To the OP: Need? Maybe not. But I actually wish for more conservatives. There’s hardly any varied conservative opinions. @octopus is only one, um… cephalopod. Doesn’t exactly represent the opinions of all other conservatives.
We have few other conservatives. Seems like in P&E and The Pit, it’s about 10% or less.
Since @Octupus obviously isn’t going to bother…
The fake vaccination campaign happened during Obama’s presidency. The President is supposed to be in charge of the country and therefore the CIA. Did Obama authorise it? If not, did he do anything about it when it came out?
As for the travel ban, I don’t remember if anyone denounced it as racist (that sort of denunciation had become background noise after 3 years of Trump in office), but I do remember it getting lots of criticism at the time. See this, for example:
Or this:
Don’t Listen To Sen. Tom Cotton About Coronavirus
Senator Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) has been on an absolute tear about coronavirus, calling for all Americans in China to “get out now,” demanding the U.S. implement an extensive travel ban targeting China proposing a “Manhattan Project-level effort to create a vaccine” ― a reference to the undertaking that produced the atomic bomb during World War II.
Doesn’t sound so unreasonable now, does he? And it turned out to be the complacent, compliant media who were busy spreading misinformation about the lab leak theory, claiming it was debunked on extremely flimsy grounds and censoring it on social networks.
Excusing and promoting civil unrest during a pandemic:
Imagine being so evil as to continue to hew to an ideology which had its elected officials do the following:
Octopus, your reply was mere rhetoric. Actions are what matters, and conservative actions are… you guessed it:
Evil.
(ETA: Better cite)
You’re just changing the subject from the completely irrelevant origins of Covid in a Wuhan lab*!
*Not that I’m, knowingly, using that phrase to make it seem like Covid is a Chinese bio-weapon of course!
Which is all he does, ever - simply repeats his preferred narrative over and over and over again, regardless of reality.
MAGA is now jealous that the Taliban violently took over a democracy, but they couldn’t.
Wuh? You supported a second, clearly unethical, war because the first one was unwinnable???
WIGWRDI
(War Is Good When Republicans Do It)
Funny how that happened. Perhaps if the Pentagon was more concerned with winning wars instead of lowering standards and fussing over pronouns we might be able to defeat an adversary. China has to be looking at Taiwan at the moment knowing the US has no stomach.
Yes, the same way the Soviet Union was looking at Western Europe right after Vietnam. Tell me again how the invasion of the North German Plain and the Fulda Gap went?
Anyone who thinks that Afghanistan and Taiwan are anywhere close to the same tier of U.S. national interest is delusional.
“Well, Chairman Xi, they have aircraft carriers, nuclear missiles, and stealth bombers, but they allow gays to marry - we got this.”
Stop lying about the past 20 years. This is exactly what I’m talking about, above: the purposeful denial of the reality of the world we are living in as to serve a failed ideology. Just stop it.
Maybe multi-tasking is too difficult for you but I doubt that’s a problem in the military.
Is that why the Russians got their lunch eaten in Afghanistan before us? Too much time worrying about pronouns?
If the Chinese are looking at Afghanistan and taking it as evidence that occupying Taiwan will be easy, they’re pretty clearly taking the wrong lesson from it.
say what now
I don’t want to relitigate all that, but the situation at the time was that Saddam was encouraging terrorism, paying families of suicide bombers, hiding terrorists in his country, etc. Afghanistan was more a symptom of a much larger problem, and an Afghanistan war was never ‘winnable’. So some in the defense community thought Afghanistan was basically a trap - that if the U.S. got bogged down there they would waste blood and treasure while the real sources of instability and terror funding went unchecked.
So Iraq was seen as an end-run. The belief was that Iraq could be won, as there was an extant middle class with skin in the game who woild welcome peace and democracy and all that. If the middle east could be calmed down, Afghanistan would really not matter on its own with respect to the war on terror. I think that was the official position of the Bush administration.
The counter-argument was that Afghanistan was where the training camps were and where Bin Laden had fled to, so we should be focused like a laser beam on fixing Afghanistan, and Iraq was a distraction.
I agree. They are doing a good job running from Afghanistan and letting those who counted on American promises be tortured, raped, and slaughtered while worrying about virtue signaling.
What is the military going to ‘run’ in Afghanistan when the political leaders - the CiC among them - have already decided on a withdrawal?
I’m sure octopus is on his way to the local recruitment office as we speak to bring some much needed alpha maleness to the service.
Afghanistan would always be a quagmire. I don’t think anyone is arguing that it could be ‘won’ in the sense of nation-building, but that a reasonably-sized protection force around Kabul could have maintained the status quo.
The other argument is that if you are going to withdraw, this was about the worst way to do it. It looks like a clown show, except at this show people who thought America would reward them as promised for risking their lives in aid of the country were sorely disappointed and will likely be murdered. That too sends a horrible message: You are an idiot if you trust America. In dealing with a hyper-partisan country, you are always only one election away from being abandoned.
More like the Chinese might be looking at Taiwan and thinking, “After what we’ve just seen in Afghanistan, America has no will to fight and is so divided on partisan lines they’ve become unable to function. This is our window of opportunity,”
And why would they think they’d have to fight an insurgency in Taiwan, or that insurgents would have anywhere near the means to hide, to raise funds, to be protected by mountain tribes, etc. Taiwan is 35,000 sq km. Afghanistan is 650,000. And the taiwanese live almost exclusively on the flat plains of the island.
Besides, they reneged on the deal with Hong Kong and cracked down with nary a shot being fired at them and almost no complaints from the world community. Certainly no sanctions or other harsh consequences for subjugating the people they had promised to leave alone.
If I were a Chinese leader looking at America over the past decade, I’d likely think very little of their ability to rally together and fight over another distant country. This is exactly the kind of thing that led to WWII, when western countries were sending signals in the 30’s that they were isolationist and fighting amongst themselves at home, and a window of opportunity had opened. That makes for very dangerous times.