Donald Trump dodged the draft during the Vietnam War by claiming to have “bone spurs.” But now he’s pretending to be a ferocious militarist. Hillary Clinton has never met a war she didn’t like – Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya – but she has to pretend to be a liberal in order to get Democrats to vote for her. What a choice!
A Choice of Two Warmongers
Ted Rall
Ted Rall is a syndicated political cartoonist for Andrews McMeel Syndication, WhoWhatWhy.org and Counterpoint. He is a frequent contributor to The Wall Street Journal, a graphic novelist and author of many books of art and prose, and an occasional war correspondent. He is, recently, the author of the graphic novel "The Stringer."
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Maybe this will cheer you up! I know it improved upon my great mood.
According to the(m) Japanese, I guess he’s their High-Noon huckleberry ~
DanD
Meanwhile, Hillary demands that America give up its gun collection … though she is perfectly fine with “loaning” anybody a gun (or a bazooka, or an F18 fighter-jet with phosphorus bombs and bullets) in order to kill whomever she finds agenda-specific, offensive. Also, she going to make GODDAMN certain that she’s under the personal, private protection of a paramilitary Secret Service (with all the latest in military firearm technology) to protect her and her family (do you believe that she’s not packin’ for the fun of it?) from the people who she’s explosively slaughtering.
First and foremost, Hillary mostly wants to take guns away from all those people that she’s most dangerous to. Whether it’s Hillary, or Trump, or BarryHO, or even Sanders (he is a card-carrying member of the warmonger’s club), they do believe in guns … just not Second-Amendment guns for the general public.
DanD
If I was held hostage in a terror attack, I would rather be inside with a gun and knowing what’s happening, than be waiting inside for three hours or more while wounded and bleeding for police outside to figure out what’s happening.
I’d also rather be defended by an ordinary person with a gun who knows he will be held accountable for his mistakes, instead of a police officer who will get a pass for his fatal mistakes—including shooting me in the name of protecting me. Police get very nervous and spray bullets all over.
When the US stops its murderous rampages all over the world, and blowback reactions are reduced…well, such dreams now sound utopian.
It’s just me. I like to be in control of a situation as much as possible.
I like to have options when facing personal extinction.
We will never have a just government when some lives are privileged and others are forced to be naked before armed aggressors in gun free zones.
“The greatest purveyor of violence in the world : My own Government, I can not be Silent.” —Martin Luther King Jr.
It’s absurd to think that attitudes of the general population can be magically altered merely by crossing imaginary lines drawn by States, their borders usually established by bloody conflict.
Americans are violent and accepting of violence wherever they are; they will not be less violent anywhere if they cannot be less violent everywhere.
Look – Wake up! We can spend all day and miles of keystrokes trying to argue and discuss philosophies, politics, and who is or was the most bad or the best, the worst, etc. The simple fact is that the majority of Americans are completely ignorant – not stupid, but simply ignorant ( and a lot are resist, but so is most of the world). While I don’t agree with all of what Maher says, he is certainly correct in his evaluation of most American citizens – they are mostly dolts and losers!
They are not a minority as a nation, because almost all of the people in the world are the same – even here in the small Baltic nation of Lithuania.
How in the world can you get such a group of ignorant people to even want to wake up and look for information to make a decision or even realize that they need to do this or remain dull slugs?
The reality is that in most circumstances, having a gun during a massacre will lead to you either shooting an innocent person in error, you being shot by the police (or another “good guy” with a gun) in error, or you missing the attacker. Even trained police officers have abysmal hit rates in crises. Some poor bastard gets shot 12 times, but the police fired 44 shots.
I guess figuring that you are going to lose and the other guy is going to kill you anyway is a good enough reason to just give up and decide to die.
I was in a parking lot with a few of the locals when a guy who didn’t like my attitude took out his gun and pointed it at my face.
So I made a bet to myself that he wasn’t going to shoot me with so many witnesses in the daylight.
I pointed my index finger at him so everyone could see my hand was empty, walked toward him saying Bang! Bang! and he lowered the gun.
Someone appreciated my act and did a little arson on his van that night. I never did find out who, but then I never asked anybody either. Bullies smell fear.
Making the adjustment to civilian life wasn’t easy.
But Glenn, your example proves my point. So he’s got a gun pointed at you. What do you do? If you had pulled a gun, he would have shot you in the face. And he would have said, at the trial, “I had him covered, and he drew a gun. Fearing for my life, I had no choice but to kill him.”
I agree that there are circumstances where a gun will save someone’s life. I simply don’t accept the standard premise that a “good guy with a gun” can make a difference most of the time. Usually, that gun simply leads to a terminal escalation of the situation.
A guy and his girlfriend were attacked by some “kids” while walking home from a 4th of July fireworks show about two blocks away from my house.
The guy was a medical technician, which really doesn’t have much to do with the story. The “kids” were going to start college next month.
So the guy pulled out a knife and, as was reported elsewhere, he just kept on stabbing his attackers until they stopped.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/suburbs/park-ridge/news/ct-prh-stabbing-verdict-tl-0319-20150312-story.html
I am always concerned about hurting a stupid kid, but I was once attacked when I was 15 and spent days in and out of consciousness.
I also had a relative and her husband shot on I-57 near Chicago some years back. He died with his face shot off and she had her arm broken by a bullet. She never married again.
I have the greatest respect for people who would rather die than kill someone, but there’s no one size fits all solution to the problem.
Whether to use deadly force is a judgement call and my finger pointing thing wouldn’t work in many, or even most, situations.
I have a lot of empathy for innocent victims and I could go on at length about vicious madness being beyond the reach of reason.
As Dilbert says, the first job of any politician is to get nominated. So no one has any idea what Trump really stands for. He said whatever was necessary to get nominated, and (since he succeeded) he did a great job of it.
Someone did a count, and 75% of Trump’s statements were doveish, and 25% were hawkish. So does one believe the 75% that the US made a yuge mistake going into the MENA, and should withdraw immediately, if not sooner, or the 25% where Trump says we must send the US Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines to kill everyone in the MENA and thereby destroy the Daesh?
Secretary Clinton is much more consistent. We know that, as soon as she takes office, she’ll send the US military to kill the evil Syrian dictator who has murdered 300,000 innocent, unarmed, peaceful protesters. Of course, the evil dictator Putin says he will not allow anyone to overthrow the legitimate government of Syria that has valiantly tried to stop the evil jihadists who have killed 300,000 innocent civilians and the Syrian armed forces who tried to protect them.
Given the choice between the only two viable candidates, does one pick Billary, with solid experience bringing peace, prosperity, and democracy to Iraq and Libya, or for Trump, with no experience and only crazy proposals that got him the requisite Republican primary votes?
The answer is obvious to anyone with an IQ having 2 or more digits: book a seat on that one-way trip to Mars, and demand a flight that leaves before 2017!
And one more thing. I wonder if anyone’s done the odds on whether Trump will actually get to be nominated. I’m thinking the Republicans will simply invoke some magical thinking and replace him with someone that will not just give Hillary a run for her money but beat her by a country mile.
I heard of a draft Mitt Romney option.
http://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2016/03/03/mitt-romney-donald-trump/
Mitt Romney is just Hillary Clinton with different trim.
No. Mitt Romney is the Republican that the Republican Party can rally around. Once Trump is removed — by fair means or foul — the Republicans will put up the candidate that EVERYONE in the Republican Party will vote for. Hillary will lose. Depending on Trump’s veep selection, the same result could occur, with the Republicans choking down the Trump Pill in the expectation that he’ll either resign or be pushed out in four years, leaving the veep to take the next two terms.
Hillary is the big money facilitator.
Romney is the big money beneficiary.
Big money is war money.
I would like to to see Trump win just to see if any Democratic Party voters will remember how the Democratic Party made friends with Bush W after vilifying him as if he were Satan incarnate to the point of embracing his war, surveillance, and…too many policies to list here.
I would love to see Trump win if I thought the Democratic party would use him as an organizing focal point to revitalize the party in the interest of the common people.
The difference between Rs and Ds goes no further than style.
«No. Mitt Romney is the Republican that the Republican Party can rally around.» Surely you jest, alex_the_tired ? Willard Mitt Romney is Thomas Edmund Dewey 2.0 – the little man on the wedding cake (despite lacking the mustache)….
Henri
“Donald Trump dodged the draft … But now he’s pretending to be a ferocious militarist”
In so doing, he upholds the proud tradition of Republican Chicken Hawks. Go Team!
Bill called Trump shortly before Trump declared as a candidate for the Republican nomination. Google Perot ’92 election, and the top 10 results say, ‘All experts wrong. Perot drew votes away from Clinton. Had Perot not run, Clinton would have had a solid majority.’
But most Perot supporters were WASP men. As are most Trump supporters. Republicans are saying, ‘Vote for Hillary, the real Republican in the race.’
So almost all African-Americans, Hispanic Americans, and women over 40 will vote for Hillary. And she’ll win.
And then she’ll do what Obama should have done but did not:: remove the evil dictators from Syria, Iran, Russia, North Korea, and China.
«And then she’ll do what Obama should have done but did not:: remove the evil dictators from Syria, Iran, Russia, North Korea, and China.» A consummation. Devoutly to be wished….
Henri
“And then she’ll do what Obama should have done but did not:: remove the evil dictators from Syria, Iran, Russia, North Korea, and China.” in a great atomic war conflagration.
And so for one joyous last moment earth will celebrate all evil finally purged; and we, our deluded species, can then savor the sweetness of our final resting into eternity.
Except for the evil plotting bastards hiding in their paid-for-by-taxes bomb shelters.
Ha!
Evil wins again.
The upside, Glenn, is that these people will never be able to emerge from those bomb shelters, and that -as anyone who has experience of technique will realise – maintenance problems will soon start to turn up, with no technicians around to help, So after a period of time, some other species will take advantage of the opportunity provided by the extinction event caused by our thermonuclear conflagration and begin to expand and diversify, just as the placental mammals did after the K-T extinction event. How evil they will turn out to be is, of course, another question….
Henri
Ted, the chap at the lower right of the frame reading a tabloid with a «Trump» headline – is that Bernard Sanders ?…
Henri
That’s one critical point of differentiation between the two “presumptive” presidential candidates:
WWIII by accident or on purpose.