You Built Where...?!?

h/t WRSA

Essay link
Robert Gore has written some truly great stuff. Really, he has, and I've seen it, and said so. (But he's anything but unserious or unthoughtful, and his jeremiad deserves due diligence. My apologies for the length.)

The linked essay is not any of it.

My response:

Show me the pictures of the homeless schizophrenic veterans who came home after WWII, carpeting the streets of America. Oh, wait, that never happened. Ditto for Korea. Ditto for Vietnam.
"But waitaminute," you say, I've seen those homeless, and the documentaries, and the news stories...and Platoon and Casualties Of War...Vietnam totally f**ked up Oliver Stone, and Sean Penn flipped out on Michael J. Fox, I saw it at the movies!" No, whiz kids, pot and Hollywood fucked up Oliver Stone, the number of homeless Vietnam vets is an infinitesimal pittance. Most of those claiming any vet status are mental cases/drug addicts playing on sympathy from the low-information drones (as the folks at Stolen Valor have documented over and over), and those "documentaries" were made by the same commie-loving media types and their useful-idiot anti-war dope-smoking '60s hippies that burned their draft cards, their campuses, and tried to incite a communist revolution. Then they got haircuts, media jobs, and tried (like Peter Arnett) to sell fakenews about us using nerve gas on the North Vietnamese - and then got fact-checked and shitcanned when caught with their hand in the Bullshit Jar. These are the guys who never met a Vietnam anti-war meme they didn't like, peddled 'em by the dozen, and for whom John Kerry was a war hero, and Jim Stockdale was a sucker. Reality is the other way around. And the recent root of this killing-is-hard nonsense, Dave Grossman's "On Killing" is a pantload of crap from the get-go, once he gets into how antithetical killing is, in his imagination. Human beings have been cheerfully knocking each other off since Cain, and no end in sight.

Southrons upset about "the War Of Northern Aggression" weren't alive at the time, and are doing nothing but virtue-signaling their imaginary oppression, in no small part because of the same defective gene problem that has never-picked-any-cotton blacks demanding "reparations" for their imaginary "servitude." (And you can't argue for either one of those imaginary offenses without sticking up for the other; lunacy loves company. Thanks for playing, and we have some lovely parting gifts for you.) So let's throw that shit in the shitter, where it belongs, and pull the chain on such claptrap for good. Sauce for the goose is good for the gander. So much for Gore's Paragraph One.

Radical islam (but I repeat myself) has laid waste to large swaths of the Middle East and Northern Africa, not the War On Terror. Iran and Iraq were happily uproariously fucking each other up for a solid decade - using such beyond-the-pale methods as poison gas, dropping modern-day V-2 missiles on each others' capitals, and running children through minefields to clear paths to the enemy - without a whit of Western help or animus, long before Iraq invaded Kuwait. And lest anyone forgets, during which time Arabs destroyed Lebanon, assassinated Sadat, held Coup Of The Week in most every country from Morrocco to Indonesia, repeatedly, and oh, just for shits and giggles, hijacked airliners, oil meetings in Austria, and blew up the fucking 1972 Olympics, becoming the first people to kill all the Jews they could get their hands on in Germany since, well, Hitler and the SS. So, clearly it was the War On Terror's fault for, um...noticing?? What The Actual Blistering Fuck, baby duck? All that flashback news is news to you, maybe?

The only people we were knocking off then were black-pajama-clad Viets, who are now one of our favorite trading partners (at least going by the labels in half my clothes and actual tacticool shit). The Arabs' only beef with us was not letting them finish the job Heydrich started by driving the Jews into the sea, while concurrently pouring BILLIONS of dollars into buying their oil so they could stop living in mud huts, eating camel shit, and fucking their nephews. The buildings they like, the humus and falafel are much preferred, but we still can't seem to separate the men from the boys there without a crowbar. But they all have nice cars now.

And those "Syrian" refugees? Sh'yeah, as if.
A documented 98.something percent of the "refugees" enterring Eurostan are from everywhere BUT Syria. They're only coming for the welfare checks, and to rape the kaffir women, which is why they like the welfare and blondes in Sweden and Germany, and the low-payout and flowing-armpit Italian women not so much. Chaostan is now Europe; the Middle East (apart from Israel, and the low-population high-petrodollar Gulf emirates) was always pretty much a continuous war-torn shithole. So much for Gore's second paragraph.

The terrorism we see now is because we stopped killing them in the Middle East  by the fuckton, and kept letting them out of Gitmo to kill some more of our guys (hey, thanks Barack!). We have a problem because we stopped blasting the fuck out of them, and we and Europe started importing them by the jihadi battalion (literally).
Maybe it slipped everyone's mind, but 9/11 started before we went to Afghanistan and Baghdad at the head of armored columns of good old American BFYTW. After several hundred violations of the GW I armistice, and after a few hundred terrorist incidents going back to the 1960s, FFS. (Pop quiz: Which Arab terrorist assassinated the practical Democrat nominee for President in 1968, what was his last name, and in what American city? Beuller? Beuller...? Ferris Bueller...?)
The terrorism we've seen since is the exact same that we've seen in the Moro uprising in the Philippines in 1899, and from the Barbary pirates in 1800: the same grasping bunch of barely-literate savages, begging the eternal question of Why the FUCK don't we simply nuke their every goddam city, push the survivors into a volcano as an offering to the gods, kill their goats, salt their fields, leave no two stones one atop another, import some buffalo, and let nature try again there in a hundred years ? So much for Gore's third paragraph.

Macbeth was a work of fiction. And launching drones is the American way of war since we had a choice: why risk a man, when you can just send a suitable application of high explosives?

Guilt factor: Zero fucks given.
Doubt me? Look up the world's thinnest books: Regrets About Wiping Out Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki.
Col. Tibbetts' thoughts on the middle one are almost as illuminating as Ground Zero was, 77 years ago on Wednesday after next. You could look it up.

Team America BFYTW, 1945 Edition: Pearl Harbor ring any bells, Tojo?
And the whole crew slept like babies, ever after.
So much for Gore's fourth paragraph.

"Odds are there will be no peace during Trump's tenure either."
When they love their children more than they hate us, there'll be peace. Their call. If that means a bull market on cluster bombs and napalm again, I'll take 100 shares of Fuck All Y'all, and an option on another hundred of Gitmo Was Fantasy Island Compared To What's Next.
So much for Paragraph Five.

Now we move to the Non-Sequitr long jump.
"They will not hesitate to push Enemies of the State, Mass Detention, Concentration Camp, and Execution buttons when the time is right."
Wait, so all that other horseshit was just to set up this punchline?
I saw this show on CNN...repeated endlessly...for the last 25 years.
So just for the helluvit, how about making sure the time for A to become Z is never.
"Rotten government, like rotten fruit, gets more rotten, until it's finally tossed in the trash."
So you already knew the answer when you set up the False Dilemma?? Thanks, Bob. Thanks a lot. Por nada.
So much for Paragraph Six.

Medicare and Social Security conflated with defense spending is like horse-and-chicken soup, at the ratio of 1:1. One horse to one chicken.
Defense spending is the chicken in that dish. We could fight nine more WWIIs on what we owe on Social Security, and cannot pay (ever).
So make up your mind, Robert: are you anti-war, or anti-debt?
They're not in any slight way conjoined at the hip, either.
So much for Paragraph Seven.

The world's peoples are second-rate, envious, and generally not worth a bucket of warm spit, though we've made their lives better in uncountable ways. There's a precedent for this, in both directions.

"...the world's peoples would little mourn the overthrow of the US government by an enraged citizenry.

But that's not going to happen anytime soon."

I'll just leave this here.

(Do they get TV news where you live, Mr. Gore? Just saying.)
So much for paragraph Eight, plus the bonus sentence.

And the conclusion, built on this foundation of steaming guano, slides off the mound of slime and lands where it belongs, toppled, broken, and covered in tailpipe-splatter.

No sale.

There might be a case to make for some point, or points, within this attempted appeal, but not founded on a mound of dung.
Give it to the scarab beetles, and let them make something useful out of it.

And maybe, look at the actual data, and see where it leads, instead of picking a conclusion and trying to cobble facts all cattywampus to try and make them lead you there. It doesn't work out well.

And if I wanted that sort of nonsense, I'd just turn on ABCNNBCBS.


(Don't get me wrong. I like a lot of what RG puts out. But this better be explained by alien body snatchers, or a really good, empty bottle of 50-year-old single malt. Otherwise...