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No dumb bastard ever won a war by going out and commenting on a mommyblog.
Now that Donald Trump has Made America Great Again by firing off a crapload of cruise missiles that did some damage at one Syrian airbase, we need to rethink everything we thought we knew about war and peace, because hasn't Bashar al Assad ended his country's civil war now? Or not. In any case, both of our articles Friday on the story drew the attention of Great Big Patriot "DRB," who dropped by Wonkette to straighten the liberal idiots out a little bit on this important issue:
Silly anti american libs... War is glorious! Good for the economy. Only libs cry when America projects power.
Thank god you guys weren't in control when the sh'''t really hit the fan aka WWI WWII
Love those Nazis they have feelings too....
We actually didn't banhammer "DRB," because his tone became a little less trolly in subsequent posts, as you'll see. Unfortunately, he also deleted his Disqus account not terribly long after visiting us, so he may never know how nice we were. As to his initial charges, we suppose we should point out that the guys who were in control of the U.S. of A. during World War II were the same guys who came up with the New Deal, which we've always tended to think of as "liberal," but what do we know? We don't even understand that the Nazis were socialists, either. Had "DRB" stayed around, we might even have enjoyed a nice discussion of some differences between the Syrian civil war and World War II, starting with small details like pointing out the two have very little in common, maybe. We might also recall one of our favorite Kurt Vonnegut observations:
One of the great American tragedies is to have participated in a just war. It’s been possible for politicians and movie-makers to encourage us we’re always good guys. The Second World War absolutely had to be fought. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. But we never talk about the people we kill. This is never spoken of.
And of course, even during that just war, our side committed atrocities, which is the only honest term for the firebombings of Dresden and of most Japanese cities -- even leaving aside the debatable justification for ending the war with atomic bombs. On the whole, we think it's probably a good thing that (ironically, thanks to fear of escalating to the Bomb) America has lost its appetite for Total War.
After the initial trolling, "DRB" started presenting something that at least resembled an argument, albeit a rather all-or-nothing one, assuming that the choices in Syria are obvious and easy, and only gutless liberals would dare suggest there are only varying degrees of extremely crappy choices:
Echo chamber... Im a puss so are you lets join together
Human history is a history of war. Of death. Of supremacy. Better to be on top then the third world idiot gassing kids. Or do you like that sort of thing?
Basically if you are against Trump bombing Syria you are for gassing children with Sarin... At some point you have to abandon your democrat line and actually be human...
Of course, the day after Trump bombed the Al Shayrat airfield, planes took off from it again. And Khan Sheikhoun, the same rebel-held town that was hit with chemical weapons Tuesday was bombed again, this time with conventional munitions.
"DRB" worked up a more complete critique of squishy liberalism's inadequacy in a comment he was so proud of that he copied it to both threads:
Ok I will present a more coherent argument. Liberalism / progressiveness is great if everyone if playing by the same rules. But no one else in the world is. It's like the bully on the playground you keep telling you child to be the better person and they keep coming home with their face beat in. It's like Chamberlain and Hitler. No one else in the world has these high ideals. They just want to beat the crap out of you. So as Churchill said “We sleep safely at night because rough men stand ready to visit violence on those who would harm us.”
The time has passed to appease those that wish us harm. The time now is to reassert America's role as a potent adversary, not to be trifled with.
First off, no, Churchill never said that. (It's actually a 1993 summary of ideas George Orwell stated in several different works, but never in those words. The summation somehow got quotation marks added to it, and isn't the internet a wonderful thing?) And more to the point, "DRB" seems to have entirely too optimistic a view of what a single airstrike can accomplish. If he's really in favor of a full on invasion and occupation of Syria, for decades possibly -- which is what would likely be needed to end the Syrian civil war by military action -- he should have come out and said so. Instead, when a Wonker pointed out that the strike on Al Shayrat wasn't much more than a pinprick in the strategic sense, and that the airbase was up and running right away, "DRB" sneered, "So wait, now you are condemning him for not being violent enough? lol." Gosh, we hive-mind liberals sure are hypocrites! We're all pussies who don't recognize this one attack changed everything, except when we point out it didn't really accomplish anything much.
And do we even want to touch "DRB's" contention that the attack had anything to do with defending America from its enemies? The whole reason Trump's most hyper-nationalist supporters are pissing themselves over the raid is that it had nothing to do with our own security: It was a message to Assad that gassing his own citizens will not be tolerated, so he'd better stick to just dropping high explosives on them. Trump's been OK with that for years.

Before he flounced, "DRB" offered this summation of why we should all be grateful that Donald Trump has made America a credible foe again, and what is wrong with us liberals that we won't oppose Assad's butchery?
My final post. I am a republican. I am a conservative. But I believe in several simple values. I want to determine my own future, pursue my own happiness, I want my children to thrive and be happy in whatever they want to pursue. Surely there is some common ground among us. When I see the constantly replayed images of a Syrian father carrying his dead daughter with her hair waving in the breeze I weep, as should we all...
See? He really did make some progress from "Dumb libs don't appreciate how glorious war is" to at least a sort of argument that intervention in Syria is justified to prevent a tragedy. Or more tragedies. We'll give him credit for being moved by empathy, too -- that last sentence evokes a truly haunting image. Where we part ways is the idea that even a vastly expanded bombing campaign will make everything better by scaring Assad out of power, or even into better behavior.
God knows we won't pretend to have any answers on what would "work" in Syria -- the best we can do is say The U.S. hasn't exactly had a shining record of fixing things with military power in the Middle East, and to add that, as liberal squishes, the one thing we're certain of is that we have fallen far short on helping the victims of the civil war. The cost of the cruise missiles fired off Thursday night was around $60 million. Charities helping Syrian victims of war aren't getting anything close to that amount of funding from the U.S. government -- and Trump wants to cut humanitarian aid, because it's "soft." The refugee ban isn't helping either. But we have some kick-ass missiles, don't we? It's times like this we just shake our heads and increase our monthly donation to Doctors Without Borders.
We also had a return visit from our well-known established author on Christianity, "Paul The Christian View," who, after being banhammered and featured in Dear ShitferBrains a couple weeks back,has returned as "PDS The Christian View" with at least two different alternateDisqus accounts. Have to appreciate tenacity, we suppose. "PDS" took a break from his successful career as an established author (of angry letters to the editor of his local paper) to drop by Wonkette and let us know he hasn't forgotten us. He visited the comments of the article about him to offer his perspective on a few brief matters:
I'm glad I can bring joy to the lawless Godless leftists of your ilks
I'm following Christ's teaching and supporting OUR president but I'm the crazy one?
Mental patients are the ones brainwashed by the Muslim Obama into committing white genocide by Islamization of this country
Your evil Hillary lost because GOD wants president Trump to defeat Islam
After I replied to the first of that bunch with the mandatory "Mi sister was bitten bi an ilk," PDS had a complaint about the unfair moderation of this here biased liberal blog: "BTW, that guy "William" said things 10000 worse than me but you didn't ban him?" I explained that "William," who was featured the same week as "Paul/PDS" and really did say some pretty rude stuff, had only written four comments, which I elected to leave in place when I banned him, rather than "delete all" as I had with "Paul/PDS," who had tried to monopolize the comments. He must have liked that explanation -- he even upvoted it.
He also offered a comment that copypasted another letter to the editor of his preferred publication forum, the Quad Cities Dispatch-Argus, this one by his wife:
I feel so sorry for President Donald Trump.
Because he loves his country far more than he does his own wealth, comfort and the prestige he once had. He is risking his life to get out there and DO something about keeping our country safe in many respects, most importantly, globalism and terrorism within our country and the world.
It is head-shakingly sad to see this man, with so many liberals and globalists, who just as the Bible describes Satan, are "seeking whom he may devour."
Instead of cussing President Trump, uplift him in your prayers, pray for the success of America and your own success -- that ONLY God can give.
This country must turn itself around in order to be blessed. Over 60-plus million people did exactly that and God blessed us and gave this country another chance at restoring our security and prosperity through those prayers.
We especially loved that part about how our wonderful president loves his country more than all his wealth and prestige, and has deigned to live in the grotty old White House so he can serve America. Don't you lawless Godless leftists (and your ilks) feel ashamed for having badmouthed Donald Trump now?
Elsewhere, "PDS" shared this important insight from the anti-Islam wingnuttosphere:
Islam is Satan's religion. Try googling or youtubing "thighing" and you will learn that Muslims are allowed to have sexual gratification with little children even babies. The day a female is born into Islam, she becomes a sex slave to a man or even her own father. It is a capital offense punishable by death to say "thighing" is evil because Muhammad started the acceptance of it when he had sexual gratification with Aisha when she was 6 years old.
We followed his advice and googled "thighing," and learned that crazies who hate Islam do indeed insist that Muslims regularly do sex things to babies by rubbing their wee-wees between the girl-children's thighs. This would be horrifying if it were true, but mostly it appears to be wingnuts on the internet insisting to other wingnuts that it's true. We found a few Muslim writers who pointed out that the only "evidence" for this supposed practice is spurious, relying on anti-Muslim fabrications by Christian missionaries and a made-up quote by Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini -- it supposedly comes from the "fourth volume" of one of his books, which unfortunately for the rumor, actually only has two volumes. In mere reality, while Mohammad did have a child bride (as did Isaac in the Old Testament ), the Quran condemns sex with children and so on. Then again, those Muslims lie about everything, and as "PDS" would no doubt point out, there are a lot more posts on the internet repeating the assertion that Muslims do that than there are debunkings, so obviously it's real.
Finally, in last week's Dear ShitFerBrains, which featured the return of Turgid Love Muscle guy, "PDS" dropped by again to explain that not only is butt stuff forbidden by The Almighty, we Wonkers should be ashamed of ourselves for joking about masturbation, which is an abomination as well:
Cute! But self pleasure is also a sin.
All our daughters Amber, Joy and Brooks weren't allowed to close their doors or to have any kind of "privacy" B.S. that the liberal doctors seemed to love because we trained them to obey God. Two of them went to a bit of a rebellious stage in college after being brainwashed repeatedly many weeks.
IF this doesn't prove how evil your leftie universities are, I don't know what is.
Thank goodness, none of that pure evil privacy for his daughters! I decided we should keep him around for laughs, because if we banned him, we'd miss out on his occasional bursts of hilarious pure insanity. In return, he was downright civil in reply:
Thanks. Hope you had a good vacation and found Jesus. If not, at least laid a good foundation to receive him in the future.
The evil DIsqus, Facebook and other social media kept banning me for speaking truth about Islam. So the righteous had to keep on fighting .
I failed to see what's so insane about preventing my daughters to sin but that's fine. As long as I can bring the voice of Jesus to those in need like this comment section, you can laugh at me all you want.
Yup. We're sure Jesus appreciates your dedication to the Gospel truth of white supremacy and lying about other faiths. We'd like to take a moment to let "PDS the Christian View" know that he's welcome to offer occasional contributions, as long as they're good for a laugh, but that our commenting rules are very clear: if he wears out his welcome, we may decide he's no longer someone we want muddying up our parlor. Where there will be dick jokes.
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Deleted Comments: War Is Glorious! Good For The Economy!
I think there's a lot more going on under the surface.
On the one hand, ISIS is partly working *with* Assad and Russia. Russia wants refugees to destabilize the ME and Europe, ISIS wants their apocalyptic Caliphate. Assad needs Russia to stay in power.
A lot of state actors in the region are engaged in drug smuggling. There's an oil pipeline money to look forward to as well.
King Abdullah of Jordan has indicated that he believes Russia would trade Assad for Crimea. This reflects the Emirates attempts to facilitate the backchannel to Russia with Trump.
The US has been dropping bombs on ISIS in Syria for years now. Assad has been committing atrocities all this time, of various kinds. At worst, Assad complained that the US was there illegally.
Trump's policy suddenly takes a left turn and he bombs an empty airfield. A lot of noise is made, but serious observers think its all diplomatic bombast. Local Syrians claim that, although chlorine gas attacks ensue, there are fewer bombing runs.
Suddenly, people who have barely noticed the US bombing babies in ISIS held areas and Yemen, get over the top angry at a warning shot at an empty airfield. "It's WAR!"
Also, more support for the Kremlin theory that the attack wasn't Sarin gas at all, we need to wait for an investigation, and oh yes, the pilot who dropped the bomb may have died. Suddenly.
The airfield was mostly emptied prior to the US attack due to hours of warning time, yet afterward Sputnik got pictures of canisters that resembled chem weapons there. This turns into a "Gotcha!" moment as Russian-controlled media explains those are general purpose canisters! Hahaha
And the hospital where the Sarin gas victims were taken is bombed.
This is some evil shit.
Whatever deals Trump may made, he is doing with Syria exactly as smarter people want him to do. There is a theory that, because Trump is so easily manipulated by those around him, that McMasters/Mattis are steering him to do the right thing.
Right thing being: 1) deter Assad from chem weapons, 2) use diplomacy to deter Russian support for him, and 3) a lot of senior military want us to put money into refugee help.
"War is glorious"? May we see your DD-214, and where you served?
Oh, you didn't, I see... "Someone's gotta go over there, and that someone ISN'T me" - Draft Dodger Rag, Phil Ochs.