Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Let’s finish the job.

Accused of treason; bitches about the ratings. I am in awe.

Tick tock motherfuckers!

Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

Historically it was a little unusual for the president to be an incoherent babbling moron.

Is it negotiation when the other party actually wants to shoot the hostage?

Peak wingnut was a lie.

I like you, you’re my kind of trouble.

This blog will pay for itself.

Come on, media. you have one job. start doing it.

“Squeaker” McCarthy

You don’t get to peddle hatred on saturday and offer condolences on sunday.

Infrastructure week. at last.

Whatever happens next week, the fight doesn’t end.

Nancy smash is sick of your bullshit.

Schmidt just says fuck it, opens a tea shop.

Battle won, war still ongoing.

Republicans are radicals, not conservatives.

This has so much WTF written all over it that it is hard to comprehend.

Let us savor the impending downfall of lawless scoundrels who richly deserve the trouble barreling their way.

No offense, but this thread hasn’t been about you for quite a while.

A democracy can’t function when people can’t distinguish facts from lies.

Something needs to be done about our bogus SCOTUS.

if you can’t see it, then you are useless in the fight to stop it.

You are here: Home / Past Elections / Election 2016 / Open Thread: Trust Fox News to Ask, and the Trump Campaign to Answer…

Open Thread: Trust Fox News to Ask, and the Trump Campaign to Answer…

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Hand-picked-by-Fox-News correspondent Hugh Hewitt cunningly asked The Donald about the “nuclear triad” during the last GOP debate, and it was clear that Trump wasn’t sure whether the phrase referred to foreign affairs or American’s Next Great Bake-Off. Now, of course, all the Repubs are strutting for the cameras, explaining how they will triad anybody so much as side-eyes Heartland America(tm), no lie. Which is not at all what the busy little minds in Ailes’ shop had in mind, oh my however could one cast such aspersions on their asparagus?…

(… also, notice they sent the “chick” out to take the heat, she said…)

Reader Interactions

76Comments

  1. 1.

    Peale

    Listen, libtards. I’m tired of hearing about becarful this and cities destroyed that. We haven’t used any nuclear weapons for 70 years and it hasn’t gotten us anything. How can you even be sure Russia would be able to fire back?

  14. 14.

    David Koch

    how can you be 69 years old, raised during the cold war, attended a military prep school, and never heard or read the phrase nuclear triad? Especially given the vast amount of cable news Trump watches.

  15. 15.

    Mike J

    @Mnemosyne:

    Wingnuts are apparently unaware that radioactive crude oil is useless.

    If you want to drive up the price per bbl of American crude, make everybody else’s radioactive.

  19. 19.

    Mandalay

    It’s probably tough for anyone here to get too excited about it on a Friday night, but MoveOn has a worthy petition right now: “Debbie Wasserman Schultz: Give the voter file back to Bernie Sanders’ campaign”.

    They currently have 243k signatures, with a goal of 250k, so if you have any harsh feelings towards the vile DWS please sign it.

  20. 20.

    Amir Khalid

    @Adam L Silverman:
    Like Silent Night, it sounds better in the original German:

    99 Kriegsminister
    Streichholz und Benzinkanister
    Hielten sich für schlaue Leute
    Witterten schon fette Beute
    Riefen “Krieg” und wollten Macht
    Man, wer hätte das gedacht?
    Dass es einmal sowas kommt
    Wegen 99 Luftballons
    Wegen 99 Luftballons
    99 Luftballons

  21. 21.

    max

    @srv: You probably know all the words to 99 Luft Balloons in the original German

    Here’s the updated version with all the lyrics. Printed. On screen, even.

    and now pine for the triad

    I got to wonderin’ about that, because as I recall, the conservatives made a big deal about restarting the B-1 project during the 1980. (Because Carter had canceled it and authorized what became the B-2 project. And in fact, the Reagan administration, did reactivate the B-1B project, and eventually built the B-2 as well, demonstrating that bad decisions were made all around.) At any rate, Digby had posted a Ben Shapiro tweet about Reagan didn’t know about the triad and that didn’t matter – what mattered was that he had good values and Trump did not, or something. So I went looking to see if I could find any speeches about it. I did not find any BUT (and keeping in mind that Reagan announced for President on 11/13/1979), I did find this:

    On July 31, 1979, Anderson accompanied Reagan from Los Angeles to the NORAD base in Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado. The visit had been arranged by a Hollywood screenwriter and producer, Douglas Morrow, whom Reagan had known for some years, and Morrow came along on the trip. NORAD, Anderson explains, “is the nerve center of a far-flung, world-wide network of radar detectors that alerts us to any surprise attack.” Its computers, he writes, would track a Soviet missile from its launch pad and give the President the facts he would have to rely on in deciding whether to launch a retaliatory strike. As for the command post, it is “a vast underground city, a multi-level maze of rooms and corridors carved deep into the solid granite core of Cheyenne Mountain,” with “a massive steel door several feet thick.” Once inside these portals, the visitors spent most of the day in a series of windowless conference rooms listening to briefings on the nuclear capabilities of the U.S. and the Soviet Union and on the means for detecting a nuclear attack. Towards the end of the day they were ushered into the command center, “a very large room several stories high,” which looked “just like such command centers do in the movies.” A huge display screen with an outline map of the United States covered one end of the room, and in front of it, facing video display screens with dozens of switches and lights, were “the young men and women who constantly monitor these displays for the first sign of a nuclear attack.” Later the visitors talked with the base commander, General James Hill, and the discussion turned to the issue of what could be done if the Soviets fired just one missile at an American city. Hill replied that they could track the missile but that nothing could be done to stop it.

    On the flight home to Los Angeles, Reagan, according to Anderson, seemed deeply concerned about what he had heard. “He couldn’t believe the United States had no defense against Soviet missiles. He slowly shook his head and said, ‘We have spent all that money and have all that equipment, and there is nothing we can do to prevent a nuclear missile from hitting us.'” Towards the end of the flight he reflected on the terrible dilemma that would face a U.S. president if, for whatever reason, nuclear missiles were fired at the United States and concluded, “We should have some way of defending ourselves against nuclear missiles.”

    […]

    Of course, looked at in a certain way, the story is pure comedy. To read it literally, Reagan did not understand that the U.S. relied on deterrence until eighteen months before becoming President of the United States. Taken to NORAD by a Hollywood screenwriter, he discovered to his amazement that ballistic missiles could not be stopped in mid-flight. While in the grip of this revelation, he was told by an economist from the Hoover Institution — and one of the architects of Reaganomics — that there might be a way to stop them. Then the economist, who apparently did not know why Nixon and his successors failed to pursue the idea of missile defenses, went off and wrote a memo proposing that the candidate call for a change in the entire strategic posture of the United States. Reagan was thrilled, and had it not been for his political advisers, he might have gone along with the idea — and possibly lost the election.

    So I believe young Ben there was correct – Reagan started out pig ignorant about nuclear weapons and the defense posture of the United States, presumably including the triad. On the other hand, he did get elected and did nearly help blow up the world in 1983 during Able Archer! So I guess Donald Trump is a Reagan-like figure in that sense.

    max
    [‘What an interesting, yet incredibly boring world we live in.’]

  23. 23.

    Applejinx

    @Mandalay: That should probably be in the relevant thread, but it’s cool to see how big the petition has become. I think it’s a great idea to blow off steam on such a petition: it sends a message but we can also put it behind us when things clear up, without too much trouble. I signed it too :)

  25. 25.

    kindness

    What will define Peak Chest Puffing by these people? And these are those folks ‘leaders’ for gods sake.

  31. 31.

    FlyingToaster

    @srv:

    You probably know all the words to 99 Luft Balloons in the original German

    Doesn’t everyone? I saw 10000 Maniacs live in 1985 (under REM headlining), though in Bloomington they sang in English.

    However, I admit, I’m a pro; I sing Falco in the original German (well, östereichischer Deutsch). Alles Klar, Herr Kommissar?

    and now pine for the triad

    What are you smoking? Nobody but airheads at FoxNoise pine for triads, and I’m sure they’re actually thinking “three-way”.

    and a No-Fly Zone in Syria.

    That’s a buzzword thing. Politicians (left and right) say this shit because it polls well.

    No Fly Zones only work if there’s a large indigenous population you want to protect. Anywhere Daesh controls, the people we would want to protect are few, in hiding, on the run, or gone.

    Shrub’s worked over Kurdistan and the Chaldees — until the Iraq stopped having a central government worth mentioning and then militias and tribal patriarchs started thinking about the color of the sky thirteen hundred years ago when those guys ancestors done their ancestors wrong…

    The inanity.

    I know you’re here to troll, but quit putting words in our mouths. The insanity on your side of the aisle is just fucking breathtaking. As in “vacuum sucking the air out of my lungs” breathtaking.

  32. 32.

    Davebo

    @Mnemosyne:

    If radioactive crude becomes useless and pushes oil up to $70 a barrel I’m all for it!

    Then again, I have ulterior motives….

    I paid $1.68 for gas yesterday and cursed the whole time I was pumping it.

  39. 39.

    liberal

    @max:

    …he did get elected and did nearly help blow up the world in 1983 during Able Archer!

    This cannot be emphasized enough.

  42. 42.

    Davebo

    @BillinGlendaleCA:

    Price too low. We’ve fracked ourselves into losing over 250,000 jobs. I know, the market at work. But my business depends to a great extent on overseas deepwater exploration and that shit has gone down the drain.

    $120 a barrel was just silly but seriously, couldn’t we all live with $70 a barrel?

  43. 43.

    liberal

    @Davebo:
    What does Saudi Arabia deciding to maintain market share by pumping more out of the ground have to do with “teh market”?

  45. 45.

    Steeplejack

    @amk:

    Speaking of which, has anyone else been having problems with The Other Chuck’s MBBJ script? I did a Firefox update a few days ago, and that—or something—seems to have broken MBBJ for me (under Win10). But with all the changes happening constantly to this site I don’t know for sure that that is the problem.

  46. 46.

    Adam L Silverman

    @max: And so the same folks that came up with trickle down also invented missile defense. Not like there wasn’t a physicist somewhere who was a registered Republican in 1979.

    As for Able Archer, its not that simple. Yes it brought us far to close to the brink of war, but a good chunk of that was because the Soviet intel folks couldn’t process that it was 1983s version of an annual exercise. Could we have handled things a bit better? Sure. Was it all our fault? No.

    We used to show the students in our seminar at USAWC this documentary on it:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ciy5R-tLiE

    Its very good.

  47. 47.

    Davebo

    @liberal:

    Saudi Arabia is just trying to keep up. You really can’t blame them, or Brazil, or Venezuela.

    And the Saudi’s aren’t pumping more out of the ground, they just refused to pump less.

    If, for instance, you had a business that made and sold shoes and the price of shoes fell through the floor could anyone blame you if you refused to cut down on your shoe production?

    Some see the massive drop in oil prices as a good thing and I understand that. But don’t blame OPEC.

  48. 48.

    liberal

    @Davebo: I’m just saying there’s nothing “market” about it, in the usual sense of a competitive market with many buyers and sellers.

  49. 49.

    FlyingToaster

    @Omnes Omnibus: I know, it’s a Nena song, I never got to see them live (dammit, being one of the siblings who didn’t live in Europe). There was a band before 10KManiacs who did a cover — in German — but I don’t remember the name of that band. Yet another midwestern bar band. Since I and the housemates all took German, we really enjoyed it.

  50. 50.

    beltane

    @Mandalay: Though I don’t usually sign online petitions, I had to sign this one. The 2016 election is not such a sure thing that DWS can afford to treat any Democrat as the enemy. Too bad she is averse to treating Republicans this way.

  53. 53.

    liberal

    @Adam L Silverman:

    Yes it brought us far to close to the brink of war, but a good chunk of that was because the Soviet intel folks couldn’t process that it was 1983s version of an annual exercise.

    Glad to know we have a Reagan apologist on board here.

  54. 54.

    liberal

    @Davebo: LOL. A “pure market” where one supplier has this amount of influence on price?

    You might know a lot about oil exploration, but you certainly know nothing about economics.

  55. 55.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @liberal: Right. Saying something is a bit more complicated than “Reagan nearly blew up the world” equals being a Reagan apologist. Get a fucking grip.

  56. 56.

    Adam L Silverman

    @liberal: Not apologizing for him. This happened when he was president. But given that it was a multinational exercise, that it occurred the same time every year, and that while what was going on within the exercise was classified, the fact that we did an exercise every year was not, Soviet overreaction carries some of the blame. Not sure how explaining what happened is an apology, but okay. Regardless, watch the documentary. Its very well done.

  57. 57.

    amk

    @Steeplejack: Try updating the script (in addons). After alain, the fixer, did his job, the back button went all screwy and toc fixed it with the update. I am also on W10 so for once we can’t blame bill for this fuckup.

  58. 58.

    seaboogie

    This is maybe a good thread to comment that I have noticed that there is a not insignificant number of commenters who studied German and retain a working knowledge of it – more than any other language ever mentioned. What is up with that? Are there words/concepts that are better expressed in German than in other languages?

    I studied French and am still semi-fluent, and notice nary a reference to it here.

    ETA: I’ll give you Schadenfreude, esp. with the Shrkeli news this week….

  59. 59.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @seaboogie: The German speakers are the types who would violate Belgian neutrality at the drop of a hat.* Just saying. N’est-ce pas?

    *Yeah, especially that Amir character.

    ETA: French cycles around every once in while – often if Yutsano and I are both around on the night shift.

  60. 60.

    Steeplejack (phone)

    @amk:

    There has been no update to MBBJ since November 19. I was/am current with that.

    Note: I’m talking about MBBJ, not EBBJ (which I haven’t installed).

  61. 61.

    Mandalay

    @Mike J:

    Promise to stop committing crimes, we’ll give back the file.

    Actually I’m glad that it has happened. About nine thousand people have signed the petition in the past eighty minutes, and MoveOn has raised the goal to 275k signatures.

    This incident will just wake more people up to the fact that DWS is a vile piece of shit who is a huge liability to the party.

  62. 62.

    Arcadia Berger

    @Davebo: What we really need to do is stop thinking of coal and oil as “fossil fuels”.
    There are so many nifty things we could be doing with the precious remaining stocks of fossil carbon besides burning them up.

  63. 63.

    max

    @Adam L Silverman: And so the same folks that came up with trickle down also invented missile defense. Not like there wasn’t a physicist somewhere who was a registered Republican in 1979.

    Well, they also missed on the ABM treaty (and why it had been signed) and why Nike Zeus never paid off (same reasons the second and third go-rounds never paid). It was a raison looking d’etre.

    As for Able Archer, its not that simple. Yes it brought us far to close to the brink of war, but a good chunk of that was because the Soviet intel folks couldn’t process that it was 1983s version of an annual exercise. Could we have handled things a bit better? Sure. Was it all our fault? No.

    Urmmm. Hrmm. Yes and no. Yes, it was an annual exercise and the Russians misread the situation. But there are two reasons for that – the first reason is that when Hitler was building up German forces in the east to prepare for Barbarossa, he gave the Russians the excuse that it was a deception exercise aimed at Great Britain and they never forgot that. The second reason goes back to the R shenanigans of the late 70’s starting with the Team B exercise conducted by the neo-cons that said Soviet forces were much more powerful and dangerous than the CIA gave them credit for. (Team B was wrong.) Brought to you by the same folks that brought you Iraq, interestingly enough.

    At any rate, the US started building up forces more during Carter’s term and went overboard with it during the first part of Reagan’s term, based almost entirely on the presumption that the Russians intended to fight a nuclear war (they didn’t), and that the Russians intended to move against Western Europe. The Russians had no such intentions – they believed they were slowly eating away at the American position around the world and were thus winning. Fighting in Europe would result in a nuclear war (they believed) so they never had any intention of attacking NATO.

    Combined with the very bellicose talk that developed around Reagan’s victory in 1980 the Soviets got nervous and started believing the US intended to fight a nuclear war (fair’s fair – some of the hard right type and the neo-cons were totally down with the idea and always had been). In that context Able Archer occurred and the Soviets misread the situation, which Reagan did not understand until 1985.

    A miniature version of that very escapade occurred in 2008 when the US accepted the Baltic states into NATO and promised Poland a missile defense battery, supposedly to defend against the Iranians (!!!). (The Russians looks at it as a medium range nuclear missile battery.) That was the point at which American-Russian relations turned really sour and the Russians began ramping up their defenses and preparing much more heavily for future conflict (a stance they have maintained for some years now).

    Which takes up into the situation in Ukraine via a long and meandering path.

    max
    [‘And Chris Christie wants to shoot down some Russian planes. That should go well.’]

  66. 66.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @seaboogie: Well, I use French when it’s appropriate, n’cest ce pas but there are some things that the Germans have words for that just don’t work as well in English. To be fair, my knowledge of German is much better than my knowledge of French or Spanish, which I have also studied. Probably because I spent three years in Germany being the chief translator for everyone setting up a hail and farewell off base.

  69. 69.

    Dmbeaster

    @srv:

    You probably know all the words to 99 Luft Balloons in the original German and now pine for the triad and a No-Fly Zone in Syria.

    The inanity.

    OK. You couldnt type inanity and be high, so I am going with stupid.

  70. 70.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @Omnes Omnibus: Well, yeah. I did a lot of coordination for this huge party for our sister battalion of the Bundeswehr and got mad props from my battalion commander for it. It had a wild west theme, and the Germans are REALLY into wild west stuff. We had cap guns and hats and just about everything.

    Also, too, “Dance Little Bird”.

  71. 71.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Villago Delenda Est: I spent a year on brigade staff where that kind of shit came into play. Protocol is so fun. Is a German Prince seated higher than a lord mayor?* Oddly there is actually a way to play that out (the US Embassy helped).

    *Titles translated in English.

  72. 72.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @Omnes Omnibus: I was the only officer even close to being a fluent speaker of German in both my first battalion, a division signal battalion, and my SigO job with the infantry. So it fell on me to help out whoever was the officer stuck with arranging a hail and farewell off base.

  73. 73.

    Joey Maloney

    99 dead baboons
    Sitting in my living room
    How I’m glad that they’re not apes
    ‘Cause apes they would clash with my drapes…

    Sorry, random neuron fire.

  75. 75.

    newtons third

    I find it interesting that Hewitt defined the Triad during the questions. From the Washington Post transcript:
    HEWITT: Mr. Trump…

    (APPLAUSE)

    … Dr. Carson just referenced the single most important job of the president, the command, the control and the care of our nuclear forces. And he mentioned the triad. The B-52s are older than I am. The missiles are old. The submarines are aging out. It’s an executive order. It’s a commander-in-chief decision.

    What’s your priority among our nuclear triad?

    And he still could not answer coherently. Even Rubio a few moments later more precisely defined the Triad. How hard is it for Trump to count and break down the word Triad to know that there are three things in it?

  76. 76.

    The Other Chuck

    @Steeplejack (phone): I just updated MBBJ yesterday. Since the site’s moved over to https, stylish is probably not checking for an update when the site doesn’t match. If that’s the case, you’ll need to update it by hand this one time.

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