Do we need a 3rd party to end the forever wars?

[anon_6hv78pr714xta]

From Matt Taibi:

To Stop War, America Needs a Third Party​

The American political system has been captured by the military, and only an independent political power can prevent the next Afghanistan​

Matt Taibbi

Aug 29

On the Sunday morning shows today, prestige media did its best to soften the blow of Afghanistan. A key theme: we didn’t lose to the Taliban, but beat ourselves. It was “self-defeat,” somehow not-disgraced former National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster told NBC, while Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson cautiously described the disaster of Afghanistan as “a war we did not win.” Chuck Todd on Meet the Press liked that. “I agree,” he said, smiling a little and noting, “I don’t know if you can say we lost, but we didn’t win.”
Meet the Press @MeetThePress
WATCH: "This is what withdrawal from a war that we did not win looks like," says @Eugene_Robinson on #MTP "It's messy. It's awful. ... It's a tragic thing for a lot of Afghans ... certainly for the 13 service members who lost their lives and their families."
August 29th 2021
9 Retweets23 Likes
Just a few weeks in, the gruesome story of Afghanistan’s collapse is already being sanitized, cleaved into neat storylines for blue and red audiences who as usual are being herded into safe psychological spaces, where they can happily non-consider what happened across the last 20 years. The images they see on TV aren’t their party’s fault, it’s those other jerks to blame, etc.
Republicans are blissful over Joe Biden’s approval rating nosedive and are thrilled to blame the whole debacle on our Sundowner-in-Chief. Biden, they say, is prioritizing Afghan lives over Americans in his withdrawal plans, and continues to push his $3.5 trillion “socialist wish list” over national security, and should have used Mike Pompeo’s “conditions-based” withdrawal plan instead of the ass-over-elbow deal they used in reality. Multiple Republicans are aping Trump-era Democrats by demanding the president’s resignation, with one, Missouri Senator Vicky Hartzler, going so far as to demand closure of the U.S.-Mexican border to “protect American lives” from an alleged heightened terrorist threat.
Democrats, not completely without self-reflection in the first days of this crisis, are already back focused on counter-blame narratives. Blue-state audiences are being reminded Donald Trump negotiated the “premature” May 1st pullout date, and that when critics blasted that deal as “weak and dangerous,” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy advised his caucus not to speak against it. McCarthy today is leading the charge in criticizing Biden’s withdrawal, which is “so freaking hypocritical,” according to Senate-to-MSNBC pipeline passenger Claire McCaskill. Moreover, they say, House Democrat Jason Crow offered an amendment for his own “conditions-based” withdrawal plan, and that was shot down by the likes of Matt Gaetz, who last year said, “I don’t think there’s ever a bad day to end the war in Afghanistan.”
It’s all noise, designed to distract from the fact that Afghanistan is as pure a bipartisan fiasco as we’ve had in recent times. Both parties were directly and repeatedly complicit in prolonging the catastrophe. Republicans and Democrats were virtually unanimous in approving the initial use-of-force, both voted over and over to fund the war to insane levels, and both Democratic and Republican presidents spent years covering up evidence of massive contracting corruption, accounting failure (as in, failure to do any accounting), war crimes, and other problems.
Afghanistan was the ultimate symbol of the two-party consensus, the “good war” as Barack Obama deemed it, and defense spending in general remained so sacrosanct across the last twenty years that the monster, $160 billion defense spending hikes of 2017-2018 were virtually the only policy initiative of Donald Trump’s that went unopposed by a Democratic leadership. “We fully support President Trump’s Defense Department’s request,” was Chuck Schumer’s formulation in 2018, choosing then to reward the Pentagon for turning Mesopotamia into a Mad Max set and spending two trillion dollars on the by-then-inevitable fall of Kabul.
Worse, as the performance of the legacy media in the last few weeks shows, the national commentariat is also fully occupied by the military establishment. Staffed from top to bottom by spooks and hawks, the corporate press’s focus from the pre-Iraq firing of Phil Donahue through the past few weeks of guest star appearances on CNN, Fox, and MSNBC by the likes of Leon Panetta, John Bolton, Karl Rove, David Petraeus and Marc Thiessen — all people with direct involvement in the Afghan mess — has been the same. It keeps the public distracted with inane tactical issues or fleeting partisan controversies, leaving the larger problem of a continually expanding Fortress America unexamined.
We need new institutions free of Pentagon influence, probably starting with a new political party. It doesn’t even matter so much what such a party would stand for, ideologically, so long as it adheres to one basic principle: don’t accept contractor money. It seems like the only possible solution to the disease that gave us Afghanistan. Our two parties, just like our academic research institutions, news networks, and even Hollywood’s movie studios, have become de facto Pentagon subsidiaries. They’re all hopelessly corrupted by the financial powers Dwight Eisenhower warned about, in his famous speech prophesying “the disastrous rise of misplaced power” from America’s armaments sector.

A few stray pundits in the last two weeks have pointed out the obvious fact that despite awesome financial and technological advantages, the United States has now “lost” virtually every war it has entered since World War II (with the possible exception of the first Gulf War, though the cleanness even of that victory is very debatable). Dominic Tierney, the author of The Right Way To Lose A War: America in the Age of Unwinnable Conflicts, told Time magazine a big reason for this was that “the nature of war itself” has changed since 1945:

Nearly all wars now are civil wars, complex arenas of counterinsurgency and terrorism. When you put the U.S. against another country where there’s a military that wears uniforms and they meet on the field of battle, the U.S. usually wins those kinds of wars—like the Gulf War in ‘91. But in complex civil wars, the United States has really struggled.

I’d agree, with a twist: under the influence of captured parties and the military’s ubiquitous and extravagantly funded public relations apparatus, America has itself redefined the “nature of war.” Armed conflict has gone from being an occasional unpleasant political necessity to the core product line of the American corporation. Wars are what we make, and like blue jeans or Louisville Sluggers, we build them to last, with Afghanistan the prime example. That should be the issue dominating Meet the Press, not whether we lost or just “didn’t win,” or which party’s leaders decided to pull out first, and why.
Just as we’re always designing new rifles and tanks and jet fighters, we’ve become adept at manufacturing fresh intellectual justifications for deploying troops, churning out everything from “humanitarian war” to “benevolent hegemony” to “regime change” to “nation-building” to Eisenhower’s own “domino theory.” Where once we fought for literal survival against other nations, and knew who’d won when one side surrendered, we’re now sending our kids to die (and kill) in open-ended engagements where victory is either impossible or indefinable, and the main concrete “results” are masses of foreign deaths and the gigantic houses built by defense executives in places like Loudon and Fairfax Counties in northern Virginia.
This is why, whenever we get a rare look at the real thinking underlying our modern conflicts, whether via the Pentagon or Afghanistan Papers or the Wikileaks release of diplomatic cables, we keep seeing the same story: senior American military and intelligence officials struggling to come up with “metrics for success,” in some cases years after they’d already invaded and occupied places like Vietnam and Afghanistan.
It shouldn’t need to be said, but if you have to invent a “metric for success” in war that goes beyond defeating an enemy, you’re not really at war, you’re doing something else.

 

[Sope Creek]

Seems to me we're still fighting the Civil War - the War Between the States for some - and we have different political parties now than then.

Wars don't end, so long as folks have the means for leisure time . . . and sometimes when they don't.

 

[Ohio Guy]

This brings up an interesting question - now that the Afghanistan war is coming off the defense industry's ledger, what will that be replaced with? I mean, those companies would seem to be positioned to lose a lot of money and I'm guessing there are people who aren't happy about that.

 

[mrhighlife]

It seems nice in theory. More than 2 parties. However doesn't it setup a perpetual minority rule?

Id rather see serious campaign finance reform. All donations of any size tracked and transparent. Citizens v United overturned.

Maybe its called a 3rd party but in actuality its a new party that displaces one of the existing 2.

 

[Marvin the Martian]

There are arguments that our structure limits 3rd parties. But Duverger's law that first past the post results in two parties may not be true as other countries do have FPtP and have multiple parties.

Duverger’s Law is a dead parrot. Outside the USA, first-past-the-post voting has no tendency at all to produce two party politics

Political science has very few ‘laws’, perhaps explaining why the discipline has so stubbornly clung onto Maurice Duverger’s famous claim that countries using first-past-the-post voting systems wil…

blogs.lse.ac.uk

I think a large part of it is ingrained in who we are, Americans tend to think the two-party system was built by our forefathers. It was, but not intentionally. Some of our forefathers, notably Washington, argued against all parties. He was right, but it's too late to put that genie back in the bottle.

I think both the Republicans and Democrats are too beholden to a large standing army. Until Reagan, America only grew an army when it needed one. At the Constitutional Convention, Gerry said this:

A standing army is like a standing member. It's an excellent assurance of domestic tranquility, but a dangerous temptation to foreign adventure.​

​

Now we judge one's patriotism by how large of a standing army we have. This was never the plan envisioned by the founders, but it has resulted in not allowing any questioning of the military budget. A third party might address this. Ron Paul certainly tried. But I am skeptical this issue alone will create a viable third party.

 

[mushroomgod_1]

From Matt Taibi:

To Stop War, America Needs a Third Party​

The American political system has been captured by the military, and only an independent political power can prevent the next Afghanistan​

Matt Taibbi

Aug 29

On the Sunday morning shows today, prestige media did its best to soften the blow of Afghanistan. A key theme: we didn’t lose to the Taliban, but beat ourselves. It was “self-defeat,” somehow not-disgraced former National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster told NBC, while Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson cautiously described the disaster of Afghanistan as “a war we did not win.” Chuck Todd on Meet the Press liked that. “I agree,” he said, smiling a little and noting, “I don’t know if you can say we lost, but we didn’t win.”
Meet the Press @MeetThePress
WATCH: "This is what withdrawal from a war that we did not win looks like," says @Eugene_Robinson on #MTP "It's messy. It's awful. ... It's a tragic thing for a lot of Afghans ... certainly for the 13 service members who lost their lives and their families."
August 29th 2021
9 Retweets23 Likes
Just a few weeks in, the gruesome story of Afghanistan’s collapse is already being sanitized, cleaved into neat storylines for blue and red audiences who as usual are being herded into safe psychological spaces, where they can happily non-consider what happened across the last 20 years. The images they see on TV aren’t their party’s fault, it’s those other jerks to blame, etc.
Republicans are blissful over Joe Biden’s approval rating nosedive and are thrilled to blame the whole debacle on our Sundowner-in-Chief. Biden, they say, is prioritizing Afghan lives over Americans in his withdrawal plans, and continues to push his $3.5 trillion “socialist wish list” over national security, and should have used Mike Pompeo’s “conditions-based” withdrawal plan instead of the ass-over-elbow deal they used in reality. Multiple Republicans are aping Trump-era Democrats by demanding the president’s resignation, with one, Missouri Senator Vicky Hartzler, going so far as to demand closure of the U.S.-Mexican border to “protect American lives” from an alleged heightened terrorist threat.
Democrats, not completely without self-reflection in the first days of this crisis, are already back focused on counter-blame narratives. Blue-state audiences are being reminded Donald Trump negotiated the “premature” May 1st pullout date, and that when critics blasted that deal as “weak and dangerous,” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy advised his caucus not to speak against it. McCarthy today is leading the charge in criticizing Biden’s withdrawal, which is “so freaking hypocritical,” according to Senate-to-MSNBC pipeline passenger Claire McCaskill. Moreover, they say, House Democrat Jason Crow offered an amendment for his own “conditions-based” withdrawal plan, and that was shot down by the likes of Matt Gaetz, who last year said, “I don’t think there’s ever a bad day to end the war in Afghanistan.”
It’s all noise, designed to distract from the fact that Afghanistan is as pure a bipartisan fiasco as we’ve had in recent times. Both parties were directly and repeatedly complicit in prolonging the catastrophe. Republicans and Democrats were virtually unanimous in approving the initial use-of-force, both voted over and over to fund the war to insane levels, and both Democratic and Republican presidents spent years covering up evidence of massive contracting corruption, accounting failure (as in, failure to do any accounting), war crimes, and other problems.
Afghanistan was the ultimate symbol of the two-party consensus, the “good war” as Barack Obama deemed it, and defense spending in general remained so sacrosanct across the last twenty years that the monster, $160 billion defense spending hikes of 2017-2018 were virtually the only policy initiative of Donald Trump’s that went unopposed by a Democratic leadership. “We fully support President Trump’s Defense Department’s request,” was Chuck Schumer’s formulation in 2018, choosing then to reward the Pentagon for turning Mesopotamia into a Mad Max set and spending two trillion dollars on the by-then-inevitable fall of Kabul.
Worse, as the performance of the legacy media in the last few weeks shows, the national commentariat is also fully occupied by the military establishment. Staffed from top to bottom by spooks and hawks, the corporate press’s focus from the pre-Iraq firing of Phil Donahue through the past few weeks of guest star appearances on CNN, Fox, and MSNBC by the likes of Leon Panetta, John Bolton, Karl Rove, David Petraeus and Marc Thiessen — all people with direct involvement in the Afghan mess — has been the same. It keeps the public distracted with inane tactical issues or fleeting partisan controversies, leaving the larger problem of a continually expanding Fortress America unexamined.
We need new institutions free of Pentagon influence, probably starting with a new political party. It doesn’t even matter so much what such a party would stand for, ideologically, so long as it adheres to one basic principle: don’t accept contractor money. It seems like the only possible solution to the disease that gave us Afghanistan. Our two parties, just like our academic research institutions, news networks, and even Hollywood’s movie studios, have become de facto Pentagon subsidiaries. They’re all hopelessly corrupted by the financial powers Dwight Eisenhower warned about, in his famous speech prophesying “the disastrous rise of misplaced power” from America’s armaments sector.

A few stray pundits in the last two weeks have pointed out the obvious fact that despite awesome financial and technological advantages, the United States has now “lost” virtually every war it has entered since World War II (with the possible exception of the first Gulf War, though the cleanness even of that victory is very debatable). Dominic Tierney, the author of The Right Way To Lose A War: America in the Age of Unwinnable Conflicts, told Timemagazine a big reason for this was that “the nature of war itself” has changed since 1945:

I’d agree, with a twist: under the influence of captured parties and the military’s ubiquitous and extravagantly funded public relations apparatus, America has itself redefined the “nature of war.” Armed conflict has gone from being an occasional unpleasant political necessity to the core product line of the American corporation. Wars are what we make, and like blue jeans or Louisville Sluggers, we build them to last, with Afghanistan the prime example. That should be the issue dominating Meet the Press, not whether we lost or just “didn’t win,” or which party’s leaders decided to pull out first, and why.
Just as we’re always designing new rifles and tanks and jet fighters, we’ve become adept at manufacturing fresh intellectual justifications for deploying troops, churning out everything from “humanitarian war” to “benevolent hegemony” to “regime change” to “nation-building” to Eisenhower’s own “domino theory.” Where once we fought for literal survival against other nations, and knew who’d won when one side surrendered, we’re now sending our kids to die (and kill) in open-ended engagements where victory is either impossible or indefinable, and the main concrete “results” are masses of foreign deaths and the gigantic houses built by defense executives in places like Loudon and Fairfax Counties in northern Virginia.
This is why, whenever we get a rare look at the real thinking underlying our modern conflicts, whether via the Pentagon or Afghanistan Papers or the Wikileaks release of diplomatic cables, we keep seeing the same story: senior American military and intelligence officials struggling to come up with “metrics for success,” in some cases years after they’d already invaded and occupied places like Vietnam and Afghanistan.
It shouldn’t need to be said, but if you have to invent a “metric for success” in war that goes beyond defeating an enemy, you’re not really at war, you’re doing something else.

When we first got involved in Afghanistan, Bush was well aware of the potential problems in getting immersed in a quagmire....thus the initial emphasis on Special Ops and the Northern Alliance.

But then, the Dems and some Pubs began insisting on nation building. I well remember the line "If you break it, you own it", and the talk about us not being able to leave, creating political and military chaos.

So we started building roads and schools and digging wells, with the thought of bringing the country into the 21st century. The defense contractors were happy about equipping and training the Afghan army. Bush and Cheney were ok with it....$ was never an object with them. And they were on to Iraq anyway. The Libs were happy because girls were going to school. So everybody got something out of the arrangement except the tax payers and the military members getting shot, blown up at worst, or doing multiple deployments at best.

 

[mushroomgod_1]

There are arguments that our structure limits 3rd parties. But Duverger's law that first past the post results in two parties may not be true as other countries do have FPtP and have multiple parties.

Duverger’s Law is a dead parrot. Outside the USA, first-past-the-post voting has no tendency at all to produce two party politics

Political science has very few ‘laws’, perhaps explaining why the discipline has so stubbornly clung onto Maurice Duverger’s famous claim that countries using first-past-the-post voting systems wil…

blogs.lse.ac.uk

I think a large part of it is ingrained in who we are, Americans tend to think the two-party system was built by our forefathers. It was, but not intentionally. Some of our forefathers, notably Washington, argued against all parties. He was right, but it's too late to put that genie back in the bottle.

I think both the Republicans and Democrats are too beholden to a large standing army. Until Reagan, America only grew an army when it needed one. At the Constitutional Convention, Gerry said this:

A standing army is like a standing member. It's an excellent assurance of domestic tranquility, but a dangerous temptation to foreign adventure.​

​

Now we judge one's patriotism by how large of a standing army we have. This was never the plan envisioned by the founders, but it has resulted in not allowing any questioning of the military budget. A third party might address this. Ron Paul certainly tried. But I am skeptical this issue alone will create a viable third party.

Has there ever been a democratic or representative form of government that didn't have parties? They seem inevitable.

 

[mushroomgod_1]

There are arguments that our structure limits 3rd parties. But Duverger's law that first past the post results in two parties may not be true as other countries do have FPtP and have multiple parties.

Duverger’s Law is a dead parrot. Outside the USA, first-past-the-post voting has no tendency at all to produce two party politics

Political science has very few ‘laws’, perhaps explaining why the discipline has so stubbornly clung onto Maurice Duverger’s famous claim that countries using first-past-the-post voting systems wil…

blogs.lse.ac.uk

I think a large part of it is ingrained in who we are, Americans tend to think the two-party system was built by our forefathers. It was, but not intentionally. Some of our forefathers, notably Washington, argued against all parties. He was right, but it's too late to put that genie back in the bottle.

I think both the Republicans and Democrats are too beholden to a large standing army. Until Reagan, America only grew an army when it needed one. At the Constitutional Convention, Gerry said this:

A standing army is like a standing member. It's an excellent assurance of domestic tranquility, but a dangerous temptation to foreign adventure.​

​

Now we judge one's patriotism by how large of a standing army we have. This was never the plan envisioned by the founders, but it has resulted in not allowing any questioning of the military budget. A third party might address this. Ron Paul certainly tried. But I am skeptical this issue alone will create a viable third party.

Concerning your comments about a standing army......I've noticed a similar attitude that has developed concerning the all-volunteer army. When ever there is debate over some ill-conceived intervention, some politician will say something to the effect of "Well that's what they volunteered for, isn't it"? Meaning, "This isn't something I'd send one of my kids to do but, what the hell, they signed up for it".

 

[El Drado]

Would rather have no party than 3. If we continue to digest our news like we do, and back ourselves into our corners with like minded people (like we do), 3 parties just means we will be divided 3 ways.
Here is a wild idea, we should vote for people with experience and choose based on the content of their character.

 

[mushroomgod_1]

From Matt Taibi:

To Stop War, America Needs a Third Party​

The American political system has been captured by the military, and only an independent political power can prevent the next Afghanistan​

Matt Taibbi

Aug 29

On the Sunday morning shows today, prestige media did its best to soften the blow of Afghanistan. A key theme: we didn’t lose to the Taliban, but beat ourselves. It was “self-defeat,” somehow not-disgraced former National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster told NBC, while Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson cautiously described the disaster of Afghanistan as “a war we did not win.” Chuck Todd on Meet the Press liked that. “I agree,” he said, smiling a little and noting, “I don’t know if you can say we lost, but we didn’t win.”
Meet the Press @MeetThePress
WATCH: "This is what withdrawal from a war that we did not win looks like," says @Eugene_Robinson on #MTP "It's messy. It's awful. ... It's a tragic thing for a lot of Afghans ... certainly for the 13 service members who lost their lives and their families."
August 29th 2021
9 Retweets23 Likes
Just a few weeks in, the gruesome story of Afghanistan’s collapse is already being sanitized, cleaved into neat storylines for blue and red audiences who as usual are being herded into safe psychological spaces, where they can happily non-consider what happened across the last 20 years. The images they see on TV aren’t their party’s fault, it’s those other jerks to blame, etc.
Republicans are blissful over Joe Biden’s approval rating nosedive and are thrilled to blame the whole debacle on our Sundowner-in-Chief. Biden, they say, is prioritizing Afghan lives over Americans in his withdrawal plans, and continues to push his $3.5 trillion “socialist wish list” over national security, and should have used Mike Pompeo’s “conditions-based” withdrawal plan instead of the ass-over-elbow deal they used in reality. Multiple Republicans are aping Trump-era Democrats by demanding the president’s resignation, with one, Missouri Senator Vicky Hartzler, going so far as to demand closure of the U.S.-Mexican border to “protect American lives” from an alleged heightened terrorist threat.
Democrats, not completely without self-reflection in the first days of this crisis, are already back focused on counter-blame narratives. Blue-state audiences are being reminded Donald Trump negotiated the “premature” May 1st pullout date, and that when critics blasted that deal as “weak and dangerous,” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy advised his caucus not to speak against it. McCarthy today is leading the charge in criticizing Biden’s withdrawal, which is “so freaking hypocritical,” according to Senate-to-MSNBC pipeline passenger Claire McCaskill. Moreover, they say, House Democrat Jason Crow offered an amendment for his own “conditions-based” withdrawal plan, and that was shot down by the likes of Matt Gaetz, who last year said, “I don’t think there’s ever a bad day to end the war in Afghanistan.”
It’s all noise, designed to distract from the fact that Afghanistan is as pure a bipartisan fiasco as we’ve had in recent times. Both parties were directly and repeatedly complicit in prolonging the catastrophe. Republicans and Democrats were virtually unanimous in approving the initial use-of-force, both voted over and over to fund the war to insane levels, and both Democratic and Republican presidents spent years covering up evidence of massive contracting corruption, accounting failure (as in, failure to do any accounting), war crimes, and other problems.
Afghanistan was the ultimate symbol of the two-party consensus, the “good war” as Barack Obama deemed it, and defense spending in general remained so sacrosanct across the last twenty years that the monster, $160 billion defense spending hikes of 2017-2018 were virtually the only policy initiative of Donald Trump’s that went unopposed by a Democratic leadership. “We fully support President Trump’s Defense Department’s request,” was Chuck Schumer’s formulation in 2018, choosing then to reward the Pentagon for turning Mesopotamia into a Mad Max set and spending two trillion dollars on the by-then-inevitable fall of Kabul.
Worse, as the performance of the legacy media in the last few weeks shows, the national commentariat is also fully occupied by the military establishment. Staffed from top to bottom by spooks and hawks, the corporate press’s focus from the pre-Iraq firing of Phil Donahue through the past few weeks of guest star appearances on CNN, Fox, and MSNBC by the likes of Leon Panetta, John Bolton, Karl Rove, David Petraeus and Marc Thiessen — all people with direct involvement in the Afghan mess — has been the same. It keeps the public distracted with inane tactical issues or fleeting partisan controversies, leaving the larger problem of a continually expanding Fortress America unexamined.
We need new institutions free of Pentagon influence, probably starting with a new political party. It doesn’t even matter so much what such a party would stand for, ideologically, so long as it adheres to one basic principle: don’t accept contractor money. It seems like the only possible solution to the disease that gave us Afghanistan. Our two parties, just like our academic research institutions, news networks, and even Hollywood’s movie studios, have become de facto Pentagon subsidiaries. They’re all hopelessly corrupted by the financial powers Dwight Eisenhower warned about, in his famous speech prophesying “the disastrous rise of misplaced power” from America’s armaments sector.

A few stray pundits in the last two weeks have pointed out the obvious fact that despite awesome financial and technological advantages, the United States has now “lost” virtually every war it has entered since World War II (with the possible exception of the first Gulf War, though the cleanness even of that victory is very debatable). Dominic Tierney, the author of The Right Way To Lose A War: America in the Age of Unwinnable Conflicts, told Timemagazine a big reason for this was that “the nature of war itself” has changed since 1945:

I’d agree, with a twist: under the influence of captured parties and the military’s ubiquitous and extravagantly funded public relations apparatus, America has itself redefined the “nature of war.” Armed conflict has gone from being an occasional unpleasant political necessity to the core product line of the American corporation. Wars are what we make, and like blue jeans or Louisville Sluggers, we build them to last, with Afghanistan the prime example. That should be the issue dominating Meet the Press, not whether we lost or just “didn’t win,” or which party’s leaders decided to pull out first, and why.
Just as we’re always designing new rifles and tanks and jet fighters, we’ve become adept at manufacturing fresh intellectual justifications for deploying troops, churning out everything from “humanitarian war” to “benevolent hegemony” to “regime change” to “nation-building” to Eisenhower’s own “domino theory.” Where once we fought for literal survival against other nations, and knew who’d won when one side surrendered, we’re now sending our kids to die (and kill) in open-ended engagements where victory is either impossible or indefinable, and the main concrete “results” are masses of foreign deaths and the gigantic houses built by defense executives in places like Loudon and Fairfax Counties in northern Virginia.
This is why, whenever we get a rare look at the real thinking underlying our modern conflicts, whether via the Pentagon or Afghanistan Papers or the Wikileaks release of diplomatic cables, we keep seeing the same story: senior American military and intelligence officials struggling to come up with “metrics for success,” in some cases years after they’d already invaded and occupied places like Vietnam and Afghanistan.
It shouldn’t need to be said, but if you have to invent a “metric for success” in war that goes beyond defeating an enemy, you’re not really at war, you’re doing something else.

I think the broader and more interesting question is whether we can have truly representative government at all with 330-350 million people. And a government with the size of our central government. It's a government run by bureaucrats and regulations. The politicians pass laws that no living person has read, and regulations are created that are 5x more complicated than the laws.

If you think about it, it's never really been tried before. And the results aren't encouraging.

 

[Sope Creek]

This brings up an interesting question - now that the Afghanistan war is coming off the defense industry's ledger, what will that be replaced with? I mean, those companies would seem to be positioned to lose a lot of money and I'm guessing there are people who aren't happy about that.

Pay down the debt . . . but the GOP will start stomping around with a tax cut mantra like it's a foregone conclusion . . . .

 

[Marvin the Martian]

Has there ever been a democratic or representative form of government that didn't have parties? They seem inevitable.

It isn't often, a quick Google shows some very small countries like Micronesia. Strangely, the Republic of Texas was non-partisan in its time.

Some countries used to prevent party ID from being printed on ballots, Canada and Hong Kong being two. But both changed their laws on that. I think that might be an answer, don't print the party on ballots. In presidential races, it probably won't matter. But an amazing number of Americans do not know their representative (37% can). Without party, people may have to vote for the person whose name they remember saying something they liked. And if the polling below is accurate, it will hurt Ds more than Rs.

Just 37% of Americans can name their Representative -

Americans aren’t likely to know much about their elected Representative. Few know their Representative’s name, and barely half know his or her party affiliation. Nor are Americans likely to have a strong opinion of their Representative, one way or the other. Yet no matter who they are—male or...

www.haveninsights.com

 

[Sope Creek]

I think the broader and more interesting question is whether we can have truly representative government at all with 330-350 million people. And a government with the size of our central government. It's a government run by bureaucrats and regulations. The politicians pass laws that no living person has read, and regulations are created that are 5x more complicated than the laws.

If you think about it, it's never really been tried before. And the results aren't encouraging.

So is the answer less government, or more?

I'm on record here suggesting an additional layer of regional government - state compacts of a sort - to take on most of the questions that are more local than national, but more regional than state-based. Think in terms of the West Regional Reporter System* (wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Reporter_System) for regional compacts, where issues that have been difficult to reach national consensus on can be dealt with on a more common ground basis than nationally would allow. How issues are allocated between the federal government and the compacts would be a matter of negotiation for a new constitution - or maybe just applying the current constitution a bit differently. I'm thinking that health care ought to be a compact level decision, whereas national defense ought to be a federal issue.

In a way, this "more" government is actually less, because issues that multiple states want to deal with can do so without having to take it to the national government and get wholly different states on board . . . .

* The West National Reporter System brought together case law states that had similar economic and legal interests into a common book of reported appellate cases, for ease in doing research regarding topics common to the states withing each region.

 

[mushroomgod_1]

So is the answer less government, or more?

I'm on record here suggesting an additional layer of regional government - state compacts of a sort - to take on most of the questions that are more local than national, but more regional than state-based. Think in terms of the West Regional Reporter System* (wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Reporter_System) for regional compacts, where issues that have been difficult to reach national consensus on can be dealt with on a more common ground basis than nationally would allow. How issues are allocated between the federal government and the compacts would be a matter of negotiation for a new constitution - or maybe just applying the current constitution a bit differently. I'm thinking that health care ought to be a compact level decision, whereas national defense ought to be a federal issue.

In a way, this "more" government is actually less, because issues that multiple states want to deal with can do so without having to take it to the national government and get wholly different states on board . . . .

* The West National Reporter System brought together case law states that had similar economic and legal interests into a common book of reported appellate cases, for ease in doing research regarding topics common to the states withing each region.

I certainly think there' s room for more regionalized approaches to certain issues.

There's a theory out there (don't know the name or who came up with it) that the most efficient and least tyrannical form of government is is to drive decisions down to the smallest component of government that can fully address the issue.

A an example, why do we have 'federal highway funds' relating to anything other than maintenance of federal highways and interstates? That is, why tax people to have a pot of federal highway funds that you then turn around and distribute for state and local projects?

As an example, not so long ago, Columbus , IN had some cosmetic work done at the interstate exit to Columbus, and to the state highway leading into town. All funded in part by the federal govt. It's nice and all, but why Columbus v. Peoria ILL vs. Athens, OH? Totally random. As far as Columbus is concerned, they get a $20M project done for $10M (I'm making up the #s). Is that efficient not to pay the full price? And having the pot increases the power of the feds. They can turn around and threaten the locals to 'withhold' federal highway funds if the locals refuse to do X, Y or Z, which may be totally unrelated to highway construction or maintenance. As a conceptual matter, why not keep the taxes local/statewide to begin with.....that way the costs and benefits track.

Same argument goes for federal education funding, disaster relief et al.

 

[hoot1]

I would argue that since WWI, WWII, and Cold War the world has become more peaceful.

Furthermore, I see the so-called war on terrorism which followed 9/11 that took our military into Afghanistan and Iraq as having made the U.S. less likely to engage its military in the near future.

To prove my point Donald Trump during his presidency showed little interest in using our military, and the previously more bellicose Republican party seemed to accept this.

So in the final analysis, we don't seem as likely to go to war as we once were, thus a third party won't be necessary to keep us out of war.

 

[td75]

These parties survive on big $$$ donors and their donations. A true third party would probably struggle to drum up proper financing.

Here in Kentucky, Amy McGrath lost to Mitch McConnell even though she drummed up 70-80 million in campaign money. It is out of control.

 

[mcmurtry66]

So is the answer less government, or more?

I'm on record here suggesting an additional layer of regional government - state compacts of a sort - to take on most of the questions that are more local than national, but more regional than state-based. Think in terms of the West Regional Reporter System* (wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Reporter_System) for regional compacts, where issues that have been difficult to reach national consensus on can be dealt with on a more common ground basis than nationally would allow. How issues are allocated between the federal government and the compacts would be a matter of negotiation for a new constitution - or maybe just applying the current constitution a bit differently. I'm thinking that health care ought to be a compact level decision, whereas national defense ought to be a federal issue.

In a way, this "more" government is actually less, because issues that multiple states want to deal with can do so without having to take it to the national government and get wholly different states on board . . . .

* The West National Reporter System brought together case law states that had similar economic and legal interests into a common book of reported appellate cases, for ease in doing research regarding topics common to the states withing each region.

Love this

 

[Marvin the Martian]

These parties survive on big $$$ donors and their donations. A true third party would probably struggle to drum up proper financing.

Here in Kentucky, Amy McGrath lost to Mitch McConnell even though she drummed up 70-80 million in campaign money. It is out of control.

Bad candidates blame money for losing, leading to the perception that money is to blame. Money is seldom the reason, there is a minimum one needs to compete but after that it just doesn't work. But all the new candidates here the old losing candidates complain about money so it becomes a truism even though it isn't.

Not just McGrath, Maine's Senate race is another great example.

My guess for state races, number of in-state contributors means more than total dollars raised. Most people contributing to the two aforementioned campaigns were not locals and couldn't vote.

 

[anon_6hv78pr714xta]

So is the answer less government, or more?

I'm on record here suggesting an additional layer of regional government - state compacts of a sort - to take on most of the questions that are more local than national, but more regional than state-based. Think in terms of the West Regional Reporter System* (wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Reporter_System) for regional compacts, where issues that have been difficult to reach national consensus on can be dealt with on a more common ground basis than nationally would allow. How issues are allocated between the federal government and the compacts would be a matter of negotiation for a new constitution - or maybe just applying the current constitution a bit differently. I'm thinking that health care ought to be a compact level decision, whereas national defense ought to be a federal issue.

In a way, this "more" government is actually less, because issues that multiple states want to deal with can do so without having to take it to the national government and get wholly different states on board . . . .

* The West National Reporter System brought together case law states that had similar economic and legal interests into a common book of reported appellate cases, for ease in doing research regarding topics common to the states withing each region.

I don't think what you've described equates to "less" government. Just a different level. Of course with a new level, you have new admin, legal issues, expenses, complexity, etc. It sounds impracticable.

I also don't find compiling cases in a common, searchable book to be analogous, politically or practically, to providing and regulating health care. I'm not sure what you have in mind here.

 

[TheOriginalHappyGoat]

I would argue that since WWI, WWII, and Cold War the world has become more peaceful.

Furthermore, I see the so-called war on terrorism which followed 9/11 that took our military into Afghanistan and Iraq as having made the U.S. less likely to engage its military in the near future.

To prove my point Donald Trump during his presidency showed little interest in using our military, and the previously more bellicose Republican party seemed to accept this.

So in the final analysis, we don't seem as likely to go to war as we once were, thus a third party won't be necessary to keep us out of war.

Good point. The world is more peaceful now than it ever has been in recorded history. Maybe if we just sit back and relax, we'll naturally come to the conclusion we can stop blowing everyone up.

 

[twenty02]

Good point. The world is more peaceful now than it ever has been in recorded history. Maybe if we just sit back and relax, we'll naturally come to the conclusion we can stop blowing everyone up.

The amount of people being killed from human conflict is the lowest in human history. Yet everyone is convinced everything is on the brink of destruction. It's truly amazing how warped the human brain can become.

 

[TheOriginalHappyGoat]

The amount of people being killed from human conflict is the lowest in human history. Yet everyone is convinced everything is on the brink of destruction. It's truly amazing how warped the human brain can become.

Over the past 20 years, 212,000 people have died in the Afghan conflict, representing three-thousandths of one percent of the human population.

In 1219, after his ambassador was killed by an official in the Khwarazmian Empire in the same part of the world, Genghis Khan went on a rampage of destruction that killed 15 million people in western Afghanistan and the surrounding regions, representing nearly 4% of the entire global population.

We have it lucky.

 

[Sope Creek]

I don't think what you've described equates to "less" government. Just a different level. Of course with a new level, you have new admin, legal issues, expenses, complexity, etc. It sounds impracticable.

I also don't find compiling cases in a common, searchable book to be analogous, politically or practically, to providing and regulating health care. I'm not sure what you have in mind here.

Depends, doesn't it, on how the extra layer is used?

I hear loads of "conservatives" complaining about "big" government, when what they're really complaining about is the federal government requiring their compliance with specific regulations that might/might not apply in their community. For example, some folks complain about Medicare, or Obamacare, or universal health care . . . and conservatives have ridden that wave to pass legislation that outlaws the federal government, or any state government (I believe) from negotiating pharmaceutical prices. Some states are chafing at this restriction and want the right to negotiate pharma prices for their Medicaid recipients.

Why is that a federal issue? Commerce clause is broadly interpreted. Instead of that, why not allow different levels of government to do things differently? Instead of a monolithic society, we'd have a pluralistic one . . . and adding a layer of government at the states compact level would allow states to act in concert more like a federal government without requiring other states who don't want to do that . . . the trick would be in determining which issues are federal (freedom of travel, defense - and along with that nuclear energy/clean up, anti-discrimination perhaps . . . perhaps monetary policy) and which are compact issues (pharmaceutical regulation, health care, food regulations, uniform commercial code, perhaps monetary policy), and which issues are best left to individual states.

Regarding the West reporting system, methinks you're too much a product of your training as a lawyer. When the profs introduced that system in law school, perhaps you didn't hear that West determined its regions based on common economic - and therefore common legal issues. New York and Indiana are in the same region because they shared a common economic interest in manufacturing, banking, and - believe it or not - agriculture. So the compacts I'm talking about wouldn't necessarily be fixed, they'd be negotiated among the states based on common interests . . . New York might enter into a compact with North Carolina for example, regarding banking . . . and might enter into a compact with Pennsylvania, Washington and California regarding maritime issues.

Finally, I welcome your criticism, as I clearly haven't thought this through to a conclusion. It's just an idea . . . . But the whole idea of an unwieldy government seems to be a real problem . . . .

BTW, to understand my post you'd have to read shroom's post about the current federal government being too unwieldy. $335 million people? 435 representatives? 100 senators? Are you kidding me? How many congresspeople do you know? And how many congresspeople should you know? That's the problem I'm suggesting we solve with an additional layer of government.

 

[mcmurtry66]

Depends, doesn't it, on how the extra layer is used?

I hear loads of "conservatives" complaining about "big" government, when what they're really complaining about is the federal government requiring their compliance with specific regulations that might/might not apply in their community. For example, some folks complain about Medicare, or Obamacare, or universal health care . . . and conservatives have ridden that wave to pass legislation that outlaws the federal government, or any state government (I believe) from negotiating pharmaceutical prices. Some states are chafing at this restriction and want the right to negotiate pharma prices for their Medicaid recipients.

Why is that a federal issue? Commerce clause is broadly interpreted. Instead of that, why not allow different levels of government to do things differently? Instead of a monolithic society, we'd have a pluralistic one . . . and adding a layer of government at the states compact level would allow states to act in concert more like a federal government without requiring other states who don't want to do that . . . the trick would be in determining which issues are federal (freedom of travel, defense - and along with that nuclear energy/clean up, anti-discrimination perhaps . . . perhaps monetary policy) and which are compact issues (pharmaceutical regulation, health care, food regulations, uniform commercial code, perhaps monetary policy), and which issues are best left to individual states.

Regarding the West reporting system, methinks you're too much a product of your training as a lawyer. When the profs introduced that system in law school, perhaps you didn't hear that West determined its regions based on common economic - and therefore common legal issues. New York and Indiana are in the same region because they shared a common economic interest in manufacturing, banking, and - believe it or not - agriculture. So the compacts I'm talking about wouldn't necessarily be fixed, they'd be negotiated among the states based on common interests . . . New York might enter into a compact with North Carolina for example, regarding banking . . . and might enter into a compact with Pennsylvania, Washington and California regarding maritime issues.

Finally, I welcome your criticism, as I clearly haven't thought this through to a conclusion. It's just an idea . . . . But the whole idea of an unwieldy government seems to be a real problem . . . .

BTW, to understand my post you'd have to read shroom's post about the current federal government being too unwieldy. $335 million people? 435 representatives? 100 senators? Are you kidding me? How many congresspeople do you know? And how many congresspeople should you know? That's the problem I'm suggesting we solve with an additional layer of government.

this would be particularly useful in the allocation of resources w/ covid

 

[Sope Creek]

this would be particularly useful in the allocation of resources w/ covid

How's that?

 

[mcmurtry66]

How's that?

i'll post later. too long to get into - but based on some of my reading in addressing the migration of covid to regional hotspots and some of the care innovations regarding medical licensing/icu coverage etc.

 

[Sope Creek]

i'll post later. too long to get into - but based on some of my reading in addressing the migration of covid to regional hotspots and some of the care innovations regarding medical licensing/icu coverage etc.

Will your thoughts explain how to manage the Sturgis, SD surges?

 

[mcmurtry66]

Will your thoughts explain how to manage the Sturgis, SD surges?

is there any money left over from trump's wall? might be a good spot for one

 

[Sope Creek]

I certainly think there' s room for more regionalized approaches to certain issues.

There's a theory out there (don't know the name or who came up with it) that the most efficient and least tyrannical form of government is is to drive decisions down to the smallest component of government that can fully address the issue.

A an example, why do we have 'federal highway funds' relating to anything other than maintenance of federal highways and interstates? That is, why tax people to have a pot of federal highway funds that you then turn around and distribute for state and local projects?

As an example, not so long ago, Columbus , IN had some cosmetic work done at the interstate exit to Columbus, and to the state highway leading into town. All funded in part by the federal govt. It's nice and all, but why Columbus v. Peoria ILL vs. Athens, OH? Totally random. As far as Columbus is concerned, they get a $20M project done for $10M (I'm making up the #s). Is that efficient not to pay the full price? And having the pot increases the power of the feds. They can turn around and threaten the locals to 'withhold' federal highway funds if the locals refuse to do X, Y or Z, which may be totally unrelated to highway construction or maintenance. As a conceptual matter, why not keep the taxes local/statewide to begin with.....that way the costs and benefits track.

Same argument goes for federal education funding, disaster relief et al.

Regarding the highway taxes . . . where do you think the money for highways comes from? You think Indiana folks pay for Indiana interstates? (Based on my most recent trip up I-65 and I-69 to Michigan, I'd think nobody is paying for them at all . . . but I digress . . . .) The money for federal highways comes from the states where economic activity is highest . . . New York, California, etc. Georgia doesn't want to pay for the highways y'all use to go to Florida on . . . .

Regarding the cosmetic work at Columbus - I presume you're talking about the orange bridge over Hwy 46 - I wasn't there when that was done. So I really don't know. Just a guess . . . it probably was an earmark by whoever represented Columbus' congressional district (Hamilton? or Pence?) when the planning was done for the project, and was done to "celebrate" - market, really - the architecture in Columbus.

In answer to your question, I don't think taxes are reallocated in accordance with just costs and benefits . . . tax money has to be sourced first. If you want to look at whether a district or state is a pig at the trough, you'd have to look at the districts and states that receive more than they generate. Or you could just look at a picture of Mitch McConnell, and ask MTIOTF why his state is so piggish.

 

[Sope Creek]

is there any money left over from trump's wall? might be a good spot for one

For building a wall?

Awwwmmmm . . . .

 

[hoot1]

So is the answer less government, or more?

I'm on record here suggesting an additional layer of regional government - state compacts of a sort - to take on most of the questions that are more local than national, but more regional than state-based. Think in terms of the West Regional Reporter System* (wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Reporter_System) for regional compacts, where issues that have been difficult to reach national consensus on can be dealt with on a more common ground basis than nationally would allow. How issues are allocated between the federal government and the compacts would be a matter of negotiation for a new constitution - or maybe just applying the current constitution a bit differently. I'm thinking that health care ought to be a compact level decision, whereas national defense ought to be a federal issue.

In a way, this "more" government is actually less, because issues that multiple states want to deal with can do so without having to take it to the national government and get wholly different states on board . . . .

* The West National Reporter System brought together case law states that had similar economic and legal interests into a common book of reported appellate cases, for ease in doing research regarding topics common to the states withing each region.

Sope, your additional layer of government reminded me about Republicans controlling the governor offices and state legislatures of 15 states. Then when ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council) prepares "model bills" for these states and other states we have the equivalent of a Republican controlled federal legislature.

To top it off, the federal government has a Congress which is so divided as to be dysfunctional, This when combined with an executive branch which goes back and forth between parties resulting in each president preparing executive orders to override those of his predecessor, and we have a federal government going nowhere.

Net result, Republican controlled states along with ALEC preparing model legislation for these states gives us a new layer of government which is actually producing legislative bills. Bills which according to this account describes the critics of ALEC as follows,

To its critics, it's a shadowy back-room arrangement where corporations pay good money to get friendly legislators to introduce pre-packaged bills in state houses across the country.

 

[Sope Creek]

Sope, your additional layer of government reminded me about Republicans controlling the governor offices and state legislatures of 15 states. Then when ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council) prepares "model bills" for these states and other states we have the equivalent of a Republican controlled federal legislature.

To top it off, the federal government has a Congress which is so divided as to be dysfunctional, This when combined with an executive branch which goes back and forth between parties resulting in each president preparing executive orders to override those of his predecessor, and we have a federal government going nowhere.

Net result, Republican controlled states along with ALEC preparing model legislation for these states gives us a new layer of government which is actually producing legislative bills. Bills which according to this account describes the critics of ALEC as follows,

To its critics, it's a shadowy back-room arrangement where corporations pay good money to get friendly legislators to introduce pre-packaged bills in state houses across the country.

So why not bring this out in the open and sanction it, if it's going to happen anyway?

BTW, is that 15 states where both the governor and the legislature are controlled by Republicans?

Where's the hue and cry from our conservative brethren here on the Cooler for split government in those states?

 

[IUCrazy2]

is there any money left over from trump's wall? might be a good spot for one

From my driving through South Dakota, they already have a Wall there. It is advertised like every other mile.

 

[Sope Creek]

From my driving through South Dakota, they already have a Wall there. It is advertised like every other mile.

Your Doorway to Endless Adventure: Wall, South Dakota | Black Hills Travel Blog

Just east of the Black Hills on the edge of Badlands National Park exists a small, but world-famous oasis with warm Western flair and all the free ice water you can drink.While the city of Wall, South

www.blackhillsbadlands.com

 

[mushroomgod_1]

The amount of people being killed from human conflict is the lowest in human history. Yet everyone is convinced everything is on the brink of destruction. It's truly amazing how warped the human brain can become.

I'd say we're underestimating the real threat---thousands of nukes in the hands of an increasing # of hostile/semi-hostile nations. And the possibility that terrorists/terrorist nations may eventually control some.

I would like to see continuous negotiations on those issues.

 

[IUCrazy2]

I'd say we're underestimating the real threat---thousands of nukes in the hands of an increasing # of hostile/semi-hostile nations. And the possibility that terrorists/terrorist nations may eventually control some.

I would like to see continuous negotiations on those issues.

China is the issue. The non state actors are dangerous but the Chinese are wanting to play the game of empires. The loss of life if they make good on their territorial ambitions will dwarf the non state actors.

The reason that things have been so peaceful is because there have not been major powers fully coming to blows outside of minor skirmishes basically since WW2. Most conflicts have been regional affairs or minor powers being "managed" by larger powers.

An expansionist China is a threat to that current order. Expansionist China increases chance of hostilities with neighbors such as Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, and the Phillipines which would likely draw in the U.S. They could also cause issues with non aligned countries like India or Russia (currently they get along...but they have fought as recently as the 1960's).

Those are what lead to high casualty conflicts.

 

[Sope Creek]

I'd say we're underestimating the real threat---thousands of nukes in the hands of an increasing # of hostile/semi-hostile nations. And the possibility that terrorists/terrorist nations may eventually control some.

I would like to see continuous negotiations on those issues.

Yeah, to those not used to wielding power weapons of mass destruction are only as good as the extent to which they're used. So they'll be used at some point . . . whether we like it or not.

 

[billyhillui]

From Matt Taibi:

To Stop War, America Needs a Third Party​

The American political system has been captured by the military, and only an independent political power can prevent the next Afghanistan​

Matt Taibbi

Aug 29

On the Sunday morning shows today, prestige media did its best to soften the blow of Afghanistan. A key theme: we didn’t lose to the Taliban, but beat ourselves. It was “self-defeat,” somehow not-disgraced former National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster told NBC, while Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson cautiously described the disaster of Afghanistan as “a war we did not win.” Chuck Todd on Meet the Press liked that. “I agree,” he said, smiling a little and noting, “I don’t know if you can say we lost, but we didn’t win.”
Meet the Press @MeetThePress
WATCH: "This is what withdrawal from a war that we did not win looks like," says @Eugene_Robinson on #MTP "It's messy. It's awful. ... It's a tragic thing for a lot of Afghans ... certainly for the 13 service members who lost their lives and their families."
August 29th 2021
9 Retweets23 Likes
Just a few weeks in, the gruesome story of Afghanistan’s collapse is already being sanitized, cleaved into neat storylines for blue and red audiences who as usual are being herded into safe psychological spaces, where they can happily non-consider what happened across the last 20 years. The images they see on TV aren’t their party’s fault, it’s those other jerks to blame, etc.
Republicans are blissful over Joe Biden’s approval rating nosedive and are thrilled to blame the whole debacle on our Sundowner-in-Chief. Biden, they say, is prioritizing Afghan lives over Americans in his withdrawal plans, and continues to push his $3.5 trillion “socialist wish list” over national security, and should have used Mike Pompeo’s “conditions-based” withdrawal plan instead of the ass-over-elbow deal they used in reality. Multiple Republicans are aping Trump-era Democrats by demanding the president’s resignation, with one, Missouri Senator Vicky Hartzler, going so far as to demand closure of the U.S.-Mexican border to “protect American lives” from an alleged heightened terrorist threat.
Democrats, not completely without self-reflection in the first days of this crisis, are already back focused on counter-blame narratives. Blue-state audiences are being reminded Donald Trump negotiated the “premature” May 1st pullout date, and that when critics blasted that deal as “weak and dangerous,” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy advised his caucus not to speak against it. McCarthy today is leading the charge in criticizing Biden’s withdrawal, which is “so freaking hypocritical,” according to Senate-to-MSNBC pipeline passenger Claire McCaskill. Moreover, they say, House Democrat Jason Crow offered an amendment for his own “conditions-based” withdrawal plan, and that was shot down by the likes of Matt Gaetz, who last year said, “I don’t think there’s ever a bad day to end the war in Afghanistan.”
It’s all noise, designed to distract from the fact that Afghanistan is as pure a bipartisan fiasco as we’ve had in recent times. Both parties were directly and repeatedly complicit in prolonging the catastrophe. Republicans and Democrats were virtually unanimous in approving the initial use-of-force, both voted over and over to fund the war to insane levels, and both Democratic and Republican presidents spent years covering up evidence of massive contracting corruption, accounting failure (as in, failure to do any accounting), war crimes, and other problems.
Afghanistan was the ultimate symbol of the two-party consensus, the “good war” as Barack Obama deemed it, and defense spending in general remained so sacrosanct across the last twenty years that the monster, $160 billion defense spending hikes of 2017-2018 were virtually the only policy initiative of Donald Trump’s that went unopposed by a Democratic leadership. “We fully support President Trump’s Defense Department’s request,” was Chuck Schumer’s formulation in 2018, choosing then to reward the Pentagon for turning Mesopotamia into a Mad Max set and spending two trillion dollars on the by-then-inevitable fall of Kabul.
Worse, as the performance of the legacy media in the last few weeks shows, the national commentariat is also fully occupied by the military establishment. Staffed from top to bottom by spooks and hawks, the corporate press’s focus from the pre-Iraq firing of Phil Donahue through the past few weeks of guest star appearances on CNN, Fox, and MSNBC by the likes of Leon Panetta, John Bolton, Karl Rove, David Petraeus and Marc Thiessen — all people with direct involvement in the Afghan mess — has been the same. It keeps the public distracted with inane tactical issues or fleeting partisan controversies, leaving the larger problem of a continually expanding Fortress America unexamined.
We need new institutions free of Pentagon influence, probably starting with a new political party. It doesn’t even matter so much what such a party would stand for, ideologically, so long as it adheres to one basic principle: don’t accept contractor money. It seems like the only possible solution to the disease that gave us Afghanistan. Our two parties, just like our academic research institutions, news networks, and even Hollywood’s movie studios, have become de facto Pentagon subsidiaries. They’re all hopelessly corrupted by the financial powers Dwight Eisenhower warned about, in his famous speech prophesying “the disastrous rise of misplaced power” from America’s armaments sector.

A few stray pundits in the last two weeks have pointed out the obvious fact that despite awesome financial and technological advantages, the United States has now “lost” virtually every war it has entered since World War II (with the possible exception of the first Gulf War, though the cleanness even of that victory is very debatable). Dominic Tierney, the author of The Right Way To Lose A War: America in the Age of Unwinnable Conflicts, told Timemagazine a big reason for this was that “the nature of war itself” has changed since 1945:

I’d agree, with a twist: under the influence of captured parties and the military’s ubiquitous and extravagantly funded public relations apparatus, America has itself redefined the “nature of war.” Armed conflict has gone from being an occasional unpleasant political necessity to the core product line of the American corporation. Wars are what we make, and like blue jeans or Louisville Sluggers, we build them to last, with Afghanistan the prime example. That should be the issue dominating Meet the Press, not whether we lost or just “didn’t win,” or which party’s leaders decided to pull out first, and why.
Just as we’re always designing new rifles and tanks and jet fighters, we’ve become adept at manufacturing fresh intellectual justifications for deploying troops, churning out everything from “humanitarian war” to “benevolent hegemony” to “regime change” to “nation-building” to Eisenhower’s own “domino theory.” Where once we fought for literal survival against other nations, and knew who’d won when one side surrendered, we’re now sending our kids to die (and kill) in open-ended engagements where victory is either impossible or indefinable, and the main concrete “results” are masses of foreign deaths and the gigantic houses built by defense executives in places like Loudon and Fairfax Counties in northern Virginia.
This is why, whenever we get a rare look at the real thinking underlying our modern conflicts, whether via the Pentagon or Afghanistan Papers or the Wikileaks release of diplomatic cables, we keep seeing the same story: senior American military and intelligence officials struggling to come up with “metrics for success,” in some cases years after they’d already invaded and occupied places like Vietnam and Afghanistan.
It shouldn’t need to be said, but if you have to invent a “metric for success” in war that goes beyond defeating an enemy, you’re not really at war, you’re doing something else.

I believe every war America has ever been in, was a necessary one. I also support the 2,500 American troops staying in Afghanistan/'plan A' for Afghanistan (limited) troop withdrawal, which Biden & Trump rejected, but our top military/DOD recommended . No, we/America can't 'save the world', but we must pick & choose our battles & wars carefully. Lindsey was correct, because of a soon to be 'nuclear capable' Iran, we will be back in Afghanistan within five years.

America was designed to lead the world.

If you want to lead, you must do it from a position of power/authority.

To do this, you can not practice 'isolationist foreign policy'.


To make the best cakes, the top chefs must often break some valuable eggs.



Remember this above all else. If you want to keep this 'American lifestyle' we currently enjoy (the best on earth), you/we/America must lead the world, both economically & militarily, otherwise, we don't lead for very long. You must often fight (& win) to be the best/dominant force in world leadership. It's never cheap, nor comes easy.

 

[i'vegotwinners]

From Matt Taibi:

To Stop War, America Needs a Third Party​

The American political system has been captured by the military, and only an independent political power can prevent the next Afghanistan​

Matt Taibbi

Aug 29

On the Sunday morning shows today, prestige media did its best to soften the blow of Afghanistan. A key theme: we didn’t lose to the Taliban, but beat ourselves. It was “self-defeat,” somehow not-disgraced former National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster told NBC, while Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson cautiously described the disaster of Afghanistan as “a war we did not win.” Chuck Todd on Meet the Press liked that. “I agree,” he said, smiling a little and noting, “I don’t know if you can say we lost, but we didn’t win.”
Meet the Press @MeetThePress
WATCH: "This is what withdrawal from a war that we did not win looks like," says @Eugene_Robinson on #MTP "It's messy. It's awful. ... It's a tragic thing for a lot of Afghans ... certainly for the 13 service members who lost their lives and their families."
August 29th 2021
9 Retweets23 Likes
Just a few weeks in, the gruesome story of Afghanistan’s collapse is already being sanitized, cleaved into neat storylines for blue and red audiences who as usual are being herded into safe psychological spaces, where they can happily non-consider what happened across the last 20 years. The images they see on TV aren’t their party’s fault, it’s those other jerks to blame, etc.
Republicans are blissful over Joe Biden’s approval rating nosedive and are thrilled to blame the whole debacle on our Sundowner-in-Chief. Biden, they say, is prioritizing Afghan lives over Americans in his withdrawal plans, and continues to push his $3.5 trillion “socialist wish list” over national security, and should have used Mike Pompeo’s “conditions-based” withdrawal plan instead of the ass-over-elbow deal they used in reality. Multiple Republicans are aping Trump-era Democrats by demanding the president’s resignation, with one, Missouri Senator Vicky Hartzler, going so far as to demand closure of the U.S.-Mexican border to “protect American lives” from an alleged heightened terrorist threat.
Democrats, not completely without self-reflection in the first days of this crisis, are already back focused on counter-blame narratives. Blue-state audiences are being reminded Donald Trump negotiated the “premature” May 1st pullout date, and that when critics blasted that deal as “weak and dangerous,” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy advised his caucus not to speak against it. McCarthy today is leading the charge in criticizing Biden’s withdrawal, which is “so freaking hypocritical,” according to Senate-to-MSNBC pipeline passenger Claire McCaskill. Moreover, they say, House Democrat Jason Crow offered an amendment for his own “conditions-based” withdrawal plan, and that was shot down by the likes of Matt Gaetz, who last year said, “I don’t think there’s ever a bad day to end the war in Afghanistan.”
It’s all noise, designed to distract from the fact that Afghanistan is as pure a bipartisan fiasco as we’ve had in recent times. Both parties were directly and repeatedly complicit in prolonging the catastrophe. Republicans and Democrats were virtually unanimous in approving the initial use-of-force, both voted over and over to fund the war to insane levels, and both Democratic and Republican presidents spent years covering up evidence of massive contracting corruption, accounting failure (as in, failure to do any accounting), war crimes, and other problems.
Afghanistan was the ultimate symbol of the two-party consensus, the “good war” as Barack Obama deemed it, and defense spending in general remained so sacrosanct across the last twenty years that the monster, $160 billion defense spending hikes of 2017-2018 were virtually the only policy initiative of Donald Trump’s that went unopposed by a Democratic leadership. “We fully support President Trump’s Defense Department’s request,” was Chuck Schumer’s formulation in 2018, choosing then to reward the Pentagon for turning Mesopotamia into a Mad Max set and spending two trillion dollars on the by-then-inevitable fall of Kabul.
Worse, as the performance of the legacy media in the last few weeks shows, the national commentariat is also fully occupied by the military establishment. Staffed from top to bottom by spooks and hawks, the corporate press’s focus from the pre-Iraq firing of Phil Donahue through the past few weeks of guest star appearances on CNN, Fox, and MSNBC by the likes of Leon Panetta, John Bolton, Karl Rove, David Petraeus and Marc Thiessen — all people with direct involvement in the Afghan mess — has been the same. It keeps the public distracted with inane tactical issues or fleeting partisan controversies, leaving the larger problem of a continually expanding Fortress America unexamined.
We need new institutions free of Pentagon influence, probably starting with a new political party. It doesn’t even matter so much what such a party would stand for, ideologically, so long as it adheres to one basic principle: don’t accept contractor money. It seems like the only possible solution to the disease that gave us Afghanistan. Our two parties, just like our academic research institutions, news networks, and even Hollywood’s movie studios, have become de facto Pentagon subsidiaries. They’re all hopelessly corrupted by the financial powers Dwight Eisenhower warned about, in his famous speech prophesying “the disastrous rise of misplaced power” from America’s armaments sector.

A few stray pundits in the last two weeks have pointed out the obvious fact that despite awesome financial and technological advantages, the United States has now “lost” virtually every war it has entered since World War II (with the possible exception of the first Gulf War, though the cleanness even of that victory is very debatable). Dominic Tierney, the author of The Right Way To Lose A War: America in the Age of Unwinnable Conflicts, told Timemagazine a big reason for this was that “the nature of war itself” has changed since 1945:

I’d agree, with a twist: under the influence of captured parties and the military’s ubiquitous and extravagantly funded public relations apparatus, America has itself redefined the “nature of war.” Armed conflict has gone from being an occasional unpleasant political necessity to the core product line of the American corporation. Wars are what we make, and like blue jeans or Louisville Sluggers, we build them to last, with Afghanistan the prime example. That should be the issue dominating Meet the Press, not whether we lost or just “didn’t win,” or which party’s leaders decided to pull out first, and why.
Just as we’re always designing new rifles and tanks and jet fighters, we’ve become adept at manufacturing fresh intellectual justifications for deploying troops, churning out everything from “humanitarian war” to “benevolent hegemony” to “regime change” to “nation-building” to Eisenhower’s own “domino theory.” Where once we fought for literal survival against other nations, and knew who’d won when one side surrendered, we’re now sending our kids to die (and kill) in open-ended engagements where victory is either impossible or indefinable, and the main concrete “results” are masses of foreign deaths and the gigantic houses built by defense executives in places like Loudon and Fairfax Counties in northern Virginia.
This is why, whenever we get a rare look at the real thinking underlying our modern conflicts, whether via the Pentagon or Afghanistan Papers or the Wikileaks release of diplomatic cables, we keep seeing the same story: senior American military and intelligence officials struggling to come up with “metrics for success,” in some cases years after they’d already invaded and occupied places like Vietnam and Afghanistan.
It shouldn’t need to be said, but if you have to invent a “metric for success” in war that goes beyond defeating an enemy, you’re not really at war, you’re doing something else.

Bernie Sanders essentially was a 3rd party candidate, but because of the rules Pubs and Dems have put in place to lock in power, was pretty much forced to run under the Dem logo.

he was winning easily in 2020, and would have won the nomination and the presidency in both 2016 and 2020, had the DNC, Comcast/NBC, and AT&T/CNN, not conspired to make sure he didn't.

in 2020 the DNC and their Wall St owners were scared shtless by Bernie, as was Comcast/NBC Universal who personally sponsored and helped fund Biden's candidacy.

as much as the rules the RNC have DNC have put in place to consolidate power between themselves are a huge obstacle, now that the major corporate media have partnered up in mutual quid pro quo alliances with the parties themselves, the bar has been raised far higher for a third party candidate, or a candidate the party itself they are running under as well as said party's corp media want killed off, or even any pro working class candidate today when all major media is corporate, and will function in it's own corporate interests.

no matter how much one party's media partners hype their candidate and portray the other party's candidate as the end of the country and the world as we know it, that isn't a real problem as long as the candidate's own party affiliated media has their back.

the real power the party affiliated media have isn't in the general, it's in the primary, where if the party media partner and their advertisers want a primary candidate killed off, that candidate is going to get killed off, whatever that takes.

and if a candidate runs as a third party candidate, then all Dem and Pub party affiliated media will be against them.

a candidate can win as long as they have one major corporate news media backing them.

if all Wall St corporate media are against them, or even just the party affiliated corporate media of the party they are running under is determined to kill them off, they will be killed off.

the saying goes, "never pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel".

well, the big corporate party affiliated media giants do the equivalent of buying ink by the ocean.

it's no longer just fighting a well financed candidate who runs lots of 30 second ads against you during program breaks.

now the party affiliated corporate media with huge financial incentives literally in the billions to insure your demise, will attack you non stop 24/7, and run panel shows all day and all night, where the host and every guest attacks you non stop as the devil himself, and the ruination of everything good in the country and universe.

they do not feel pity or remorse, and they absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead.

it isn't personal. they may even realize the candidate they are burying with all the might a corporate media giant or giants can muster, is what's best for the country.

it's just business.

 

[billyhillui]

It seems nice in theory. More than 2 parties. However doesn't it setup a perpetual minority rule?

Id rather see serious campaign finance reform. All donations of any size tracked and transparent. Citizens v United overturned.

Maybe its called a 3rd party but in actuality its a new party that displaces one of the existing 2.

In the beginning, probably, but all new parties take time to get established, get their platforms out to the public/voters, & demonstrate themselves to be viable & competitive. It doesn't more or less displace the other parties, but certain voters in those parties who are more than unhappy/dissatisfied with their current party's status quo/record.