Comments

1

Cletus Ray Republinazi is just expressing his 2nd Amendment rights to set off weapons of mass destruction. Case dismissed!

2

Exploding bikes? A Lime Bike exploded and burned out the Fremont in warehouse just in 2019

3

That's not a bike. That's a moped. They want us to call them "ebikes", but they're mopeds.

4

“… hospitals in the state are approaching 100% occupancy as they are getting hit with a renewed wave of mostly unvaccinated COVID patients.”

well if they Choose not to vax then please triage the Reluctants to the back of the line – unless they’re kids – say, Pfizer’s gonna get FDA’s nod next week according to a headline I think I saw in the nyt so kids might get the vax SOON which is Awesome. thnx Jas!

5

GM got done in by a loose Bolt?
Come on, GM, don't try to outdo Boeing in the race to the bottom for profits over people.

@1 Original Andrew: Another typical death cult gun nut was out fahtn' fer his Free Dumbs.

@4 kristofarian: I worry about kids under 12, still unvaccinated, as well as teachers and school employees, vaxxed or not, who are at increased risk.

All people over 12 otherwise still unvaccinated--GET YOUR FUCKING SHOTS ALREADY!!

7

well Fried whilst there Is an epidemic
of Obesity in America not to mention stupidity*
there's a fucking Pandemic of Biblical proportions
perhaps our Reluctants might choose the Simple Fix
and save our ICUs, medical workers and the Citizenry
from the Rugged Individualistics of today's modern Capitalism

and just get the fucking Vax.

*just-in-time bean-counter-approved!
not-an-extra-bed-to-be-had
for-Profit Medicine
etc

8

the very same
Winner takes ALL
attitude that Fails the
Planet when it comes to
Vaccines and Global Health

curb the incubation
& End the intubation

9

@3,

Not too sure what you're even referencing there, but mopeds are gasoline powered.

10

@6:

Most of the things you're concern-trolling about have one major difference from the current pandemic: the people who engage in them have very little, if any, risk of harming others as a result of their poor choices.

But hey, you just keep on erecting those strawmen to try to burn down - it's not like we expect anything more from you...

11

9 - Not exclusively, mopeds are electric or gasoline. The definition is a low power, lightweight motorized bicycle.

14

@11,

Eh, I guess. Though I still don't have the slightest clue what @3 there is on about.

15

14 - Weary of calling everything eXXX I guess.

16

damn -- looks like Uncle Joe's
Quagmire* just keeps
getting Worse

Biden needs a brand
new Afghani Czar.

*I know
it's gee dubya's
but American History
only goes back a few News
Cycles anymore thnx to Profits
over Content in 'our' news media

17

Afghanistan: U.S. May Seek
Airlines’ Help in Evacuation Effort

The Pentagon is moving toward compelling major American airlines to help transport tens of thousands of evacuees from Afghanistan, as the military struggles to meet the demand from Afghans seeking to leave Kabul, the capital, after the Taliban took control.

Military officials are poised to activate the Civil Reserve Air Fleet, or CRAF, created in 1952 in the wake of the Berlin Airlift, to provide several commercial airliners to bolster the American military operation to evacuate Afghans arriving at bases in the Middle East, Defense Department officials said on Saturday.

Aug. 21, 2021
Updated 10:11 p.m. ET

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/08/21/world/biden-taliban-afghanistan?type=styln-live-updates&label=afghanistan%20updates&index=0#us-airline-pentagon-flight-evacuation

19

@16: Aww, did your dem pres do a bad? So sorry.

But it does seems the media and pouty pundits are doing far more second guessing about the kerfuffel in Kabul than most Americans. War exits are always untidy.

20

@dipshits -- Smokin' Joe wouldda done Well
to wipe his ass with traitor trumpf's Cut and
Run full-on Surrender Plan -- but he didn't

and b yeah the Biden Honeymoon if def
behind us so let's pray for Joe's Success
even if it may mean a Dem Victory in the
upcoming Heavily-Gerrymanded 'Elections.'

21

c. who 'edits' this Tripe?

23

'expensive' el gaseous one?
yet another TWO TRILLION$
Right Down the Fawking Drain.

you "republicans"
are KILLING America

oh
and
AMERICANS.

I spose it just
Comes with
the Ethos

sad
beyond
fucking Sad:

Horrorfucking Rific.

25

That NWS tweet made me Crunge.

26

yeah
if you
can call
an ILLEGAL
Invasion of a
Soverign fucking
NATION a 'misstep.'

but it's just your Typical
"Republican" Nightmare.

whaddayagonna Do?

well
we'll
Bow Low
to the Capitalists

as per fucking usual.

27

@26: A misstep for the American people perhaps, but an unqualified win for the the pentagon, law enforcement, the surveillance state, prisons and weapon manufactures within the Criminal-Military-Industrial-Complex.

All it cost us was innocent American and Afghani lives and your civil liberties. How can you call such a small price to pay a misstep ? If you're a retired General working for a defense contractor, or law enforcement at home that no longer needs to bother with the 4th or 1st Amendment, Afghanistan was an unqualified success.

My advice to any young investors out there to buy stocks in defense contractors, private prisons and bail bond companies. Those will be the true growth industries in 21st century America.

29

@28: I admit I was wrong at the time to trust the government on this, but we never should have gone into Afghanistan.

We should have taken the deal the Taliban offered to turn Osama Bin Laden over to any third party country we chose prior to the invasion.

An offer our Government did not share with the public until a week after the invasion of Afghanistan had already begun so they could justify the invasion the Neo-Cons had drawn up on a wish list prior to 9-11.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/oct/14/afghanistan.terrorism5

30

@29's gotta be a pretty Tough
Cookie to swallow
eh ducky?

they
USED
you as per

31

and Thanks for the
Horrific trip down
Memory Lane
Mr. Royal.

yet another Win
for the NeoCons

at EVERYONE
ELSE'S Expense.

it must be getting
Hard to call oneself
'a Patriot' these days.

33

@32: Amazing, we could have let Osama luxuriate in Swiss chalet or a compound in Malta for the rest of his life.

34

well then Good Thing*
the USOFA no longer
requires of itself part-
icipation in the World
Court -- or is it the
War Crimes Trib-
unals? whatever
war criminals
are Every-
where.

*don'tchya think

35

@31 kristofarian: How can RepubliKKKan neocons be patriots when they always send in the most gullible and poorest of working class of lackeys in to fight their war$ for profit for them?
I believe this is your point, and I agree.
I say, let's ship off all RepubliKKKans, their lawyers, lobbyists, fixers, QAnon thugs, Patriot Players, Proud Boys, trophy bitches and bimbos, and snotnosed heirs down to the most pathetically gullible of MAGA-stupified rubes to Guantanamo Bay Cuba, and leave them to die. That's what they actually want--they're that batshit crazy and inept anymore. All they have to do is breathe on each other fahtin' fer their Free Dumbs. Good riddance.

36

@32: You Cherry Picked the wrong part of article. Have you been taking debate notes from Tensor? If so you should stop before you have as little credibility here as he has.

If you read down a few more paragraphs from the part you quoted, it reads:

"Taliban 'ready to discuss' Bin Laden handover if bombing halts
The Taliban would be ready to discuss handing over Osama bin Laden to a neutral country if the US halted the bombing of Afghanistan, a senior Taliban official said today."

Which is what I said, but nice try.

If you read Anand Gopal's "No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban and the War Through Afghan Eye" who spent the last 20 years embedded with the Taliban and wrote his account about a decade after 9/11, he breaks things down further with the benefit of reviewing the available documents.

The Taliban originally offered to turn over Osama Bin Laden, who they had a tense relationship with, to any third party muslim county we wanted if we could provide proof. If we had chosen Egypt or a dozen other Muslim allies Osama bin Laden would have been in an American prison within a week. George Bush flatly refused to provide edivence, repeating his "you are either with us or against us" speech to them. Once the bombing started, the Taliban dropped the proof requirement and said they would deliver him to ANY 3rd party country, which could have been Canada if we wanted.

Bush and his advisers had a debate. Condaleeza Rice and some others wanted to take the deal. Rumsfeld and Chaney were furious it was even being considered and argued we should invade Afghanistan regardless as part of a plan to overturn the governments if 7 countries within 5 years. I think we all know how that turned out.

37

@33: Osama bin Laden was taken out on Top Secret mission by Seal Team 6 under Former President Barrack Obama's-----NOT Dubya's---watch. "Mission Accomplished" didn't actually happen until the second Obama-Biden term in the White House.
I know it hurts your glue-addled brain, but try to keep up, Elmer.

38

@33: I don't know if you are being intentionally obtuse or that's just your nature, but we did not need to choose Switzerland as the 3rd party country since it was our choice. We could have chosen Egypt, where the CIA already had a black site prison to torture people (read Alfred McCoy's "The CIA and Torture." After the bombing started we could have picked ANY third party county. Do you really think if he had chosen the UK or Canada, Osama bin laden would have ended up in the Swiss resort.

People seem to have dreamed up a relationship between The Taliban and Al Quaeda, but if you read "The Looming Towers" or the book I cited above, the Taliban viewed Al Quaeda and a group of foreign spoiled brats and little to know respect for them. Given the change, they would have loved to get them out of their country and we knew that, which is why we didn't take the offer. The decision to invade, along with Iraq had already been made pre 9/11 and no one was going to stop that.

It's been 20 years so there is not a lot of conjecture at this point. I know you live in a world of blind faith for your government to include the CIA, NSA and the Feds, but they were caught lying to conflate the Taliban with Al Quaeda to justify the invasion. Burying your head in the sand at this point makes little difference.

It would be nice if just this once you stopped licking the boots of the government that lied to us.

39

@32: I left out the second part of that quote from the article you skipped that highlights even further what a false argument you are trying to make here:

"If the Taliban is given evidence that Osama bin Laden is involved" and the bombing campaign stopped, "we would be ready to hand him over to a third country", Mr Kabir added."

That sounds pretty definitive and a match of what I said.

40

I hate to say it as I know it probably aligns my thinking with Mehlman, but the reality is we were never gonna not go in, not after the second tower fell. I personally might've been OK w/ an Afghan offer to hand Bin Laden over to a neutral country, but the overwhelming majority of Americans were bloodthirsty as fuck and demanding warfare. I can only hope we learned something from it, though I'm not even quite sure what, as international geopolitical diplomacy is a freaking mess. Human beings in general are a mess.

41

And as long as I've got the floor...

@15,

I get annoyed at e-everything as well, but there was no mention of e-bikes in Jasmyne's write-up, which is what makes @3's comment so odd. She tangentially mentions "bikes," but not e-bikes or mopeds or anything else to prompt that comment. It's a total and complete non-sequitur. No idea who he's complaining to or what about.

42

@40: I think that's an honest appraisal of where we were no Sept. 12.

We were going to go somewhere, although I'm not sure Afghanistan that Edwin Meese and the Neo-Cons had pre-determined would be the best choice to invade prior to 9.11 should the opportunity present itself was the best option.

I think given that no members of 9-11 came from Afganistan, or the Taliban, nor where they involved in the planning, perhaps we would have been better served if we had accepting their offer of Osama bin Laden and instead invading Saudi Arabia where the majority of terrorists and money for the terrorists came from. Over the past 20 years the majority of foreign money to support the Taliban against the US has come from Saudi Arabia. They seemed like the logical choice if the NeoCons had not had their own relationships with Saudi Arabia they were determined to protect at the expense of American securoty.

My biggest complaint is that President Bush did not trust the public enough to give us an honest appraisal in our run up to the invasion of Afghanistan why that was the best option. Instead, they intentionally conflated the Taliban with Al Quaeda and buried the offer to turn him over from the public until we had already invaded and it was too late. Even when it came to the invasion of Afghanistan itself their were competing ideas.

Condaleeza Rice thought if we invaded Afghanistan we should ignore the Taliban and focus on capturing Al Quaeda. Rumsfeld and Chaney insisted we attack the Taliban and hold Afghanistan as a permanent base and Bush always listened to them.

At every stage their was a choice to be made. If we invade, do we choose Afghanistan. If we chose Afghanistan, do we go after Al Quaeda, or and the Taliban or just Al Quaeda. If we go after both, do we try to maintain a permanent presence there. Do we leave in 2003 when the Taliban was crushed and Osama bin Laden had already left, or do we stick around and try our hand at nation building.

We know from the speeches people like Bill Brystal, Meese and Wolfowitz gave at the Council of Foreign Relations prior to 9-11 that the Neo-Cons had already decided Afghanistan for it's strategic importance and Iraq due to Saddam Hussein should be the targets regardless of the event. Every indication shows that Condalezza Rice was evaluating facts on the ground and making decisions based on changed events in real time. It's clear those like Rumsfeld, Chaney, Bremmer and Wolfowitz had an ideological desire to invade and control Afghanistan and Iraq and nothing happening on the ground was going to change that ideology.

President Bush continually favored the advice of Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Chaney over Rice at every decision point and in every case I can think Rice turned out to be right. I just can't help but think how much better served we would have been if Bush had listened to her, or better yet, Rice had been president.

43

@42: As usual, too many typos to bother correcting now, but I should at least get his name right. "Bill Brystal" should be "Bill Krystal."

44

the architects of the
Cheney/bush Debacle
did well by turning War
into a Video Game© with
Front Row seats for Americans
and a nice Stage (with trapdoors) for
the Afghanis whose oil was actually Ours.

how it got Under
their Homeland
was Never our
Problem.

or am I conflating it with

Operation
Iraqi
Liberation

45

@38: Human beings lie. Better to be granular with these things; it's far more practical. There professions are tangential. But yeah, to replace capturing Osama for a sooner end to the conflict would have been preferable. Even if Osama would have be a guest on The View.

But all these hindsight games are tedious. So let's stop bashing Joe and be grateful this chapter in Afghanistan's history is finally drawing to a close.

46

I'm sure those who profited from this trillion dollar disaster share your "we all lie and mistakes were made" take on the last 2 decades of dead bodies, but keep in mind that "people lie" only applies to them. When they are lied to people go to prison.

Tedious is not a factor when you have a large number of people learning the wrong lessons from this. The lesson is not that we made a mistake, but that for those who profited at our expense it was not a mistake. This is a recurring these within our criminal-military industrial complex. People know they are making decisions that destroy innocent lives, but since they personally profit from the disaster and will never be held accountable they continue profiting off of our misery. It's a repeat of the lesson we didn't learn from the war on drugs. Those who prosecuted it and later said that it didn't work were really just admitting the rules had changed in a way that they could not longer profit from it. They were more than happy to move onto the next policy where they profit at the expense of ruined lives.

If you have followed me at all I am grateful Biden pulled out, but there are too many people who never wanted to leave who want to turn this into an evaluation of the exit strategy without discussing what we were doing there in the first place. It's worth pushing back against that. If you find it tedious, there are other topics you are welcome to participate in.

47

@46: I should have addressed the "bashing Joe" remark to kristofarian, who's been sounding like a Fox News host about the president.

There's a difference between learning from history, and the tiresome amateurish remarks using the low-hanging fruit in a war's ending that's so handy to throw at Biden. I get this point of view actually from Laurence O'Donnell.

48

cumdrop you've been Bashed
so many times by so many
here on Schlog you can
no longer differentiate
twixt constructive
Criticism and a
good Bashing.

so Sorry
for your
Loss.

49

oh -- also interesting you referenced Laurence O'Donnell

if you've ever watched The West Wing
(or Veep) you'd learn the Incredible
Importance of GETTING AHEAD
of the goddamm Catastrophe.

Smokin' Joe may have learned
that Lesson this past week
and Kudos for him in
doing so. He may
Save his Pres-
idency yet.*

that he's getting us
the FUCK OUTTA
Afghanistan is an
YUGE Eagle
Feather in
his bon-
net.

50

also -- my FAVORITE
West Wing Episode?

The Supremes.

51

"The lesson is not
that we made a mistake,
but that for those who profited
at our expense it was not a mistake."

--@Casino Royal*

DUDE.

*also my FAVE
James Bond flic

52

I'm so sick of hearing "covid is not conquered" and "covid is not over." No one is saying it's over and they probably never will so just shut up.

53

the Covid's
so Not over...

54

@52

says Helloo and wants to know
why that handsome cat's lost his crown?

oh and Why is he listing?

is he Okay?

hey tS:
PREVIEW
ain't Werkin

55

@52
Gracie
[to the Left there]
says Hello

it's werkin now


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