DL Open Thread Sunday, August 15, 2021
One of them finally spilled the beans. A congressional aide told journalist Julia Ioffe the reason Republican politicians are getting their own constituents killed:
About a month ago, I was talking to a pretty senior Hill aide on the Republican side. Vaccinated, everybody in his shop was vaccinated. I said, ‘What is the deal, why are you doing is this? It’s your own constituency you’re killing.’ And he said they just want to make Biden look bad. They want the crisis to happen on Biden’s watch so that he does not get the credit for the vaccine that they felt Trump should get the credit for. That’s it. I mean, my jaw hit the floor and I had to work to get it back up.”
Infrastructure bill punditry abounds. Alex Pareene thinks the drawn-out process, far from a bipartisan triumph, shows the Senate is a broken institution. Will Bunch notes that though much of Biden’s plan benefits blue-collar workers, he’s getting no polling bump from blue-collar whites. But he concludes it’s worth doing anyway because so much of the blue-collar workforce isn’t white anymore.
What is it with Republicans and the sex trafficking of minors? It’s almost like someone’s running a pedophile ring out of the basement of Matt Gaetz’s fraternity house or something. The latest arrests include a young lady who was just named, and quickly unnamed, head of her campus branch of college Republicans.
The Taliban is quickly taking over Afghanistan, and I still can’t figure out why I”m supposed to give a shit. Because some Muslim fanatics might attack the United States? What would be the point? The country is destroying itself just fine without them.
The floor’s yours.
The collapse of the so-called Afghan government was gonna happen regardless of who was in the White House when we finally left there.
We just learned, a couple of decades later, what the Russians already knew:
You break it, you bought it. We never should’ve been there.
I want to be spared the avalanche of articles explaining how things would have gone better if we had done this, that or the other thing differently. No, they wouldn’t. This has been the result of every military intervention we have been involved in since World War II.
We keep thinking we can nation-build with military force. Apparently it’s like trickle-down economics — no matter how many times it’s proved to not work, we proceed as if we didn’t already know that.
I think the swiftness of the collapse of the Afghan government after the USA withdraw indicates that the Taliban had considerable support among the Afghan people and within the military forces.
The New York Times has an article about Lindsey Graham that reveals Graham tried to call Joe Biden to make up for his attack on Hunter during the campaign, but Joe was having none of it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/14/us/politics/lindsey-graham-donald-trump.html
You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make them drink. After 20 years we once again discovered that other tribes have their own ideas about governing. The Afghan military did not have the will to defend the democracy they did not own or want. When push came to shove, they simply caved. Everyone it was going to happen.
In the small world category, we were at our beach club in San Bruno, Yucatan and met a family from Mexico City who had relocated to Merida. The wife happens to be a former classmate and good friend of Lisa Rochester. I explained that even though Delaware is a small state, I didn’t know her or run in her circles. Still, it’s a small world.
Good to hear from you, glad to hear things are well.
Or, as Paul Owens once said of his Phillies, “you can lead a horse to water but you can’t stick his fucking head in it.” Not positive he said “fucking,” but I like to think he did.
I checked it with Bill Conlin, the source of the quote. The actual quote was “…you can’t stick the dumb son of a bitch’s head in it.” The subject of the quote was Marty Bystrom.