This is so heinous, I do not know what to say. This shit devastates me.
Trump Is Said to Be in Talks to Send Afghans Who Aided U.S. Forces to Congo www.nytimes.com/2026/04/21/w...
Hope is a form of resistance.
-- Aziz Abu Sarah
There was also the time Eugene Rostow testified to Congress that the U.S. could survive ten million fatalities. And this comment by Richard Pipes in 1981:
From the New York Times:
Bush was far from the only person in the Reagan administration who believed that. Fortunately, Reagan himself didn't, though that wasn't obvious in his first few years in office.
Page 29 of "With Enough Shovels," where Scheer (during the 1980 presidential election) asks Bush (in a tape-recorded interview). Key quotes are highlighted on the page: "'Don't you reach a point with these strategic weapons where we can wipe each other out so many times and no one wants to use them or be willing to use them, that it really doesn't matter whether you're ten percent or two percent lower or higher?' Bush bristled a bit and replied, 'Yes, if you believe there is no such thing as a winner in a nuclear exchange, that argument makes a little sense. I don't believe that.' I then asked, 'How do you win in a nuclear exchange?' Bush seemed angry that I had challenged him to what was apparently an obvious truth. He replied, 'You have a surviability of command and control, survivability of industrial potential, protection of a percentage of your citizens, and you have a capability that inflicts more damage on the opposition than it can inflict on you. That's the way you can have a winner, and the Soviets' planning is based on the ugly concept of a winner in a nuclear exchange.' 'Do you mean,' I asked, 'five percent would survive? Two percent?' 'More than that,' Bush answered. 'If everybody fired everything he had, you'd have more than that survive.'"
The cover of the first paperback edition of Robert Scheer's book "With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush and Nuclear War" (originally published in 1982 and updated in 1983). The words are in large white letters over a red background. Short blurbs from New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis and former Secretary of State Cyrus Vance appear at the bottom.
Vice President George H.W. Bush's official color portrait. He is wearing a dark suit jacket, white dress shirt, and a patterned tie. An American flag and the vice presidential flag (both on stands) are partially visible behind him.
Historical footnote: Vice President George H.W. Bush (a former director of the CIA, former ambassador to China, and former Member of Congress) really did believe it was possible to survive—and win—an all-out nuclear war, as he told then-Los Angeles Times reporter Robert Scheer on January 24, 1980.
Just completely unhinged and untethered to reality.
I wonder if the fraction of bombs dropped that were incendiary was comparable for both cities, or if it was higher for the bombing campaign against Japan.
Also, in a true democracy no party needs to win the vote by a supermajority to get control of government. No one should be complacent about the uneven playing field of competitive authoritarianism.
The negotiations were short because they weren’t real negotiations. The talks were an opportunity for the US to demand things Iran has long rejected instead of finding compromise. That has been the Trump regime’s whole approach to Iran and it’s why the war continues.
The phrase "delusion of omnipotence" is insightful. Conservatives in the U.S. have long conflated the notion that the U.S. is the most powerful country in the world, which it is, with the idea that it is all powerful, which it is not. This is a phenomenon that pre-dates the Trump era.
My biggest fear right now is that Trump will try to resolve the Iran situation with a nuclear weapon. It's hard to know how high the risk of this happening is, but it's not zero.
Trump again with the card game metaphor. Something tells me he's really bad at poker.
🔥🔥🔥
Can't you just be happy about the national championship?
Firing the Army chief of staff in the middle of a military conflict is perfectly normal. Happens all the time. Nothing to see here. Move along.
You have to laugh because the alternative is contemplating that we, as a country (I mean, I voted for the qualified Black lady), engaged in an act of world historic irresponsibility, the suffering of which will be born by millions of people worldwide, but will stain our very souls nonetheless.
“It will just open up naturally,” Trump says about the Strait of Hormuz. He also once said, at the beginning of the pandemic, that COVID would end by itself. "One day — it’s like a miracle — it will disappear"
Trump's right that the world is watching.
Sad news about my old SAIS professor Tom Keaney. Taught my class on the American Military.
Go Artemis!
PEPFAR was one of the greatest American accomplishments of the last 50 years. It saved lives at home and abroad and represented the very best of this country: the compassion, the expertise, the dedication to a greater good. It did us proud.
Its willful destruction is both criminal and immoral.
Nothing says we will always have the backs of our warfighters™️ quite like undermining the chain of command.
From today's New York Times:
Needless to say, Trump's behavior toward nations that have been U.S. allies for the last 80 years is severely harmful to our national interests. But no one forced Trump on the American people. He is who the voters chose in 2024.
Exactly my point. It's difficult to deter an idiot, which Trump is.
The administration simply declaring victory (again) and ceasing hostilities would by no means be the worst COA.
Trump has created a mess and has no great options for fixing it.
But some of those options—committing war crimes, sending in ground troops, etc—are definitely worse than others.
