Friday open thread: Meanwhile, in cloud cuckoo land
So, this happened on the floor of the House yesterday:
Firstly: "Colored people". Yeah, 1953 called, and they said to cut that shit out.Crane: My amendment has nothing to do with whether or not colored people or black people or anybody can serve.
— Acyn (@Acyn) July 13, 2023
Beatty: I would like those words stricken from the record pic.twitter.com/K83Q2ls7aS
But over and above that: Here we are again treated that the Russians and Chinese militaries mock us because we worry about "pronouns".
Let's review. The US is spending less on the military as a percentage of GDP in decades. Yes, we outspend the next top ten militaries. But we're doing that with a far smaller portion of our economy. We're pummeling the Russians with basically loose change found in the country's sofa cushions. And the last time the Chinese fought a foreign opponent, the Vietnamese kicked their asses. The world is getting an up-close and personal display of US military hardware in Ukraine. I somehow doubt that our adversaries think they will meet a military full of effete soldiers. If anything, many are rethinking their strategies, and their ideological premises that the US is a declining power.
This obsession which the right has in painting the military as weak and ineffective, distracted by culture wars, is projection. The military is not concerned with the culture wars. The military is projecting US power and foreign policy effectively, so much so that the one-time "world's second military" is being decimated on the battlefield by US weapons. And because I never get tired of showing this video, this is what the US military did to Russians in a direct engagement:
To be fair, drag queens would have probably left none of them alive.
The likes of Eli Crane live in a weird bubble which bears no relationship to reality. As I've written before, the US military is the most dominant in human history. There is no part of the world to which we cannot project power. And that is due, in part, to its diversity. Unlike the Russian army, American soldiers are trained to take initiative and exploit openings. This "woke" military would destroy Russian conventional forces within weeks, if not days. And the Russians know this.
Mr. Crane, who was a Navy SEAL, dishonors himself and the military he served. But that's par for the course nowadays. There are no patriots in the Republican Party.
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