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CSotD: 1, 2, 3, What Are We Fighting For?

Perhaps you have to be further away to see it clearly. Leahy views things from Australia, and apparently from there it appears that only Trump and Netanyahu think the war in Iran is a good idea, and also that Trump may have an ulterior motive. Or perhaps the message is that it only appears that way from a distance.

Because from here, Hands suggests, it appears that Dear Leader still wants that Peace Prize and somehow can’t see the likelihood that blowing up other countries is not the way to get it, just as he can’t see that wearing the cheesy ball cap he’s currently selling to the dignified transfer of remains, and not even taking it off during the salute to the fallen, was gauche and disrespectful.

Not that Fox didn’t try to repair the damage by showing old footage of a time when he did behave like an adult, but it didn’t fool anyone.

Saul Loeb/Getty

The phrase used to be “You can dress him up, but you can’t take him anywhere,” but you can’t even dress him up any more. Nobody else was wearing a baseball cap, much less keeping it on during the salute.

In another view from Australia, Wilcox recalls when we were talked into invading Iraq on assurances that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, although inspectors on site said they couldn’t find any, and, after we’d removed him from power and his head from his shoulders, no WMDs ever turned up.

Ted Rall notes that, while we most assuredly obliterated Iran’s nuclear program recently, they’ve most assuredly rebuilt the whole thing and were most assuredly within weeks of being able to launch intercontinental nuclear missiles which they also haven’t yet developed.

It was certainly a narrow escape from something that was definitely possibly most assuredly going to happen assuming the Iranians were super-human geniuses.

But, once again, you needed that distant vision, because, while it almost seemed from here that we were making it up as we went along, Katauskas really could see the cunning plan behind Operation Epic Führer, all the way from Australia.

Whereas Joel Pett was concerned that we were once more heading into an endless war in which our military members would be sacrificed as pawns, and then forgotten.

However, not only has Dear Leader made a point of keeping them out of harm’s way, but our Secretary of Greasy Kid Stuff has declared it unpatriotic for news outlets to report any occasions when someone is accidentally terminated, since it makes Dear Leader look bad.

Paul Fell, however, seems to feel that all Americans are paying a price for Dear Leader’s decision to join Netanyahu in keeping the peace through war, as dictated in well-established Ingsoc theory.

Dear Leader promised to get gasoline prices down below $2 a gallon, which he nearly did for about an hour and a half. They’ve gone up in my neighborhood by just a dollar, which isn’t much unless you get all involved in percentages and so forth, in which case there seems to be a chance that they’ll be doubled before we’re done being safe from those Iranian ICBMs and atomic weaponry.

Matt laughs off the price of petrol, but he’s in the United Kingdom, where electric cars make up 28% of new car sales. It’s even funnier in Norway, where 92% of new cars are electric and not quite so humorous here in America, where only 10% of new cars are electric. (World-wide, the rate stands at 22%.)

As for generating electricity, we’re getting back into the idea, now that the courts have stalled Dear Leader’s concern for the danger of wind turbines giving whales cancer and smacking down passing birds, though he’d still rather retrofit generation plants to make them coal-fired instead of using natural gas, which by the way is also becoming more expensive, since much of it passes through the Strait of Hormuz, though we’re actually a net exporter of natural gas.

Our leading source of imported natural gas is Canada, but if we continue to annoy them, maybe China will want to buy that, too.

Adam Schiff offers another way to look at the cost of joining with Netanyahu for an adventure in the Middle East, which is to visualize it in terms of what we could be doing with that money instead, like building hospitals.

My grandfather, who served in WWI and saw his son serve in WWII, came away with a plan whereby we would make tanks and cannons and bombers — which would be great for jobs — but then just take them out to sea and dump them overboard, which would make artificial reefs for fish and would benefit the world by not using them to blow each other up.

I don’t think he was serious about actually doing it, but he was quite serious about the grim benefits of our weapons industry to our domestic economy, and I’ll bet we’d also create a lot of jobs if we followed Adam Schiff’s plan and built hospitals instead. We could even skim off a little of the money to provide health coverage so people could use those hospitals.

Or maybe when we finish blowing up Iran, we should go blow up Cuba. Your choice.

Back in 1985, on the tenth anniversary of the fall of Saigon, a Vietnam vet arranged a reunion of vets and protesters at which I was invited to play. This was back when our generation could mingle and remember, before lines were drawn and curses cast, and I played both protest songs and songs written for the vets, but the one everyone joined in on was one written and recorded by Country Joe McDonald.

Country Joe died Saturday, so here’s that song, in honor of his memory, in honor of his fellow veterans, in honor of his fellow protesters and in honor of all the tanks that won’t be dumped in the ocean and all the hospitals that won’t be built:

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Comments 10

    1. Most people do, but this is the one I first heard in 1967.

  1. The Adam Schiff reference to this war costing taxpayers one billion dollars per day ($1,000,000,000) is probably better understood in smaller units, that is around $11,574 per second or $41,666,667 per hour, per the online Iran War Cost Tracker: https://iran-cost-ticker.com/ — plus this tracker notes the real monetary cost may be higher, as well as reporting the human cost: the rising dead and wounded count.

  2. Building hospitals is all well and good, but if they continue to understaff them, devalue nurses (and lately, doctors), and operate for profit (for hospitals, insurance companies, and HMOs) it won’t aid the people that actually need them.

    1. I think you’ll find on investigation that most of the people who advocate for “building more hospitals” also intend that once built these hospitals will be and continue to be adequately staffed and supplied to meet community needs, but aren’t able to think of a way to put all that into three words without using German. They also intend the buildings to be connected to the power and water and sewage systems, and to have roads that make the hospital accessible without an overland hike or approach by canoe.

  3. I like Joel Pett’s inclusion of the little wrecking ball next to the White House, which Trump continues to treat as though it were his own private property.

    And boy, did I scrape off a good number of those Biden “I Did That!” stickers at the pump. And I don’t even work at a gas station. When I was visiting my parents in Indiana over the summer of 2024, a local shop even had a bowlful of those for sale.

    I swear, the fact that I haven’t yet been seeing Trump “I Did That!” stickers all over the grocery aisles is disappointing, but maybe they’ll start showing up at the pumps if things keep going in this direction…

    1. I found them on Amazon. $ 3.99 per hundred. You have given me a mission.
      Thanks!

  4. I think now that it’s okay to kill religious leaders, the “woke” Vatican will be the next target for a “regime change”. Pope Leo better should send the Spanish Inquisition to the Uninvestable States of A.I.merica to wipe out the heresy. Let Vance and Hegseth burn at the stake for turning Christianity into a travesty. You know what they say about the Spanish Inquisition…

  5. Just as irritating to me as Trump wearing that baseball cap was Steve Witkoff, special envoy to the middle east for conflicts of interest, bopping around in the second row looking this way and that as if he was a tourist.

  6. I, too, mourn the passing of Country Joe. Just the other day I was telling a genXer about the fish chant and he was too squeamish to let me get past “Gimme a U…” I don’t know about kids these days, they don’t seem to appreciate vulgar protests anymore. I blame the parents.

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