I return smack ack
Now that the Republican primary season is safely far, far behind us, the real senator Rand Paul has apparently been released by the Borg slavers who captured him in the spring of 2015 and replaced him with a neocon replicant. He’s made waves recently by opposing the Obama administration’s plans to sell the Islamic fundamentalists who run Saudi Arabia yet more weapons of mass destruction — this time totaling more than a billion dollars — to be used to slaughter additional tens of thousands of helpless Yemeni civilians. Paul’s opposition to this senseless waste of human life is based, apparently, on trivial things like law and morality, which came as a tremendous shock to ancient robotic newscaster Wolf Blitzer, who once won a Peabody award for announcing that being annihilated by a hurricane is bad for you, but can’t seem to extend the metaphor to cover annihilation by bombs:
"So for you this is a moral issue," he told Paul during the Kentucky Republican’s appearance on CNN. "Because you know, there’s a lot of jobs at stake. Certainly if a lot of these defense contractors stop selling war planes, other sophisticated equipment to Saudi Arabia, there’s going to be a significant loss of jobs, of revenue here in the United States. That’s secondary from your standpoint?"
The correct answer would be a look of extreme incredulity, followed by a flat "obviously." Senator Paul arguably wimped out slightly on the golden opportunity to explain to a grown man that killing is wrong even if you get paid for it, but his response was still utterly devoid of the weird, both-sides-of-the-net waffling we became accustomed to during his ill-fated presidential bid:
"Well not only is it a moral question, its a constitutional question," Paul said. "Our founding fathers very directly and specifically did not give the president the power to go to war. They gave it to Congress. So Congress needs to step up and this is what I’m doing."
It’s immoral and illegal, sure, but, hey, what about the "defense" contractors? You do realize that if the military-industrial complex stops getting absolutely every handout it wants, important people like secretary of defense Leon Panetta and secretary of evil Hillary Clinton may stop doing photo ops with cheerleaders like Wolf Blitzer, right? It is too bad that Senator Paul didn’t bother to correct Blitzer’s relatively insane understanding of economics, but, if he ever gets back to it, perhaps he can allow the staff of the Intercept to join the class too, and they’ll stop writing inanities like this:
If you’re worried about jobs, military spending is not where you look. It’s an inefficient way to create jobs, because it has a lower multiplier effect — meaning how much it ripples in the wider economy. One study from 2011 found that $1 billion put into military spending would create approximately 11,200 jobs, but that same amount of money put into education creates 26,700 jobs.
There is no multiplier, you weirdos. None! Consumption spending is consumption spending, and doesn’t become magic just because somebody put a gun against somebody else’s head as part of the transaction. Also: there is no value in creating bulk jobs. You know what would create a lot of jobs? Spending that billion dollars hiring a whole lot of dudes to dig holes and fill them back in for a dollar a day. That is obviously wasteful, yes? For God’s sake, read a book once in a while.
Clear and present danger
I checked with the Nobel committee, and, even though Alfred Nobel invented dynamite, that doesn’t make it a Nobel Peace Action to murder millions of innocent people with nuclear bombs. Apparently Nobel peace laureate and Doctor of Truthology Barack Hussein Obama is of a different opinion, as he has decided not to promise the United States won’t randomly start nuclear wars. Apparently he’s afraid of looking insufficiently macho.
President Obama, who has weighed ruling out a first use of a nuclear weapon in a conflict, appears likely to abandon the proposal after top national security advisers argued that it could undermine allies and embolden Russia and China, according to several senior administration officials…
[Defense secretary] Carter argued that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, could interpret a promise of no first use as a sign of American weakness, even though that was not the intent.
I’m glad they specified that it was Vladimir V. Putin — I thought for a minute this was the much less agreeable president Vladimir F. Putin of Russia.
Stylebook comedy aside, it’s worth noting that, of those three horrible axes of evil, China has already made a "no first use" pledge, and North Korea has repeatedly sworn to abandon its nuclear weapons program in its entirety if only the United States would agree to end the Korean War already — which war, yes, is still ongoing, as the U.S. has repeatedly refused to allow it to end. Russia has made no such pledge, it’s true, but here’s Vladimir V. Putin himself speaking to Bloomberg just a few days ago:
I think all sober-minded people who really are involved in politics understand that the idea of a Russian threat to, for example, the Baltics is complete madness. Are we really about to fight NATO? How many people live in NATO? About 600 million, correct? There are 146 million in Russia. Yes, we’re the biggest nuclear power. But do you really think that we’re about to conquer the Baltics using nuclear weapons? What is this madness?
Ol’ Vlad V. makes a good point: no sane person truly expects Russia — a country with the land area of China and Canada combined, the population of Bangladesh, and the GDP of Mexico — to be eager to go to war with, honestly, the entire rest of the world at once. Your humble narrator may be unwilling to accuse president Obama and his secretary of catching ’em all, Ashton Carter, of sanity, however; they continue to assert the possibility that the United States will randomly nuclear-bomb people even as they reveal that the shiny new nuclear missiles the pentagon is building will probably cost far more than their current estimated eighty-five billion dollars, while still having the gall to consider "a reduction in the role of nuclear weapons as critical to his legacy." Only a churl would suggest that a man who desires that legacy should consider at least taking some steps to reduce the role of nuclear weapons.
Last week in fair and balanced
You’ll be delighted to hear that Donald Trump has finally given us the final, official, smoking-gun proof that he’s really a secret member of the Nazi party:
In a move to boost his national security credibility, Donald Trump released an endorsement letter signed by 88 retired military figures.
Now some are questioning if there is a hidden anti-Semitic message behind the statement — since the number 88 is a well-known code for ‘Heil Hitler.’
I must admit with some chagrin that I was never acquainted with this "well-known code" until quite recently, when I discovered that apparently the number 88 is illegal in Austria. This is even clearer proof than the time his campaign released a graphic with a six-pointed star on it and the time his campaign used the same infographic notorious 1930s German politician David Duke once retweeted. It’s a good thing this isn’t one of those crazy conspiracy theories, like the idea that Hillary Clinton might have health problems.
What kind of a lunatic would you have to be to believe that Robust Hillary has health problems? I mean, come on! Let’s all go back to believing World War II is still going on, and we all live in Germany, and there are any Nazis around, and there’s a non-zero chance that a presidential candidate is sending coded shout-outs to his Nazi buddies in his campaign announcements. I mean, that’s just sense.
Madness upon stilts
Now that I’m well and truly past school age, I find myself giddy with excitement when the school year begins. Why, you ask? Because the Social Justice War is nowhere else as utterly lunatic as it is on college campuses. This year’s crop of snowflakes has wasted no time, either: Brown University’s student body president, Viet Nguyen, has announced a bold new initiative to provide "free" (read: compulsory) feminine hygiene products in men’s rooms across campus. Why?
By putting menstrual products in women’s, men’s and gender-inclusive bathrooms, Nguyen’s campaign highlights an often ignored fact: Not all people who menstruate are women. "We wanted to set a tone of trans-inclusivity and not forget that they’re an important part of the population," he says. "I’d be naïve to say there won’t be push back. I’ve had questions about why we’re implementing this in male bathrooms as well. It’s an initial confusion, but people generally understand when we explain it."
That "fact" is often ignored, of course, for the simple and understandable reason that it’s entirely false. I will not insult my readership’s intelligence by explaining the technical reasons why, yes, all people who menstruate are women; I will, instead, insult author Abigail Jones’ intelligence by pointing out that her writing is florid, her grasp on reality is tenuous, and "trans-inclusivity" is not a word.
It is a sad thing that the world we live in has become so downright idiotic that placing feminine hygiene products in the men’s room is reported by straight news outlets as some type of important act of revolutionary justice, rather than as the drunken frat-boy prank it actually is.