Hearing those meatballs running for the Republican nomination brag about how tough they’d be on terrorism is surreal. It’s like hearing some pot-bellied drunk brag about how he could beat Floyd Mayweather Jr. if the World Boxing Association would let him in the ring.
Ted “Tailgunner” Cruz brags about “carpet bombing” ISIS, apparently without comprehending what “carpet bombing” means. Even Frank Bruni is snarky —
Someone needs to explain carpets to Ted Cruz.
They’re continuous stretches of material, usually rectangular, sometimes round. They’re not staggered, interrupted, with stops, starts, holes and sharp jags so that they smother and blot out only the evil bits of floor but leave adjacent, innocent ones untouched.
When you call for carpet bombing, as Cruz did again on Tuesday night, you are not outlining a strategy of pinpoint targeting or of any discernment.
You are sounding big and bold and advocating something indiscriminate. That’s the nature of a carpet. You can’t pretend otherwise.
Unless you’re Cruz, who can pretend just about anything.
I’m pretty sure none of the A-list contenders has had any experience wearing a military uniform, except perhaps for Halloween. (Toast! and Dr. Ben did register for the draft during the late Vietnam era but were not called.) Gilmore (is he still running?) was in the Military Intelligence Corp. for a while. Miz Lindsey has a considerable military record serving as a lawyer but was never deployed into combat. Of course, combat experience is no predictor of whether a President will be an effective commander in chief. But you’d think a person who has never seen war would at least affect some humility and reticence about sending other people into one.
On the other hand, there’s Mike Huckabee, who never served, telling young people to get off their butts and secure their freedoms.
So sitting there, listening to a bunch of people who never served a day in combat talk about how they’re going to turn the Middle East into obsidian glass and how they will keep me safe, it was hard not to fall off my chair. Frankly, I wouldn’t hire any of these people to watch my car in a valet parking lot, let alone lead the country into what they never miss a chance to call, “the Third World War.” Chris Christie? Ted Cruz? Marco Rubio?
Trump?
You see where I’m going here.
When he was a “federal prosecutor,” Chris Christie made more ferocious war on his expense account than he did against the “people who want to kill us.” (His big trophy case, the Fort Dix Six, is one of those strange half-entrapment cases.) He also doesn’t seem to like the Senate very much. Marco Rubio, continuing his ongoing effort to fill out a grown-up person’s suit, postured and promised us (again) a 500-ship Navy to keep us safe from the people who drive their pick-up trucks across the ocean to attack us. He also puffed himself up and declined to talk about classified information on national television. (This assumes, of course, that he even knows any, given the fact that he seems to have developed a severe allergy to something in the  room where the Senate Intelligence Committee meets.) Ben Carson said something very weird about being a neurosurgeon in connection with carpet-bombing Syria. (I’m not kidding.) It’s a very good thing that we really are not electing a commander-in-chief for the whole country because none of these guys is up to the job.
There’s an old saying, if wishes were horses, beggars would ride. Well, if hot air were missiles, these guys would be fearsome. But it ain’t, and they aren’t.
Their bluster is predictable, the corporate media has stepped up their carefully crafted propaganda campaign, exaggerating the terror threat ever since the attacks in Paris. Just yesterday after non-stop reporting of a hoax bomb threat msnbc tried their best to tie it to ISIS, labeling the overreaction a “new normal”? They have to be able to attack the incumbent administration on something, $1.85 gas and 5% unemployment just won’t do. CNN really exposed themselves last night, I mean Hugh Hewitt as debate moderator who’s next Frank Gaffney, Pam Geller?
My guess, is that nuance and diplomacy are too French for these assclowns.
If a picture is worth a thousand words, then think of how many less words you need, if you just want to let drones and missiles do your talking for you?
Oh, and of course, even less words are needed, when you want to ‘send in the plebe’s!’
Let the ground troops do your talking for you!
Hey, these schmuck kid’s volunteered, so they can’t beef!
FSM forbid, that any of these psycho/socio-paths are in the Oval Office.
We’ll have to rename it.
Maybe, after another recent Preznit:
“The George W. Bush ‘Awful Office.'”
Oy……..
Was it Frank Gaffney or Pam Geller what got me in the twit filter?
Uncledad,
Either.
Both.
?
We should all wish that maha’s twit-filter, extended outside of her realm, here…
Imagine how much better our country would be!
Gulag wins the intertubes for the day!
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/isis-and-the-folly-of-world-war/ has Andrew Bacevich, an actual conservative, saying things that no so-called “conservative” will ever be caught dead saying.
“An invitation to collective suicide” is what the GOP is test marketing, but you never ever see the networks have someone like Prof. Bacevich (who lost a son in Iraq) calling them out for marketing it.
The man is also worth seeing on YouTube. Never pompous, never frivolous, always steady and possessed of gravitas–that rarest of commodities in our current media circus.
Off Topic –
http://bigstory.ap.org/article/4d7e3be14dcb45c0a010f1b289725ef7/man-famous-gyrocopter-stunt-eyes-congressional-seat
So Doug will you be getting a bad Perm then? Good Luck!
Doug, your potential House run got a mention on Morning Edition! Good luck! That is, if you really really want to enter the looney bin.
You GO, Doug!! We’ll all be cheering for you. And contributing to your campaign. (Skip the bad perm, tho. It just fries your hair.)
Doug, you’d have my vote if I still lived in the area. (If you win, can you do something about those wooden tomatoes?) This seems like a great way to continue your fight.
“Well, if hot air were missiles, these guys would be fearsome. But it ain’t, and they aren’t.”
Wasn’t there an old Abbott and Costello joke that went.
Costello: Hot air rises doesn’t it?
Abbott: Yes.
Costello: What do you wear, lead shoes?
Uncle is right. Hugh Hewitt is really a piece of work. Does anyone remember when he had a series called , “America, In search of God,” or something like that. It would have to have been circa 2000. I think they were trying to copy the Bill Moyers/Joe Campbell series of discussions. But, they made a bad choice. Hugh Hewitt was insufferably shallow. I gather that he still is.
Doug,
The only reason I’d ever move to that hot, humid, fetid, festering, FSM cursed hellhole of Florida, would be to vote for you!
“hot, humid, fetid, festering, FSM cursed hellhole of Florida”
Oh come on the keys are nice 5 months of the year! The beauty of an island is less space equals less assholes!
I lived in Florida for 8 mos. one winter. I liked the climate and it is beautiful. The downside is that there are no mountains and it is sinking into the ocean.
Uncledad & friends – The idea is to primary miss bad perm. You see, the presidential primary is March 15 – and most voters will ignore everything between March & November. MY election, the primary against DWS is August 30. That means a small number of voters, as little as 3% of residents, can deliver the election to the challenger. It’s a gerrymandered district – if I win, the general is a formality. But here’s the deal…. if I knock off the DNC chair in the same way the Tea Party knocked off Cantor in ’14 then I’ve proven that EVERY member of the House, democrat & republican, is vulnerable in the primary when the challenger is perceived by even a small number of voters as for real reform (re money in politics)
That means you can replace a sold out democrat with a reform democrat – you can replace a sold-out republican with a reformist republican. So theoretically, it’s a duplicateable pattern in 2018 on a HUGE scale if reform is seen as the referendum issue by democratic and republican VOTERS. A sweep in 2018 could create a bipartisan reformist majority, a reform caucus, that could deny the House leadership a quorum unless reform legislation which has been frozen in committee comes to the floor. Is this scenario likely? – honestly, it’s along shot. Is it possible? – we only know if I try.
If Sanders supporters realize this is how they can strike back against the ‘fix’ that DWS engineered with six debates, to guarantee HRC the nomination, I can raise the funds and the votes to win.
I lived in Florida for a couple of decades. Back in the ’60s and 70s, I loved it. Sarasota was a comparatively sleepy town back then, so I thought Tampa was the happenin’ place. Now, the buckeyes, or little cigar shops are long gone, the dozens of madre and padre Cuban restaurants are far fewer in number and I got a lousy cup of cafe con leech on 7 th Avenue! I’d have done just as well at Starbucks.
Tampa has sprawled out over the wooded areas and everywhere seems packed with strip joints and tattoo parlors. Ahh, for the old days!
Every place is what you make of it. Tampa/Ybor had its moments, and my closest friends still live there. But, it’s sad to go back.
Goatherd: Everything changes. That is the only thing we can depend on. It’s harder when you get older. Thomas Wolfe said: “You can’t go home again”. He tried it, got very depressed and died of pneumonia. The fact is, home just isn’t there anymore. It’s in our hearts and we carry it with us but often don’t recognize it.
Doug has a good strategy and I sincerely hope it works. The government is definitely one area that needs changing. I think it was Margaret Mead who said: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
“Is this scenario likely? – honestly, it’s along shot. Is it possible? – we only know if I try”
Agreed anything is possible. I’m sure DWS has lots of cash on hand so you might be in store for a well funded smear campaign. Why they are probably combing through the mahablog archives at this very moment! I can’t understand why she remains head of the DNC, she has lost house seats, last election we lost the senate, I’m thinking she has access to lots of donor cash and that keeps her in power?
Nothing from Mahablog has ever surfaced anywhere in the prosecutor’s searches or as a tidbit elsewhere. Years ago I had my full name out there but I shortened it when I decided I didn’t want a search engine to turn up a trove of comments. One of the highest awards I got after the flight was that the tenured commentors on Mahablog claimed me as ‘Our Doug’.
For the moment I have public anonymity – you folks know who I am but as long as my last name is excluded, the trollers won’t find me. That’s how I like it here.