Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

The poor and middle-class pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the wealthy pay politicians.

With all due respect and assumptions of good faith, please fuck off into the sun.

Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

The line between political reporting and fan fiction continues to blur.

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

How any woman could possibly vote for this smug smarmy piece of misogynistic crap is beyond understanding.

I swear, each month of 2025 will have its own history degree.

If you tweet it in all caps, that makes it true!

… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

Republicans: “Abortion is murder but you can take a bus to get one.” Easy peasy.

Quote tweet friends, screenshot enemies.

There is no right way to do the wrong thing.

There are no moderate republicans – only extremists and cowards.

Those who are easily outraged are easily manipulated.

I’m starting to think Jesus may have made a mistake saving people with no questions asked.

I’m more christian than these people and i’m an atheist.

Giving in to doom is how authoritarians win.

fuckem (in honor of the late great efgoldman)

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

If America since Jan 2025 hasn’t broken your heart, you haven’t loved her enough.

You are so fucked. Still, I wish you the best of luck.

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

This fight is for everything.

You are here: Home / Politics / domestic terrorists / Auschwitz: The GOP Does Not Understand This “Shame” of Which We Speak

Auschwitz: The GOP Does Not Understand This “Shame” of Which We Speak

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No matter how low you’ve seen them go, the Repubs can always find new depths!

I’m not embedding the video, but you can see it at Esquire, if you must. Their rebuttal:

… The horrors at Auschwitz were perpetrated by a government, not a terrorist organization. It was not some outside force acting on Germany: Adolf Hitler rose to power with the assent of the German people, and his crimes were possible—and, technically, legal—because he generally enjoyed the consent of a large segment of the population. The problem with Nazi Germany was not military weakness. It was the ideological depravity of a government run on a toxic brand of right-wing nationalism that demonized foreigners and multiple subgroups within German society—but most prominently, and terribly, Jewish people.

The last time Higgins made national headlines, it was when, in a Facebook post addressed to “all of Christendom” after a terror attack in London, he had a suggestion for how to treat every “radicalized Islamic suspect.”

“For the sake of all that is good and righteous,” he wrote, “kill them all.”…


CNN:

… Higgins gained his “Cajun John Wayne” nickname and reputation before entering Congress in previous job as captain and public information officer of the St. Landry Parish Sheriff’s Office in Louisiana. While serving in that role, he made videos for Crime Stoppers which later went viral, but soon sparked a community uproar that caused him to resign from the position.

The Louisiana Democratic Party responded to his Sunday post by citing a Bible verse promoting inclusion, trolling Higgins and his claim of a war between Christianity and Islam.

“The congressman points to Christianity to justify his backward position. As a party that strives to put in place representatives who serve progressive, inclusive Louisiana values, we urge him to look to 2 Timothy 1:7, ‘for God did not give us a spirit of timidity, but a spirit of power, of love and of self-discipline.’ Rep. Higgins’ language is exactly the sort of response that terrorists aim to provoke.”…

Good for the Louisiana Democratic Party.

Reader Interactions

170Comments

  2. 2.

    p.a.

    Just surprised he didn’t sink even lower by puking up the ‘if only the Jews had armed themselves’ meme.

  3. 3.

    Omnes Omnibus

    Wait, was he actually recording his “exterminate the brutes” thing in part inside the gas chamber?

  5. 5.

    J R in WV

    I think he was talking about genocide against Muslims in a very sacred spot where genocide against Jews was committed back 73 years ago, or so.

    I’m not gonna look at his sick video, but that’s the take I got reading about his performance. How did he get elected to anything? A walking, talking, Republican monster!!

  7. 7.

    Peale

    @Omnes Omnibus: you see, there are those on the right who say “hitler had some good ideas, he just went too far”. You may have thought they were talking about building the autobahn, but for modern conservatives, that kind of massive state structured infrastructure that is paid for by tax dollars and isn’t a private toll road is actually a crime worse than grabbing bits of their neighbors.

  11. 11.

    lollipopguild

    Utterly clueless, but gee we have become quite used to this by now. People like this live in an alternate universe.

  13. 13.

    Adam L Silverman

    From the career section of his bio at Wikipedia:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clay_Higgins

    Higgins served in the Military Police Corps of the Louisiana National Guard for six years.[1][2] He then worked as a manager of a car dealership in Opelousas, Louisiana. He left the job in 2004 to become a reserve officer for the Opelousas Police Department. After serving in the department for four years, he resigned in lieu of accepting disciplinary action for his striking of a handcuffed suspect before spending the next three years working for the Port Barre Police Department. He joined the St. Landry Parish Sheriff’s Office in 2011. When the office’s public information officer was reassigned in October 2014, Higgins succeeded her in the role and was promoted to captain.[3][4]

    As public information officer, Higgins made videos for Crime Stoppers. He began by using standard scripts in his first weeks, but then began to highlight various criminals by name.[5] His videos went viral, and he was referred to as the “Cajun John Wayne”.[1][6] One of his videos was featured on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon in 2015.[5] He resigned from the St. Landry Parish Sherriff’s Office in February 2016 because of the public outcry against one of his videos.[7][8] In March 2016, he was sworn in as a Reserve Deputy Marshal in Lafayette, Louisiana.[9]

    The former deputy of St. Landry Parish Sheriff’s Office[10] resigned in lieu of being fired for making controversial statements after the Sheriff warned him against using disrespectful and demeaning language toward the public. The Sheriff ordered him to “Tone down his unprofessional comments on our weekly Crime Stoppers messages”[11], underlining “a growing undertone of insubordination and lack of discipline on Higgins’ part”[12]. The Sheriff also took issue with Higgins’s misuse of the St. Landry Parish Sheriff’s Office’s badge of office for personal profit and gain, citing Higgins’s fully uniformed appearance with his marked patrol unit in a commercial for Acadian Total Security as well as its use in the sale of t-shirts and shot glasses from Higgins’s personal website. In an investigative article published in Salon it is revealed that “He also negotiated paid speaking appearances with other police departments. In one email, Higgins discussed his request for a speaker’s fee that included shopping money for his wife and part of the fuel for his friend’s private plane[13]. Clay Higgins had previously worked for the Opelousas Police Department but also resigned under allegations of unprofessional and unlawful conduct. The Opelousas Police Department’s Discipline Review Board found that “Clay Higgins used unnecessary force on a subject during the execution of a warrant and later gave false statements during an internal investigation. Although he later recanted his story and admitted to striking a suspect in handcuffs and later releasing him”. Clay Higgins resigned before disciplinary action could be imposed.[14]

  14. 14.

    Ruckus

    I’ll have to remember this. A fine example of fucking republican politician. As Betty said earlier, it’s assholes all the way down.

  17. 17.

    zhena gogolia

    If you’ve ever been there, you know that making a promotional video is the last thing on your mind. The atmosphere is overwhelming.

  24. 24.

    Mike in NC

    This story made the evening network news, complete with a photo of this shithead wearing a cowboy hat.

  25. 25.

    Bobby Thomson

    @J R in WV: I don’t know how to break this to you, but at least 40% of Americans are monsters who would go along with Holocaust 2.0 without a struggle, if not actively participating.

  27. 27.

    Ruckus

    @debbie:
    I’d bet we will find over the next little while that this is no where near as low as they can and will go and trying to categorize any group or person on the right as worse than some other is a waste of time.

  28. 28.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Ruckus: I’m sure he is. If I was either running against him in 2018 or advising his opponent (I am not doing either), I’d be running ads with a seriously sounding narrator’s voice reading this record and then conclude with: “Clay Higgins, crooked cop. Wrong for the people’s House of Representatives, right for the jail house. Send the House of Representatives a message by sending Clay Higgins home and sending a law abiding citizen to Congress.”

    But what do I know.

  29. 29.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @MTmofo:
    Republicans do, in fact, have shame – that is, it hurts them to be publicly scorned. They do not feel guilt, an internal feeling of having done wrong. This difference really explains a lot about them, particularly their focus on how being called out for whatever horrible thing they’re doing is unacceptable.

  30. 30.

    ArchTeryx

    @Bobby Thomson: Not so sure about 40%. 27%? Sure. They’d happily vote in mass murder (and have – witness Trumpcare) and they’re scattered in all the right places.

    The rest are Good Germans.

  31. 31.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Omnes Omnibus: I have worked with a number of MPs – active, reserve, and National Guard components. Most of them are good Soldiers, though the Guard folks can be a little rough hewn depending on where they’re from. As is the case with all of our National Guard. This guy was a bad cop who was allowed to skate from being a problem child in one department to another without ever being properly disciplined. You’d think that leadership would eventually get tired of having this stuff happen, having problem personnel foisted on them because the leadership where they’re creating the problem let them resign rather than actually disciplining them.

  33. 33.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Frankensteinbeck:

    Republicans do, in fact, have shame – that is, it hurts them to be publicly scorned.

    If, by shame, you mean, “I am upset that I got caught being an asshole and even more upset by being called out on it,” then you are correct.

  34. 34.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Miss Bianca: Clay Higgins, wrong for the people’s House. Right for the jail house. Send Congress a message: no more crooked cops in the House of Representatives.

    The campaign attack ads just right themselves.

  37. 37.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Major Major Major Major: Good thoughts heading his way. One of those took out one of my grandfathers – surgery was deemed too risky and, at 89, the docs figured any of the other ailments he had were as likely to get him as that one.

  39. 39.

    Miss Bianca

    @Adam L Silverman: what I can’t fucking figure out is how the scum-sucking mofo even got elected in the first place. I mean, you’d think his record would have come out and made him too toxic even for Louisiana Republicans to stomach. But then, what the hell do I know – I keep expecting scandals that would destroy any Democratic candidate to actually have some – ANY – meaning to people who vote for Republicans.

  42. 42.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Adam L Silverman: Combat Arms elitism and snobbery. I did mention that. One of my best friends in OCS was an MP type. He did iron his underwear and tucked his t-shirt into his boxers. Just saying.

  46. 46.

    Ladyraxterinok

    Reminds me of another tone deaf GOPer. Remember when Reagan visited Bitburg cemetary in 1985? Criticized around the world for visiting a cemetary where SS soldiers were buried, he said that those soldiers were also victims of the Nazis; they were put in that group and forced to do the Nazis’ bidding. As a result of the criticism, Reagan’s staff added a visit to a concentration camp. (Such a visit was not on the original schedule.)

  48. 48.

    efgoldman

    Oh, great. Get home from day surgery and find this!
    What a wretched piece of pig shit.
    Or, as my now daily refrain has it, assholes gotta’ be assholes, it’s what they do.

  52. 52.

    efgoldman

    @J R in WV:

    How did he get elected to anything? A walking, talking, Republican monster!!

    Question answers itself, doesn’t it?

  56. 56.

    Kraux Pas

    @lollipopguild:

    What do you do when a good third of your country’s population is insane?

    If that’s the good third, then I guess just pray for the meteor.

  57. 57.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @efgoldman: Surgery? The fact that they let you come home to be cranky on the internet must mean that everything went well. IOW, I hope everything went well and you are doing okay.

  59. 59.

    efgoldman

    @zhena gogolia:

    If you’ve ever been there, you know that making a promotional video is the last thing on your mind. The atmosphere is overwhelming.

    I never have, but my late parents (both born in US) went in the 70s. Overwhelming, is what comes to mind. And that really because no actual words do it justice.

  61. 61.

    efgoldman

    @Adam L Silverman:

    Did you see my comment reply to you last night before you signed off?

    Don’t think so, but I had general anesthesia and surgery since. I’m lucky I remember my own name. I’m Silverman, right? Or maybe Omnes. I know I’m not Cole or Anne Laurie

  63. 63.

    jl

    This GOPer’s little advert was offensive and stupid in so many ways, it’s hard to keep track of all of them.

    OTOH, to be fair and balanced, so hard to figure out what his point was or what specific policies his ad was supposed to support, have to be careful not be accused of making insane stuff up and reading it into his fear mongering performance art.

    Like, was he saying American Muslims are Nazis and they are planning something? Building secret installations? WTF? Who knows?
    Anyway, both disgusting and pointless. Unless his idea as to just instill vague dread to drum up mindless support for authoritarian minded political movements, namely the Trumpists and the current depraved edition of the GOP.

  66. 66.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @Ladyraxterinok: Um, wrong on the part of the defenders. The SS was made up, at least in the Germanic speaking countries, by volunteers. EAGER volunteers.

  68. 68.

    Adam L Silverman

    @efgoldman: I will resubmit:
    My Dad spent several years on dialysis, not what you’re getting, but dialysis nonetheless. If you, Mrs efg, your kids have any questions about everything that isn’t technical/medical, please feel free to reach out. I’ve lived through this when my Dad went through it.

    Also, glad your procedure went well.

  71. 71.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Villago Delenda Est: Creeped me the fuck out. And it wasn’t one of the truly horrible places. Also, its proximity to Munich made me extremely skeptical of the “We didn’t know” people. If you didn’t know, you didn’t want to know and ignored the evidence.

  73. 73.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Villago Delenda Est: I’m sorry to report that West was an artillerist. He was the 2nd Battalion/20the Field Artillery Regiment Commander when he was relived of his command.

  75. 75.

    efgoldman

    @Adam L Silverman:

    This guy was a bad cop who was allowed to skate from being a problem child in one department to another without ever being properly disciplined.

    My dad was a personnel WO for 22 years. he had plenty of stories (as I’m sure many decent officers did) of giving shitty NCOs and junior officers good efficiency reports, so some other poor bastard would take them in a transfer. While he was never a CO (obvs) he was always the one with the Harvard English degree, so he wrote a ton of reports and letters “signed” by majors and colonels.

  76. 76.

    jl

    @Millard Filmore: I don’t think anything can ‘right itself’ in a Baud campaign. That violates the physical laws of nature, and Baud political motto: “We still have time to mess this up!”

  77. 77.

    SiubhanDuinne

    O/T, am getting a bunch of news flashes that Steve Scalese has been readmitted to intensive care, condition upgraded to “serious,” concern about infection.

    I don’t like the man or his politics, but he’s a fellow human being and I do hope he can recover fully.

  78. 78.

    Miss Bianca

    And may I just add, as a general note, that the very IDEA of what this asshole has done is so fucking offensive I could bite his face off. My steady beau in college had a grandfather who died in the camps – I believe it was, in fact, Auschwitz. His grandmother had to smuggle his father and aunt out of Belgium as children, and almost lost them to Christian families who had them and wanted to keep them. They finally all made it to America, and were reunited as a family and became proud Americans. And this – THIS – is how myopic and idiotic America has become?? I blush with shame for this shameless creature and the out-and-proud morans that elected him.

  79. 79.

    NotMax

    Posted about this on the morning thread. Also about the “gay orgy”/drug bust at the Vatican.

    “What a world, what a world.”

    – Wicked Witch of the West

    OT – Mission accomplished: annual viewing of Lanford Wilson’s “The Fifth of July.”

  80. 80.

    Mike in NC

    Spent 4 or 5 days in Louisiana back around 1995. Mostly in New Orleans and Baton Rouge. Got a pretty good feel for the local politics in that short a time and vowed to never return.

  81. 81.

    efgoldman

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    Surgery?

    Had the cath implanted for home peritoneal dialysis. Living in New England as I do, I don’t want to have to depend on getting to a center three days a week in the winter. I’m getting too old for driving in that shit it I don’t have to
    Really is a simple, quick day surgery, but i still had general anesthesia.
    Later on I’ll bitch and whine about how they had me report to the wrong building

  84. 84.

    Ruckus

    @Omnes Omnibus:
    It was a different world when you were there and when the camps were open. Not saying some/many didn’t know but the reports that I’ve read that some camp liberators brought local towns people in to help and a lot of them didn’t seem to know. Maybe they just didn’t want to believe it, even if they knew what or if something was going on. Anyway it seems the German people for the most part have learned from the past. They don’t deny it, they acknowledge how horrible it was. The camp museums are the tell. The people responsible are mostly dead or close to it now and the only people who seem to want them back are our right wingers.

  85. 85.

    efgoldman

    @Ruckus:

    You OK?

    Better by the hour, thanks. My head is starting to clear, at least as much as it ever does. They offered me Oxy for the pain – I won’t fill it. I have Tylenorl and Tramodol.
    Wish I were hungry.
    Probably going to sleep sitting up tonight. My office chair is very comfy

  90. 90.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @Adam L Silverman: How did an FA commander get put in charge of a prison? That’s definitely something I’d have an MP officer be in charge of. Oh well, at least he wasn’t Signal Corps.

  91. 91.

    efgoldman

    @Adam L Silverman:

    please feel free to reach out. I’ve lived through this when my Dad went through it.
    Also, glad your procedure went well.

    Thank you and thank you.
    This past May I was two years on the transplant list. Dialysis moves one up a few places. So we’ll see.

  92. 92.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Omnes Omnibus: Not sure. Hard to tell from his professional bio. He completed what we now call BOLC A and B at Sill. His O3 command was of Battery B, 6th FA Regiment, 1st Infantry DIV. He was also cross qualified as a parachutist/airborne infantry after his basic course and had an assignment as an airborne infantry fire support officer and platoon leader at 4BCT/325 ABN IN Regiment.

  94. 94.

    seaboogie

    @efgoldman: was thinking happy thoughts for M4’s grandad and wondering about you – and your cranky self shows up, so I have a double happy.

  96. 96.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Ruckus: Dachau is a Munich suburb. The people around it know shitty things were happening. It wasn’t a death camp; they cleverly positioned most of them outside of Germany proper. But anyone who was interested would have known of, at the very least, severely horrible treatment. Claiming no knowledge is like a Chicagoan saying “Golly, I had no idea that people were being worked to death in Skokie.”*

    *Yeah, I picked Skokie.

  97. 97.

    efgoldman

    @Miss Bianca:

    I blush with shame for this shameless creature and the out-and-proud morans that elected him.

    My paternal grandparents came to this country from Russia as young adolescents before WW1 and the revolution (met and married here). My grandfather had relatives in Leningrad/St Petersburg that survived the siege, including a Soviet general hero of the Soviet Union. My grandmother apparently had family in either Ukraine or Beloruss that got wiped out. She never knew for sure, as I’m sure was the case with many thousands of people.

  98. 98.

    Lizzy L

    @efgoldman: My dad made the same decision 20 years ago. It worked well for him, much better than going daily to a dialysis center.

  99. 99.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Villago Delenda Est: He wasn’t in charge of a prison. He was a field artillery battalion commander when he got himself in trouble. His battalion 2 (Intel officer in charge for those reading not familiar with Army jargon) got information that someone had taken out a contract on his life. He authorized a cordon and search to scarf up those who supposedly knew who had ordered the hit. When the folks they scarfed up didn’t offer any info up to the interrogators at the battalion detaining holding area (DHA), he got frustrated, went over to the DHA, grabbed the guy who supposedly knew, dragged him outside by a weapons clearing barrel, placed the detainee on his knees adjacent to the barrel, took out his M9 (and the Iraqis are culturally scared of semi-auto handguns because Saddam Hussein used them for 9mm retirements), made a show of loading his magazine and racking the slide and taking it off safety, then turned the guy around next to the clearing barrel, and shot the gun off next to his head into the clearing barrel. He never did get any info from this guy or the others his people scarfed up because it turned out they scarfed up the wrong folks.

  105. 105.

    gene108

    @Adam L Silverman:

    Clay Higgins, wrong for the people’s House. Right for the jail house. Send Congress a message: no more crooked cops in the House of Representatives.

    One thing 2016 showed me is a lot of white Americans have no problem whatsoever with bad and/or crooked cops, as long as they are smacking around black or brown handcuffed suspects.

    I think “crooked cop” actually appeals to the white folks, who are so fucking scared of everything they need to carry a gun in public.

    They’d rather have cops abuse power on the right people, if it makes them feel safer.

  107. 107.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @efgoldman:

    Have been thinking about you a lot, and thinking even more, if possible, of the lovely, gifted, and long-suffering mrsefg. You have both been through a lot in the last few years, and I do hope that your dialysis can help bring some ease and predictability to your lives. Any chance of a granddaughter visit soon to lift everyone’s spirits?

    ❤️ to you both.

  108. 108.

    Kraux Pas

    @gene108:

    I think “crooked cop” actually appeals to the white folks, who are so fucking scared of everything they need to carry a gun in public.

    When the President a police officer does it, that means it is not illegal.

    who are so fucking scared of everything they need to carry a gun in public.

    Re-emphasized because so many of the gun nutters are so worried about needing guns to fight totalitarian governments, yet cheer on any abuse of the wrong people by the right people.

  109. 109.

    Mike J

    @gene108:

    I think “crooked cop” actually appeals to the white folks, who are so fucking scared of everything they need to carry a gun in public.

    Nobody ever made a movie about “Plays-by-the-book Harry.”

  111. 111.

    Adam L Silverman

    @NotMax: Nope, happened before I ever got to Iraq. When my teammates and I went through the Continental Redeployment Center (CRC) at Benning to do our gear/equipment draw and process for deployment we got a lot of orientation courses to check the boxes so we could go and link up with our brigade prior to going to Iraq. One of them was Rules of Engagement. The JAGs that presented the course used LTC West as the poster child for what not to do. They were very, very thorough in going through the details of what West had done, why it was unacceptable, and why we shouldn’t do what LTC West did.

    LTC West is a classic example of what happens to the force during war time. It becomes degraded. Personnel that would never be promoted past a certain point or placed in certain commands in peace time or in the early years of a conflict wind up in these positions because the force generation cycle has to be fed. I knew lieutenant colonels who were promoted to that rank despite never attending Command and General Staff College. And this was allowed to happen because we needed bodies to feed the deployment cycles. These personnel would normally have been forced out at major after serving a rotation in a billet for a major that had not attended Command and General Staff College. It was not until late winter 2011 that the Chief of Staff of the Army, General Casey, finally issued orders that you had to graduate from USAWC or one of the equivalent senior leader colleges in order to be given brigade or equivalent command as a colonel.

  113. 113.

    Doug!

    At least he believes the Holocaust happens. That’s more than you can say for a lot of right-wingers.

  114. 114.

    Kraux Pas

    @catbirdman:

    Yep, and the ven diagram of them and the most-heavily-armed Americans is a single circle. Can you say “We’re effed”?

    Maybe, but liberals are armed too and still benefit from having most of the industry. These gun hoarder jackoffs, if they try to pull anything, are going to quickly realize that they can’t wield hundreds of guns at once like a cartoon rabbit.

  116. 116.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Adam L Silverman:

    It was not until late winter 2011 that the Chief of Staff of the Army, General Casey, finally issued orders that you had to graduate from USAWC or one of the equivalent senior leader colleges in order to be given brigade or equivalent command as a colonel.

    I assumed that was a norm except during a WWII-type war.

  118. 118.

    Ruckus

    @efgoldman:
    I’ve had Oxy once. As in one tablet. FUCKING hated it. Last two times I’ve gotten them to give me Vicodin instead. Works OK, no real side effects. I’ve only needed a couple of tablets both times. Like my sister said, if they think operation pain or cancer pain is bad they should try chronic migraines. That dial goes to eleven. And can stay there for quite a while. And it’s a relentless eleven. Hits that high note and plants it’s butt there for as long as it wants. Thankfully there are meds to use and if you do early enough they actually go away. But right now I’m down to one application and the VA won’t refill for 3 more weeks. Occasionally I get clusters of 2-3 a week. I’ve also gone months with none. Fun times.
    Saw that you are on the transplant list, good luck with that as well.

  122. 122.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Omnes Omnibus: During WW II, USAWC was shut down in terms of the courses as personnel were needed for the war effort. With the exception of a small cadre of personnel working as, essentially, a strategic assessments group on behalf of the National Command Authority. It is also important to remember that the school at that time was very different than it is now. The course was shorter. The attendees were not senior lieutenant colonels and junior to mid time in rank colonels between battalion or equivalent command and brigade or equivalent command. Now it is both a senior leader college that has to fulfill the DOD’s Joint Professional Military Education Level 2, the Army’s Military Education Level 1, and a Middle States Accredited professional/graduate school that awards a masters degree.

    Is it comparable to civilian graduate/professional schools? No. And in my professional opinion it shouldn’t be. It delivers a niche public good: preparing successive cohorts of lieutenant colonels and colonels to function at the strategic and policy levels in a variety of assignments from brigade or equivalent command to Division, Corps, Army Service Component Command, Geographic Combatant Command, Major Command, Department of the Army, DOD, and/or National Security Staff staff positions. The curriculum is compressed as a result of only having 10 and 1/2 full months across a 12 month academic year to deliver at least 18 months worth of curricular materials. Attempts to turn it into Harvard would be a mistake. We already have Harvard and we already send military personnel there for degrees and fellowships.

  123. 123.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Kraux Pas: I have have a double-barrelled 12 ga and a bolt action rifle (a single barrel 20 ga too, but my judgment is that it would be completely militarily ineffective). I am competent with them. How do I stop people with 30 round magazines?

  124. 124.

    Ruckus

    @Omnes Omnibus:
    Did say they might just not have wanted to admit what was going on.
    Please don’t take what I wrote was in any way an excuse for Germany of the 30s-40s.
    What I did mean was that a lot of Germany was like the US of the 30s and 40s. News from the paper and in Germany this was printed by whom? A lot of people were still recovering from the depression and being told who was to blame? It was a con job of epic proportions on a population that was primed to hear it. Now tell me about the right wing of the US in this day and age.

  128. 128.

    scott alloway

    @Omnes Omnibus: I was at Dachau in summer 1968. It was part of a summer session in comparative government. It was the only place I took no photos. Too serious, too somber, too unsettling to intrude. I was 18.
    Later in life, in the 1990s, I befriended two holocaust survivors. Yesterday, I celebrated the 4th with one of them.
    The congressman has no sense of decency, of history, of what is right.

  129. 129.

    Ladyraxterinok

    @Omnes Omnibus: Thanks. Never heard this before. The Bitburg visit was just so appalling!! I think Kohl pushed for the visit; I don’t remember why. I don’t suppose much if anything was said about this incident at the various events surrounding Kohl’s recent death.

  130. 130.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Ruckus: No thought that you were excusing anyone. I saw how close to a major city that the Dachau camp was My comments and judgments come from that.

  131. 131.

    Kraux Pas

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    How do I stop people with 30 round magazines?

    Do what I do, rely on the professionals. They haven’t failed me yet. ETA: do what you need to do to not be in a one-on-one confrontation with such a person on a level playing field.

    Isn’t part of the reason the loyal states won the first Civil war the fact of their stronger institutions and economies? Certainly the new global economy wouldn’t do a newly ascendant rebellion any favors in this regard. Their 30 round magazines won’t do them any good with dwindling resources to get them to the people they want to shoot and the world against them.

  135. 135.

    Ruckus

    @Adam L Silverman:
    I saw this lack of leadership from command officers during my stint in the navy during Vietnam. Most command officers were OK, they had a tough job, what with malcontents like me. A very few were exceptional, and a few more than them were absolute shit. And of course as you say the service can’t just let them go, they need(ed) bodies. So they at least try to shuffle them around so that they can’t do much damage. And so that they may quit, but I never saw one that should have quit do that.

  136. 136.

    SiubhanDuinne

    “A great sense of dread comes over you in this place,” Higgins says, leading the viewer on a five-minute, nine-second tour of the site, with a dirge-like solo violin playing in the background. “Man’s inhumanity to man can be quite shocking.”

    Not for nothing, but that “dirge-like solo violin” is from the soundtrack to Schindler’s List, composed by the great John Williams for the film directed by Steven Spielberg. I’m just going to take a wild-ass guess here and wager that the Congressman neither asked for nor received permission to use the music in his political video. I doubt Clay Higgins can even spell “appropriation,” let alone know how offensive it is. Hey, Clay? It’s another word for “theft.”

  137. 137.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Omnes Omnibus: Tracking, now I get where you were going. Apparently waivers were being given and we were getting personnel after brigade command because of Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom or because general officers were pulling them to run special projects or staff sections for their commands. So General Casey made an explicit policy change.

  139. 139.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Ruckus: The longer conflicts go on the more corrosive they are to the professionalism of the force. So just at the point when you have to have the most professional of professionals you often times don’t. It is a huge conundrum for the Profession of Arms/professional military ethic folks.

  140. 140.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Kraux Pas: Oddly, I was one of those professionals. You are not helping the discourse. As a gunner, I do know how Napoleon came to power.

  141. 141.

    Kraux Pas

    @Omnes Omnibus: Yeah, if it comes to Civil War 2.0, rely on the professionals. Liberals have guns too, but they give the best ones…to the professionals. Let the national guard handle the yahoos and if, by some chance, they wind up on your doorstep; that’s where you use the shotty, where the terrain is to your advantage.

    And if you want to take the fight to them, join the professionals. I’m sure they’ll train freedom -loving Americans and give them a weapon that’s up-to-snuff.

  142. 142.

    Ruckus

    @Omnes Omnibus:
    Just making sure.
    My point was that you were there in when the 80s?
    How much smaller was Munich in the 40s? How close was the camp to the city of the 40s? How accessible or guarded was it? How much did the troops from there talk when in the city?
    I’ve not been to Germany, not seen the camps other than war footage. Not sure I could stomach it. I have been to the Antwerp resistance museum. It can not, I’m sure, in any way compare with the camps, but they pulled no punches with the history and it was pretty brutal when you looked at it from the standpoint of a citizen of Belgium during the war.
    You may be 1000% right, I’m just questioning what it was like during a war, with only propaganda to read or hear. It can’t be easy to try and live under those conditions and inquire about something like one of the camps. Who could you trust?

  143. 143.

    Kraux Pas

    @Omnes Omnibus: And if there’s something you’d like to enlighten me about; by all means, enlighten me. Don’t, however, be a dick while complaining about the contributions of others to the discourse (lacking any sense of irony).

    I’m not afraid of the yahoos with their giant white-elephant gun collections. If there’s a reason you think I should be, tell me. If you just hate me and want to routinely go out of your way to insult me, just say so rather than being a pompous ass.

  144. 144.

    Anne Laurie

    @MTmofo: I’m glad he took it down, but ‘I’m sorry you aren’t capable of understanding my very sincere reverence for protecting our people by exterminating the brutes’ isn’t an apology, IMO.

  146. 146.

    Anne Laurie

    @efgoldman: Regardless of all the malign idiots, I’m glad you’re home and feeling well enough to be on Balloon Juice!

  147. 147.

    Ruckus

    @Adam L Silverman:
    I’d agree with that 1000%.
    I served at the middle and ending of Vietnam. I had 6 months to the day to go when I got my discharge order. They had just started winding down and I got, for probably the only time in my life, lucky. I may have been one of the first 6 month early discharges. And that while serving under one of those command officers that was shuffled around, with a poor record and even less an idea why or the proper thing to do about it. It’s always a problem, the people with bad/non existent skills who should be shit canned aren’t, and people with skills leave because of it.

  148. 148.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @Adam L Silverman: Adam, thanks for all this. Obviously I was misinformed; I knew West was for all practical purposes a war criminal, but I thought he was connected with the Abu Ghraib mess.

    Once again, you’re a great asset here, and you’ve set me straight yet again!

  149. 149.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Ruckus: I will say that my experience has been that brigade or equivalent commanders and those commanders and staff at echelons above brigade who have graduated from the senior leader colleges have been very good, very competent officers even when I didn’t personally get along with them (I once worked with a Corps G2/Officer in Charge of Intelligence who was the poster person for the redheaded Irish hothead stereotype. Really sharp Military Intel officer, but talk about a hair trigger temper). Moreover, and perhaps even more importantly, a lot of work has gone into really professionalizing the senior non commissioned officer corps under the All Volunteer Force. I have worked with excellent Senior Enlisted from company to Geographic Combatant Command levels and provided support for the Director of the Army’s Institute for NCO Professional Development (a retired Command Sergeant Major with a PhD who is a former student of mine – and one sharp SES) and the US Army Sergeants Major Academy. They work very hard at getting it right for senior enlisted leader development and education.

  150. 150.

    sdhays

    Just in case anyone was curious, LA-3 is a R+20 district (according to Wikipedia). He’d probably need a video pleasuring himself in that location to endanger his chances of reelection…

    But I hope he gets a strong challenge anyway. What a disgusting excuse for a human being.

  151. 151.

    Mike Toreno

    The tweet asking who else thought strict homeland security and invincible army were paramount wasn’t well thought out. He seems to think there is only one answer, but it wasn’t just Hitler who thought that. Stalin was just as fanatical about that as Hitler was. So whether the author of the original tweet realized it or now, he is talking about two different countries, where the same government policies produced TOTALLY DIFFERENT results.

    Oh wait…

  153. 153.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Villago Delenda Est: Other than his AOR may have been up in Taiji, which I honestly can’t remember where the 4th Infantry Division was assigned at that point in time, he had nothing to do with Abu Ghraib.

  154. 154.

    Ruckus

    @Adam L Silverman:
    I’ve talked on BJ before about lifers, and not in a good way. But and it’s a big, firm, round but, some of the lifers that I served with were very good. I may not have wanted a career in the military ( I really, really did not. Other than wanting to be an AF pilot when I was seven. I got over it.) But I could see why someone might. But at the time the useless lifers out numbered the good guys by a large margin. I worked on temp duty while between stations for a Marine staff sgt, who was assigned to the shore patrol, who fit the good guys category to the max. I knew I could trust him from about the second minute that I met him. I met maybe 3 navy enlisted lifers that I could say that about. I’ve actually met more Marines in real life I could say that about than any other service. Those guys would be the ones I might thank for their service.
    I’m glad that a realization has come about that if you want a professional military force you actually have to have professional people to work and run it.

  155. 155.

    Another Scott

    @efgoldman: Welcome back. Good to see you.

    Re the Teabagger – look at the bright side. 10 years ago only the True Believers™ he hangs out with would have known about his awful actions. Now the whole world does….

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  156. 156.

    BillCinSD

    Higgins was also like $140,000 behind in child support when he was elected in 2016. His response was that if elected, he would have the money to pay up. He had not done so by the last time Wikipedia updated that section of the article on him.

    Dachau is less than 20 miles from the Munich Train Station

  157. 157.

    frosty

    @BillCinSD: When I saw Dachau in the 70s I remember talking to some of the locals who wished we would see more of Munich and that Dachau wasn’t all there was. Well we did see more of Munich, and enjoyed our visit. But whether they liked it or not, Dachau was part of it.

  158. 158.

    Ruckus

    @Adam L Silverman:
    That command officer I mentioned was an O-6, looking forward to making O-7, which I’m sure he absolutely believed he earned. He never got there. Passed away at 86 in 2013, I just read his obit. Surly the person who wrote that had never served under or around him in the navy. Or they drink a lot.

  159. 159.

    Ruckus

    @BillCinSD:
    Hard to make a lot of money if one keeps getting fired or having to resign for being a total fucking asshole. And it seems to be pretty difficult to get fired for being a total fucking asshole cop. He seemed to manage.
    Plus how long does it take to get $140,000 behind in support payments?

  160. 160.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Ruckus: Things have changed a lot. That doesn’t mean they’re perfect. But I remember that when I was at USAWC the Navy Senior Service rep kept a tally of Navy officers in command relieved for cause compared to the other services. The Navy was running about 6 to 1 compared to the Army, Marines, or Air Force. For whatever the reasons the Navy has less tolerance than the other services, though it is a zero defect Army.

  161. 161.

    Mnemosyne

    @Adam L Silverman:

    For whatever the reasons the Navy has less tolerance than the other services, though it is a zero defect Army.

    If this civilian can take a guess, it’s because an incompetent Navy commander can accidentally kill a whole lot more of his own people at one time than any other branch is capable of. Crashing a jet or a helicopter is not the same as sinking an aircraft carrier.

  163. 163.

    Ruckus

    @Adam L Silverman:
    @Mnemosyne:
    Mnems has a point but it’s also that a captain has an unusual amount of power over the crew of a ship. I wrote here the other day that I served as master at arms of the enlisted transit barracks at Long Beach for a while and as such you have a lot of power. Sometimes you have to use it but you should never abuse it. The MoA doesn’t take orders from the enlisted who nominally out rank him or her and are assigned to the barracks awaiting orders. The MoA is like the captain.
    Yes an army/marine/air force unit commander has a lot of power but isn’t normally controlling a large and usually very powerful military weapon and in charge of troops at the same time.
    A lot of the captains relieved that I’ve read about are for doing captaining wrong with the crew. Either attempting to be Capt Bligh or their too good buddy. Neither of those work out.

  164. 164.

    Gretchen

    @Miss Bianca: I’d like to hear more about the Christian families who took care of them during the war. Did they stay in contact?

  168. 168.

    Chief Oshkosh

    This is another good reminder that a significant portion of the population simply does not think critically. These guys ALWAYS come to the wrong conclusions.

    I say it’s a “good” reminder because, though it exemplifies their poor reasoning, it does so from a somewhat different perspective. Thus, it highlights how pervasive their mental inadequacies are.

  169. 169.

    Barry

    @Doug!: “At least he believes the Holocaust happens. That’s more than you can say for a lot of right-wingers.”

    Somebody said once that there were two types of Holocaust deniers:

    1) Those who think that it did not happen, but believe that it should have.

    2) Those who ‘believe’ that it did not happen, and want to do it again.

    This guy is number 2.

  170. 170.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    Dachau is a Munich suburb. The people around it know shitty things were happening.

    It is now. And it was in 1980 when I first visited. A 25-minute trip on the S2 S-bahn from the Münchener Hauptbahnhof followed by 5-10 minutes on bus 726 rolling through scads of charming houses & the charming village of Dachau-Dorf. I got off the bus & looked at the camp entrance & instantly thought the same: Don’t tell me they didn’t know!

    Some years later, though, I ran across photographs from the early 1930s (don’t have a link, sorry.) that showed the area surrounding the site as mostly fields & farmlands. Apparently the camp was expanded from an abandoned munitions plant – those tend not to be sited in populated areas. The Munich metro area has expanded greatly since then.

    The smoke (& smell) of cremated bodies might well have drifted into populated areas – the camp is only 10 miles NW of Munich. But if I read the sources correctly, the first crematorium dates from 1940 & the second from 1942; it’s unclear what was done with the remains before that. And how far the smell spread is a question. There was a distillery operating less than a mile from my childhood home & a waste treatment/sewage disposal facility in full olfactory splendor a bit less than 2 miles away, & when the wind was wrong for either we’d get a snootful – but I don’t recall people more than a few miles away raising a big stink =;^D about the smell.

    All this is to say only that the situation isn’t as cut & dried as you might think – or as I thought back in the summer of 1980.

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