That piece of garbage, Cheney, needs to die a very painful death - the pain suffered by all of the people killed and wounded because of his and Bush's BS.
I got bad mouthed by ignorant Americans who Bush and Cheney took for a ride because I wouldn't tie RED, WHITE, and BLUE ribbons on my car antenna and didn't yell - USA, USA - an called them LIARS! And then I 100% supported the Dixie Chicks.
Disbanding the Iraq army was an obvious error. Turning loose hundreds of thousands of trained young men into an economy with no jobs or other opportunities - what could go wrong? It's obvious these idiots never read a military text as basic as "The Art of War." My favorite example of total stupidity, however, is shipping cargo plane loads of $100 bills shrink-wrapped on pallets. What possible good could come from that?
I can't really contribute cuz I don't have the book yet but a very good book for supplemental reading is The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein. It's about disaster capitalism. Modern day plunder and pillage on purpose for greed. Great chapter in there on Iraq.
because they aren't, actually; just small, weak men who want to feel strong by proxie, using the nation's "defense force" to bully smaller, weaker nations.
And if all else fails, there's always Dick Cheney's baby, the "One Per Cent Doctrine", which posits that if there's even a 1% chance that we can be hit with a terrorist attack, everything, from torture to pre-emptive war is justified to "Keep Us Safe(tm)"
Lots of interlocking reasons-the one i haven't seen mentioned yet is domestic politics. The Cheney/Bush/Republican regime needed a foreign war to silence dissent, to crush the opposition and to rally the electorate into a majority that they could not gain with their policies. Using the "Saddam lover" smear, they cowed almost the entire Democratic party and made most of its leaders complicit in their crimes. Maybe it also provided insurance against further investigation of Bushco's grievous bungling of the lead-up and then response to 9/11. Never, never, never forget that Turdblossom was scheming to achieve "The Permanent Republican Majority", the twentyfirst century edition of the Thousand Year Reich.
"But save pictures of your kittycats and grumblings about your idiot neighbor for the open thread, 'K?"
I feel like I'm being Dick(Cheney)ed by DOK! If Dok isn't going to allow me to grumble about my neighbor, than this is no longer a safe space for me!!!! I may have to take my commenting business somewhere else.
Just to make my comment relevant - Dick Cheney outing Valerie Plame was one of the most treasonous things I have ever seen in my life. Republicans are a boil on democracy's ass, and we need to take out the trash in 2020.
The run-up to the invasion was my introduction to Dana Rohrabacher who insisted that American troops would be received better than those who liberated France in WW2. He was totally oblivious to the cultural differences, language barriers and the fact that all Muslims weren't in lockstep agreement that Saddam Hussein was a dick. He had never heard of the deep division between Sunni and Shia, and dismissed any suggestion that an invasion by western armies might be viewed through the lens of the crusades. He was phenomenally ignorant and resistant to any other perspective. Yet he was on tv night after night celebrating victory before the battle had even been joined, and msm did little, if anything, to reel that shit in.
Oof. I was a child and my father was overseas for a naval meeting in the UK. He couldn't get home for two weeks. And then a week into that waiting my teacher decided to use the tragedy as a writing exercise, and singled out the kids whose folks were out of the country or military and tweaked the prompt to how we felt about that specifically. I refused and was put in the hall for hours for refusing to work. I decided to see it as a protest and refused to move for anything--no recess, no special area, nada. I sat my butt on that floor. Hilariously, Mom volunteered in the drop out prevention class nearby, and when the janitor realized how long I'd been there she got my mom, who got the principal, who flipped out on my teacher because "wtf, our standardized test scores are not worth traumatizing the kids!" (several other kids who had wrote testified that they hadn't wanted to and it made them upset, as well, like three had breakdowns that afternoon).
Also, the teachers were watching the news while we were at PE/Special Area on 9/11, and the fifth grade teacher who shared a cubby area with us didn't see my fourth grade class come in, so...yeah. We saw a tower drop on TV. Again, 4th grade teacher saw this as inspiration for the Writing FCAT. Yep, her ass got fired by October for that.
Yeah, we could contact my dad in England from the home phone, but he said he and the other guys over there for the conference were racking up quite the hotel phone bills for the Navy.
I was always under the impression that invading another country that is not a threat, even a fraudulant threat, is a war crime but the trials have been a bit thin on the ground.
No worries. I’m pretty high up in the queue. But I think the book’s popularity might limit who can participate in out book club thingy.
That piece of garbage, Cheney, needs to die a very painful death - the pain suffered by all of the people killed and wounded because of his and Bush's BS.
I got bad mouthed by ignorant Americans who Bush and Cheney took for a ride because I wouldn't tie RED, WHITE, and BLUE ribbons on my car antenna and didn't yell - USA, USA - an called them LIARS! And then I 100% supported the Dixie Chicks.
Declarative reality can generate tremendous amounts of policy inertia.
Disbanding the Iraq army was an obvious error. Turning loose hundreds of thousands of trained young men into an economy with no jobs or other opportunities - what could go wrong? It's obvious these idiots never read a military text as basic as "The Art of War." My favorite example of total stupidity, however, is shipping cargo plane loads of $100 bills shrink-wrapped on pallets. What possible good could come from that?
I can't really contribute cuz I don't have the book yet but a very good book for supplemental reading is The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein. It's about disaster capitalism. Modern day plunder and pillage on purpose for greed. Great chapter in there on Iraq.
Don't forget the ba ba billions that Cheney's Halliburton made.
because they aren't, actually; just small, weak men who want to feel strong by proxie, using the nation's "defense force" to bully smaller, weaker nations.
And if all else fails, there's always Dick Cheney's baby, the "One Per Cent Doctrine", which posits that if there's even a 1% chance that we can be hit with a terrorist attack, everything, from torture to pre-emptive war is justified to "Keep Us Safe(tm)"
Lots of interlocking reasons-the one i haven't seen mentioned yet is domestic politics. The Cheney/Bush/Republican regime needed a foreign war to silence dissent, to crush the opposition and to rally the electorate into a majority that they could not gain with their policies. Using the "Saddam lover" smear, they cowed almost the entire Democratic party and made most of its leaders complicit in their crimes. Maybe it also provided insurance against further investigation of Bushco's grievous bungling of the lead-up and then response to 9/11. Never, never, never forget that Turdblossom was scheming to achieve "The Permanent Republican Majority", the twentyfirst century edition of the Thousand Year Reich.
"But save pictures of your kittycats and grumblings about your idiot neighbor for the open thread, 'K?"
I feel like I'm being Dick(Cheney)ed by DOK! If Dok isn't going to allow me to grumble about my neighbor, than this is no longer a safe space for me!!!! I may have to take my commenting business somewhere else.
Just to make my comment relevant - Dick Cheney outing Valerie Plame was one of the most treasonous things I have ever seen in my life. Republicans are a boil on democracy's ass, and we need to take out the trash in 2020.
The run-up to the invasion was my introduction to Dana Rohrabacher who insisted that American troops would be received better than those who liberated France in WW2. He was totally oblivious to the cultural differences, language barriers and the fact that all Muslims weren't in lockstep agreement that Saddam Hussein was a dick. He had never heard of the deep division between Sunni and Shia, and dismissed any suggestion that an invasion by western armies might be viewed through the lens of the crusades. He was phenomenally ignorant and resistant to any other perspective. Yet he was on tv night after night celebrating victory before the battle had even been joined, and msm did little, if anything, to reel that shit in.
Oof. I was a child and my father was overseas for a naval meeting in the UK. He couldn't get home for two weeks. And then a week into that waiting my teacher decided to use the tragedy as a writing exercise, and singled out the kids whose folks were out of the country or military and tweaked the prompt to how we felt about that specifically. I refused and was put in the hall for hours for refusing to work. I decided to see it as a protest and refused to move for anything--no recess, no special area, nada. I sat my butt on that floor. Hilariously, Mom volunteered in the drop out prevention class nearby, and when the janitor realized how long I'd been there she got my mom, who got the principal, who flipped out on my teacher because "wtf, our standardized test scores are not worth traumatizing the kids!" (several other kids who had wrote testified that they hadn't wanted to and it made them upset, as well, like three had breakdowns that afternoon).
Also, the teachers were watching the news while we were at PE/Special Area on 9/11, and the fifth grade teacher who shared a cubby area with us didn't see my fourth grade class come in, so...yeah. We saw a tower drop on TV. Again, 4th grade teacher saw this as inspiration for the Writing FCAT. Yep, her ass got fired by October for that.
Yeah, we could contact my dad in England from the home phone, but he said he and the other guys over there for the conference were racking up quite the hotel phone bills for the Navy.
I was always under the impression that invading another country that is not a threat, even a fraudulant threat, is a war crime but the trials have been a bit thin on the ground.
I just watched the movie "Vice" about Dick Cheney, really good and a good complement to the book.