Jaysis. I have no idea why the tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free keep coming here.
Maybe they’re thinking: “Well, they hardly ever bomb anyone inside their own borders. Even the brown people.”
And they may have something there. I refer you to the late Professor Carlin: “You don’t have to be a history major or a political scientist to see the Bigger Dick Foreign Policy Theory. … It’s a subconscious need to project the penis into other people’s affairs. It’s called ‘fucking with people.'”
But then again, we have the Bill Burr Theory of Homeland Defense and Immigration Control: “You’re gonna build a wall from fuckin’ California to Texas? You actually think you’re gonna get this done? Look at the Freedom Tower. We actually wanted that shit, and it took almost 15 years to get it done. Half the people don’t even want this fuckin’ thing. … I’m telling you, by the time they finished it, this country would be so fucked up we’re gonna be the ones going over it.”
If Professor Burr is correct, it would seem that the Bigger Dick Theory applies to domestic affairs as well. They fuck with us here, too. Maybe all you brown people should save yourselves the climb.
“Every data point was altered to present the best picture possible,” Bob Crowley, an Army colonel who served as a senior counterinsurgency adviser to U.S. military commanders in 2013 and 2014, told government interviewers. “Surveys, for instance, were totally unreliable but reinforced that everything we were doing was right and we became a self-licking ice cream cone.”
Except ice cream cones taste good. This tastes like death.
Just a little souvenir wisenheimery from the bad old days.
You’re going to see some relentless hagiography about John McCain from the national press for the better part of quite some time.
That’s the audience he played to, after all.
For a different perspective, check out Amy Silverman’s piece in the Phoenix New Times. Silverman, who covered McCain in the 1990s, calls him “one of the most fascinating politicians in history,” and a few other things, too.
I saw him mostly as a ruthless opportunist, a tireless self-promoter, focused on John McCain the Brand®. You could dig down into what seemed on the surface to be some statesmanly act and see the real McCain down there, smirking and rubbing his hands together. He recalled President Eisenhower’s secretary of defense, Charles Erwin Wilson, who famously told the Senate Committee on Armed Services: “For years I thought what was good for our country was good for General Motors, and vice versa. The difference did not exist.”
Substitute “John McCain” for “General Motors” and you’ll see what I mean.
Like George W. Bush he achieved high office thanks in part to a famous name, unearned wealth and a pugnacious ignorance that some mistook for straight shooting. Unlike Dubya, McCain was a sure-enough tough guy. But both suffered from the delusion that their guts held all the answers they’d ever need.
Hammers in search of nails, they teamed up to bring us the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which continue to rack up bills and body counts. For an up-close-and-personal look at the latter, see Pulitzer-winner C.J. Chivers and his excellent book, “The Fighters: Americans in Combat in Afghanistan and Iraq.”
Remember “that old Beach Boys song? ‘Bomb Iran?'” You can be sure the Iranians do. As do more than a few American pilots who already had plenty on their plates, I imagine.
Here’s another lame joke that happily fell flat: For his last presidential bid, in 2008, McCain scraped the bottom of the Republican barrel and came up with running mate Caribou Barbie, in a stroke legitimizing the Tinfoil Beanie Brigade. Some think this is the shove that sent the Republic on its drunken stagger toward Il Douche, but we’ve always leaned in that direction and it was only a matter of time before we finally got there.
When you hear all the sermons about McCain’s selfless devotion to country, remember what he was willing to do to win the presidency. He would have sacrificed us all on the altar of his own ambition.
• Editor’s note: Charlie Pierce, who had a much closer look at McCain than I did, recalls a man he liked and admired, while adding that he “was destined, always, to disappoint me politically, but that was only because we didn’t agree on anything.”
Mad Blog Media 