they all limited their criticism to INCOMPETENCE, never war crimes

That reminds me of an interesting moment in an interview earlier this week (arc)

NPR’s Steve Inskeep speaks with former Pentagon spokesman John Ullyot about articles of impeachment brought against Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.

…

INSKEEP: … Now, I want to take seriously, though, this suggestion that you mentioned, Hegseth saying, if you come after me, you’re coming after the troops; if I broke the law, the troops broke the law; if I committed war crimes, the troops committed war crimes. Let’s just look at that for a moment. Do you believe that is accurate? If, as Thomas Massie says, this is an illegal war waged without proper authority from Congress, is everybody in the military guilty of a crime?

ULLYOT: No. That’s obviously a bogus accusation there because the troops are following lawful orders, or what they believe are lawful orders. And they’re told by their commanders. And so nobody’s going to be going after the troops or military.

Ullyot is a dumbass who really needs to read up on the Nuremberg trials and international law, because he’s 100% wrong about “just following orders” being an acceptable excuse, but American society is really not prepared to have this conversation, so we just talk about incompetence and never war crimes

I don’t think the New York Times knows what the word “quietly” means

I’m sure a Republican led investigation will hold people accountable /s

I think I’m the opposite of pessimistic, I believe we can do better than we are when it comes to making Pete Hegseth have a bad day. Still probably an annoying little shit, but not a pessimist!

Is he though? He just beat impeachment and I really doubt he sees any consequences from this

“I have very aspirational dreams and hopes for immigration reform. But I am also a pragmatist. And as we have – as we continue to have – Donald Trump in the White House, and without a supermajority in the Senate, we need Republican support. So any comprehensive immigration reform must be bipartisan,” said congresswoman Veronica Escobar

Reading collaborator bullshit like this it’s looking like the best we can hope for is that nothing at all happens from this and a Dem who isn’t a fucking idiot works with other Dems to craft some actually decent legislation

If they actually gave a shit about vets and service members skipping out on this vote was a pretty terrible way to demonstrate that

Honestly, fair

The fact that it’s bipartisan is pretty outrageous

It’s like a backwards Mitch Hedberg routine

defensive munitions,

If those munitions are so defensive why don’t we give them to the Palestinians and Iranians and Yemeni and Somali and etc.? Also, any aid we’re giving them is freeing up money they’d otherwise have to spend on those things to spend on offensive genocidal weapons instead

He refused in debate to call the conflict in Gaza a genocide

Yep, and this is a massive tell. He’s controlled by people who won’t let him say that. They’ll let him ramble out a convoluted meaningless cop-out sentence that everybody can hear what they want to hear in (e.g. the left can hear him saying “violated the law” and think he’s going to try to do something about it, but genocide supporters hear “Israeli forces” and can tell themselves it’s just a few bad apples and they were justified anyway because they were “prosecuting a war” and not just genocidally shooting fish in a barrel), but he can’t just say “genocide” like everyone else does because the point is to disrupt and disorganized resistance to Israel’s genocide.

So it actually seems like ideologically he is totally OK with the genocide in Gaza and has worked to disguise the material support he’s provided for Israel to make that material support more politically durable.

I think he’s toeing the line of calling it what it is since he represents Georgia.

Yeah, I’m sure conservatives in Georgia just love spending money on foreign wars on behalf of a Jewish state /s

Supporting Israel is about not pissing off donors or ending up on the bad side of the national security state, who can and will do opposition research and counter messaging against politicians who threaten their interests. Voter preferences aren’t part of the equation.

So what’s next? They gonna try to get people to clap for Jeb again? The only reason Trump was successful in the first place was because basically everyone hates everything the Republicans stand for. The only reason we keep forgetting that is because the Democratic party’s leadership is so incredibly awful.

When Hakeem Jeffries says stuff like this it’s terrifying because he’s a scumbag corporate sell-out, but when Dr. Abdul says it I’m on board and can’t wait to see what he comes up with, because he actually seems like a good dude we can trust to negotiate for us instead of corporate paymasters

Too bad Ossoff doesn’t have enough of a backbone to stand up to Israel

I mean, good legislation is good legislation regardless of who signs it, but like you said I don’t think he’s actually going to do that

May as well pretend to offer a carrot

This will not build political capital, this will spend our political capital for absolutely nothing. Voters do not want us to be bipartisan and compromise right now, they want us to inflict some of the pain that’s been inflicted on them into the people who have inflicted it

until it’s too late for another Jan6 attempt, there’s two full years to use the stick.

Hmm, OK, you might have a point in this very specific scenario. I still maintain that it will be a PR disaster with our voters, and I’m not sure the GOP has another Jan6 in them with how beaten down they seemed this week, but yeah ensuring a peaceful transfer of power is important and might require a different approach than governing will.

Literally what election result is this based on? As far as I can tell, “we tried to be nice but failed to get anything done” has lost every single election since like Carter. Like, Trump won general elections because he was an asshole to his opponents and people are that up because it made him seem genuine and like he’d be an effective fighter on behalf of the people who supported him. Promising to be nice to people you are simultaneously arguing (correctly) are corrupt fascists doesn’t make you seem reasonable, it make you seem like you’re full of shit and just don’t believe anything.

If we go down that path we’ll get another Trump within 20 years and we may not come back from the next one. Trump is just a symptom, the real disease afflicting this country is the party of Goldwater, Nixon, Reagan, Bush, and countless other traitors. Until that organization is broken every victory we see is just the country getting lucky while playing Russian roulette.

In January 2015, Trannyshack was renamed “Mother” and started taking place at Oasis, a San Francisco gay club owned by Heklina. The reason for the name change was out of respect for the transgender community, who were critical of the use of the word “tranny” as being offensive.

I think there’s a generational difference on what words are or are not slurs. Like, at one point I ended up in a conversation with a friend’s very chill but 70+ year old parents and they couldn’t believe I used the word “queer” to describe somebody because that was a slur to them, but they also thought calling that person “fruity” was totally OK, which definitely made me feel uncomfortable.

There are literal years worth of reasons Tim Scott is a shitbag nobody should ever brag about being willing to work with, this was just the most recent example