, under Trump. He said that Afghans were allowed into the U.S. “unvetted,” when they’ve been put through security screenings at every stage, from the original entry to the request for asylum and green cards. The claim by Kristi Noem, Trump’s secretary of homeland security, that Afghanistan is now safe enough for her department to send Afghan refugees back there is a lie.
The argument that federal troops are needed in U.S. cities to end a nonexistent crime wave created by refugees and other migrants is a lie, as is the administration’s insistence that national security requires mass deportation. Trump himself has undermined that security far more by purging the FBI of agents deemed disloyal, cutting millions of dollars from counter-terrororism, and diverting thousands of federal law-enforcement officers to the dirty business of rounding up men in Home Depot parking lots and arresting married couples who have shown up to a green-card hearing. “If they are correct in characterizing the shooting as a terrorist attack,” Becca Heller, the founder of the International Refugee Assistance Project, told me, “how come no one is talking about the intelligence failure that allowed a terrorist attack against U.S. troops on U.S. soil?”
All of these lies are built on a deeper one. Stephen Miller, the ideologue behind the foreigners-out policy, told it over the weekend in a social-media post: “You are not just importing individuals. You are importing societies. No magic transformation occurs when failed states cross borders. At scale, migrants and their descendants recreate the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands.”
If it were true that those fleeing horrifying violence are bound to inflict the same oppression on others, Miller might well have added: Just as Jews imported here from postwar Europe brought the industrial slaughter of Dachau and Bergen-Belsen with them and inflicted it on their innocent American neighbors in Scarsdale. Just as South Vietnamese who managed to flee the victorious North terrorized the peaceful streets of Galveston with civil war and torture. Just as multiple generations of Iranians and
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This Is How Venezuela Becomes A Quagmire Like Iraq
U.S. 'decapitation' campaigns are rarely swift or clean
By Paul Iddon | Dec 02, 2025
https://www.trenchart.us/p/venezuela-could-become-an-iraq-style
As the months-long standoff between the United States and Venezuela intensifies, many speculate that U.S. Pres. Donald Trump may opt for a decapitation strike against Venezuelan Pres. Nicolas Maduro’s government. If Saddam Hussein’s Iraq serves as any precedent, a “clean” strike against the leadership in Caracas may not succeed—or avert wider war.
Trump and Maduro spoke by phone a week ago. According to sources cited by The Miami Herald, Trump offered Maduro and his family guaranteed safe passage if he agreed to resign immediately. The Venezuelan president’s public appearance a few days later, Nov. 30, following speculation that he had fled, confirms he hasn’t taken Trump up on this alleged offer. Venezuela, Maduro chanted, is “indestructible, untouchable, unbeatable.”
Over the last few months, the U.S. military has built up substantial naval and air power and deployed 15,000 troops in the Caribbean. They have destroyed several small boats allegedly smuggling drugs on dubious legal grounds. On Nov. 27, Trump said the U.S. military would counter this alleged Venezuelan drug trafficking “by land” and “very soon.” On Nov. 29, he declared Venezuelan airspace “closed in its entirety.” When asked on Nov. 30 if that meant imminent U.S. strikes on Venezuela, he vaguely answered, “Don’t read anything into it.”
Several prominent media outlets and think tanks have already highlighted Trump’s potential options for an escalated military campaign against Venezuela. These include decapitation strikes targeting Maduro’s government and military. Despite America’s overwhelming military superiority against the South American nation, such a move could prove complicated, as would mounting an effective coup. The 2003 invasion of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq may offer some important lessons.
As War on the Rocks has already noted, Maduro has already been “coup-proofing” his regime over the past decade, “by building overlapping structures that can survive leadership decapitation.” Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Party did the same shortly after taking power in 1968. Therefore, American hopes for an internal coup by the Iraqi military following the 1991 Persian Gulf War were fantastical. CIA efforts to depose Hussein later in the 1990s also ended in abysmal failures.
When the United States made the fateful decision to invade Iraq, it found that decapitating the Iraqi regime by military force wasn’t straightforward either.
As the U.S. amassed ground forces to invade in March 2003, then-president George W. Bush gave Saddam Hussein and his sons a 48-hour ultimatum to leave Iraq. They refused. As that ultimatum expired, Washington received intelligence regarding the whereabouts of the Iraqi dictator and his two notorious sons. All three Husseins were apparently meeting in a bunker at the Dora Farms complex outside Baghdad. It was too good a potential opportunity to miss: eliminating the Iraqi dictator in a relatively “clean” strike in the war’s crucial opening salvo.
Shortly after the 48-hour deadline expired, on Mar. 19, 2003, two Lockheed F-117 stealth fighters flew toward Dora Farms. Each carried two 2,000-pound EGBU-27 bombs. It marked the combat debut of the EGBU-27, guided by GPS in addition to a laser seeker system and an inertial navigation unit. The F-117s dropped their bombs where the U.S. guessed the bunker was most likely located. A salvo of 40 Tomahawk cruise missiles launched from naval destroyers and submarines in the Persian Gulf quickly followed the F-117s’ air strike.
The attack intentionally spared the primary residence at Dora Farms, where U.S. intelligence deemed there was a greater risk of killing women and children. Additionally, military lawyers rejected a follow-up Tomahawk bombardment on the site after deeming the risk of civilian casualties and killing of medical staff unacceptably high. Neither Hu
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