Here’s how good the GOP Cavalcade-of-Noise-and-Bullshit Machine is: I’m fairly critical of that party, believe it or not, and yet up until three weeks ago, if someone had asked me the ratio of fuck-ups between the parties I’d have answered “maybe 3 to 1” But it turns out to be more like a clean sweep, that is: Since November, 1968 The Republican Party Has Been Responsible For Literally Every Single Thing Done By or to the United States of America That’s Really, Really Sucked. Whether it killed a lot of people or wasted a lot of money or just made us all look like assholes, Republicans were responsible. Whether it was a mistake, or policy - success or failure doesn’t matter — Nope, I take that back — While Republican policy failures have been disastrous, their successes have been catastrophic — they’re why we live in a divided country with poisoned water where about 916* people own more than everybody else put together.
*I have no idea what the real number is.
Operation Rolling Thunder, the sustained bombing of North Vietnam, began when I was three and a half years old. It ended, at least under President Johnson’s command, a week after I’d turned seven.
From that point on every fucked-up thing this country’s done during my lifetime has been at the hands of Republicans.*
*Yes, I could’ve said “just about” every fucked-up thing etc., but I didn’t, so go ahead: come at me. But first you should know that the Bay of Pigs happened before I was born, and that 175 drone strikes over 8 years is nothing — easily dwarfed by just 8 hours on.the highway of death at the end of the first Gulf War or 8 minutes of the shock and awe that began the second. Also, fuck the Bosnian Serbs, they had it coming..
That said, Democrats make mistakes, and if I’d been Jimmy Carter I would’ve told Kissinger and Rockefeller they could both go to hell and just wait for the Shah down there. Also, guess what? NAFTA turns out to be a tie! I’d forgotten it was Bush Sr that negotiated it before Clinton signed it. NAFTA sucked, and in a way that mattered, which wasn’t really the case with Monica Lewinswky. You know what else didn’t matter? Jimmy Carter using the word “malaise”, Obama asking for Dijon mustard and every single word that came out of Republican pieholes about Hillary Clinton for the last twenty-five goddam years. I took a look at her police record — nothing there!
What DID matter was dropping explosives on rice paddies like they were the Rhine and the Vietnamese were firing V-2s into London. Three and a half years dropping high explosives on a bunch of farmers from seven miles up wasn’t exactly making Communists look like the Bad Guys. Any economist would’ve told him that victory for capitalism in the region could’ve been ensured in just three and a half weeks by simply eliminating the middleman and just bombing them with the money.
Rolling Thunder ended on the 2nd of November, 1968, and with it the end of Democratic Fuck-Ups that mattered apart from NAFTA and the Shah. If you want to include Desert One, fine: Jimmy Carter was responsible for the sandstorm that crashed the helicopters that killed 8 men and injured 4 and deemed the mission a failure— But that means we’ll have to add the 241 Marines blown up in Beirut by a truck bomb. Hardly a success but technically speaking not a mission failure either since Reagan sent them there without a mission.
Okay, Now I’m going to list the major Republican Fuck-Ups during my lifetime and I don’t blame you if you decide to skim. I’m skipping over a few major ones myself. But before you skip ahead you can just consider as emblematic how Nixon really hit the ground running where Johnson left off by quadrupling the bombing and illegally adding Cambodia and Laos as targets thereby punishing the VietCong by killing between 400,000 and 600,000 people who weren’t VietCong, just like the Bushes would go on to punish Saddam Hussein by killing over half a million Iraqis who weren’t Saddam Hussein. along with a couple of thousand Panamanians that weren’t Manuel Noriega and well over 100,000 Afghans who weren’t Bin Laden. Once or twice, maybe — three times is pushing it - but we’re talking about over a million cases of mistaken identity here and I’m sorry, but that’s just fucked up.
Crimes that didn’t involve the wholesale slaughter of innocents, like the burglary, wiretapping, kidnapping and cover-ups directed by Nixon in Watergate were considered so egregious at the time that the kickbacks, bribery, extortion and tax fraud that forced his Vice President to resign were all but forgotten. Reagan’s trading arms for hostages doesn’t sound so bad, except that he was arming our enemies, which then encouraged them to take more hostages. And we were arming them with Stinger” anti-aircraft missiles which allowed a single person to easily shoot down a commercial airliner from up to three miles away. Reagan’s insistence that the hostage-taking gentlemen who needed to shoot down airplanes were “Iranian moderates” was met with some skepticism, but only by those who didn’t appreciate that sunny, ever-smiling, cock-eyed optimism that made Ronald Reagan so beloved to the American People.
Oh yeah, and the whole thing was done to secretly fund a war against Nicaragua in direct violation of the law that stated explicitly they couldn’t fund any wars with Nicaragua. And trying to cover that up added destruction of evidence, obstruction of justice and lying to congress.
The crimes that took place during the Bush administrations were so massive and heinous they practically rivaled the aggregate of everything ever stolen by anyone up until then. But since they were conducted under the mantle of war that makes everything A-OK
That said: Bush Sr.? Huge fan, love your resumé…
Say, do you remember that girl who was lying about Iraqi soldiers pulling babies out of incubators and throwing them on the floor of the hospital? Supposedly because they were so damn eager to get their hands on those precious, precious incubators with all that cutting edge heating-coil-and-thermometer- technology? The reason I’m asking is because pretty much anyone who’d gotten through Junior High and knew something about humans and traveled at least as far as the next county would’ve known she was lying because soldiers don’t actually do that even if you want them to. I knew instantly it was a lie but you, a former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Ambassador to the United Nations and China., not only believed her but spent the next month re-telling a story that was such obvious bullshit? I only mention it because when you had a choice between going to war and making a phone call you chose war, and I want to make sure that’s how you’re remembered ‘cuz once you’ve killed 90,000 people for no good reason that’s the only part of your resumé that matters anymore.
Bush Jr? Heckuva job. Mission Accomplished and all that.
Just one quick thing, back in March 2002, when you said you no longer cared about Osama Bin Laden? If that’s the case, that would’ve been a great time to pull out of Afghanistan.
Also, anyone who knew anything about Osama Bin Laden, Wahhabism, The Middle East, Religious Fundamentalists, or could operate Google or open a book could’ve told you Osama would’ve worked with Woody Allen before he’d ever work with Saddam.
As for criminality in the Trump administration…
I keep racking my brain, but I’ve got nothin’: the guy was squeaky clean as far as I can tell.
Ha Ha, just kidding: the guy was Squeaky Fromme.
But since we don’t have all year, just think of a couple of your favorites.