Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

There are a lot more evil idiots than evil geniuses.

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.

Oh FFS you might as well trust a 6-year-old with a flamethrower.

We still have time to mess this up!

He seems like a smart guy, but JFC, what a dick!

Damn right I heard that as a threat.

with the Kraken taking a plea, the Cheese stands alone.

A thin legal pretext to veneer over their personal religious and political desires.

If you thought you’d already seen people saying the stupidest things possible on the internet, prepare yourselves.

The rest of the comments were smacking Boebert like she was a piñata.

If you are still in the gop, you are either an extremist yourself, or in bed with those who are.

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

The choice is between normal and crazy.

Biden: Oh no. We’ve upset Big Pharma again.

“The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.”

Following reporting rules is only for the little people, apparently.

Of course you can have champagne before noon. That’s why orange juice was invented.

Roe isn’t about choice, it’s about freedom.

Schmidt just says fuck it, opens a tea shop.

The frogs are rarely mistaken.

The US Supreme Court is on the ballot in november.

… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact

The new republican ‘Pastor’ of the House is an odious authoritarian little creep.

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

You are here: Home / Absent Friends / As Veterans Day Comes to an End

Reader Interactions

57Comments

  1. 1.

    Miss Bianca

    Day is done, doggies snoring…been thinking about my grandfather all day…how appalled he would have been to have to serve under a President Trump.

  4. 4.

    Major Major Major Major

    I always enjoyed this retelling of Daniel Inouye’s big day. Um, NSFW.

    All told, he had killed 25 Germans and wounded 8 more, and he’d literally done it all single-handedly. When the men in his unit came to the hospital and recounted the events to Inouye, his exact words were, “No, that can’t be… you’d have to be insane to do all that.”

    No shit.

  12. 12.

    Gin & Tonic

    While I appreciate those who served in causes worth serving, not all military efforts were the same, morally. We do not particularly observe this day, as my family’s history with respect to the armed forces of nation-states is … um … complex. While I have relatives who took up arms, their service was … different.

    Maybe it’s time for bed.

  14. 14.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Gin & Tonic: No worries. These things are always complicated. The last three names on that list were my counterparts that never made it back. They were civilians and, because our program was, at that point, an experiment contractors. But they were willing to put their lives on the line. The first two on the list are actual, in the traditional usage here in the US sense of the term, veterans. And is the day to thank those for their service or to memorialize it and those that have and survived and have and didn’t or is the latter only Memorial Day? We do symbolism really well in the US. Meaning and nuance not so much.

  15. 15.

    NotMax

    @efgoldman

    At his campaign events he would gleefully recount the tale of when he came upon the dead body of an anonymous French woman and how he cut her finger off to get a ring, which he wore on a chain around his neck. Then he’d would reach under his shirt and pull it out to show.

    Lost any respect I might have had for him the first time witnessed him relishing sharing the story.

  21. 21.

    Mnemosyne

    @Adam L Silverman:

    Nope — it’s a New Zealand actress named Rachel House. All of the voice actors except one have at least some Polynesian heritage, so House is part Maori. The guy who plays Moana’s father is also Maori, and was in a couple of the “Star Wars” prequels.

    The accents are kind of all over the place, but I’m okay with that.

  22. 22.

    Mary G

    @Miss Bianca: Obama has done such a good job getting most of our troops home, or at least mostly out of harm’s way. Ugh.

    Here’s my military story. I grew up just north of a Marine base. My dad was an Episcopalian priest and he was determined to get some of them to come to church, even though the parishioners would rather have not. He would go to the bus station and hand out his card and promise them a Sunday lunch after service at our house. He got a few, and since my mom was an amazing cook, they kept coming.

    My poor dad was so disappointed, so mom, a very smart lady, decided she had to help. She recruited two of her friends’ teenage daughters to help cook and serve. They were the most beautiful girls in town; one eventually became a news anchor in Chicago and the other won some beauty contests.

    Attendance went through the roof and it was a rousing success, for three or four weeks. The girls’ fathers and brothers put their feet down pretty hard. It was too late for the beauty queen, though, eventually she married an incredibly handsome captain from Tennessee. He looked and sounded a lot like Clark Gable as Rhett Butler. I got my sole high school coolness cred years later when he became a substitute English teacher and showed up in my class and gave me a hug.

    So we went back to our one or two or three a week. They became my big brothers, taking me to the beach and the movies. They left their stuff and cars with us when they were shipped out to Vietnam. One year my mom got to drive a hunter-green Triumph convertible that we loved.

    A few didn’t come back and we packed up the stuff and sent it to their families. Most did come back, but they were not the bright-eyed big brothers and there were no movies and no beach. They were silent, jumpy, angry, suffering physical wounds and psychic ones too. All but one are already dead.

    I don’t want our country to go through that again.

  23. 23.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Mnemosyne: I thought that was the case, but there’s something in some of the intonation that reminded my admittedly very, very tone deaf ears of CCH Pounder.

  29. 29.

    Adam L Silverman

    I’m watching a fascinating documentary on how they misidentified the second group of flag raisers at Iwo Jima – the guys memorialized in the monument. When the formal IDs were done for awards and the memorial the Marine that did the identifications confused/conflated the personnel from the first raising and the second. So the guy in the middle on the right side of the memorial was actually the guy closest to the flag just before the guy kneeling. The actual guy in the middle was a Private First Class that survived Iwo and the war and lived until 1995 and only ever told one other person – his next door neighbor – that he was one of the flag raisers. History is fun some times.

  30. 30.

    NotMax

    @Adam L. Silverman

    As opposed to the numbskull who draped the American flag over the head of Saddam’s statue.

    One could practically hear the phone lines from the Pentagon crackling with orders to cease and desist within seconds of those pictures being flashed to the world.

  31. 31.

    NotMax

    @efgoldman

    Wouldn’t expect you to have known. Threw the esteem I’d accorded him from his stint on the Watergate committee right into the trash can.

  32. 32.

    Adam L Silverman

    @NotMax: Yep. You go to war with the troops you have. Don’t get me wrong, the All Volunteer Force is an excellent military. It just was never intended nor designed to be fought in a war. It was designed so we could have a warm start while the draft was spooled up and so the draftees that were trained and deployed had a functioning, professional structure to be added on to. The AVF is, often, too rural, too small town, and too sheltered at ascension. And too often a lot of that sticks. As the USAF Chief of Staff stated: every Soldier, Sailor, Airman, and Marine has 18-20 years of socialization before they get to Initial Entry Training. That’s a lot of cultural baggage, good, bad, and otherwise, that the military has to deal with.

  35. 35.

    Adam L Silverman

    @efgoldman: Same thing for me in college. I had the really interesting one for Western Civ I. Wound up with the really boring one for Western Civ II. So I dropped him and took Western Civ II with the guy I found interesting. The guy who’s class I dropped was pissed as hell at me, but you got to do what you got to do.

  37. 37.

    Adam L Silverman

    @efgoldman: My first two years were at Oxford College of Emory University for the classic liberal arts core before going to Emory College for my major and minors. So about 200 people in my class for the first two years.

  39. 39.

    EBT

    @Adam L Silverman: Better, I have my roommate with me now and my (now sadly long distance) girlfriend amanda in the south bay. And getting back in to queer activism really does sound good to me, it’s been a few years since I helped normalize trans on Something Awful just was not expecting THIS of all things.

  40. 40.

    Mnemosyne

    @efgoldman:

    I had the rote guy freshman year of high school. He literally handed out lists of facts that we were expected to regurgitate on the tests. Despite the fact that I already loved history and read it for fun, I almost failed that class, because recalling lists of facts from memory is not my forte, to say the least.

  41. 41.

    Adam L Silverman

    @EBT: I understand. While it may be mostly aspirational, given that this is text on a screen, as I’ve said to several others: we have your back. We will help you hold the line. Hang in there. We’re keeping good thoughts.

  42. 42.

    Dog Dawg Damn

    Serious question….what happens if the paramilitary / militias waiting in the wings come out armed to join the inevitable mass protests after Trump’s presidency?

    Is that likely? Will the police and security apparatus treat them equally?

  43. 43.

    Mike G

    @NotMax:

    Souveniring like that was common in WW2. My uncle, now passed, was in the artillery in the drive across Europe. He recalls seeing American infantry routinely taking items from dead German soldiers. They were known for hiding valuables inside their boots so the first thing the GIs would do was cut the boots open above the sole.

    But it is ugly that Inouye chose to mention at public events mutilating someone, especially a non-enemy civilian.

  44. 44.

    Mnemosyne

    @Dog Dawg Damn:

    IM (non-expert) opinion, it depends. Cops in urban and suburban areas know full well that sovereign citizens are dangerous to them — there have been many instances of cops being killed by them. There was one just before the election where a Trump supporter killed 2 cops.

    Rural areas may be more likely to have the local sheriffs support them.

  45. 45.

    jenn

    This is genuinely terrifying:

    KStreetHipster ‏@KStreetHipster Nov 10
    Midterms will increase GOP majorities in both the House and Senate. By a lot. The Senate math is staggering. Defending 25 seats to GOP’s 8.
    0 replies 31 retweets 30 likes
    KStreetHipster ‏@KStreetHipster Nov 10

    The Senate will come damn close to topping the 60 mark. And I think you are all smart enough to know the significance of that.
    0 replies 24 retweets 28 likes
    KStreetHipster ‏@KStreetHipster Nov 10

    Republicans control:
    SCOTUS
    Senate
    House
    President
    34/50 Governors
    68/99 state legislative chambers
    Full control of 33 state legislatures
    0 replies 61 retweets 43 likes

    KStreetHipster
    ‏@KStreetHipster
    Republicans only need 5 more state legislatures to have 3/4ths of all states. Then they can pass all the constitutional amendments they want

    This is a fight we need to start on now.

  46. 46.

    DivF

    Veteran’s day is multiply poignant for me. My father was a career army nco, retired as an E-8. His tombstone at Arlington lists service in WW II, Korea, Vietnam. On top of that, 11-11 is his birthday. Finally, his father, an Italian immigrant, served in the US Army in WW I, was probably how he got his citizenship.

  51. 51.

    NotMax

    @EBT

    All I can do is tell you I saw and heard him proudly say and do as stated. And I never voted for him thereafter.

  54. 54.

    Adria McDowell (formerly LurkerExtraordinaire)

    @efgoldman: like your daughter, I majored in history. I was always bored with American history, with the exception of the class I took with William Fowler at Northeastern, and the military history classes I took (after I got off active duty, those classes meant a lot more to me).

    Now, Latin American and East Asian history classes- those were interesting.

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