Help me: am I overly paranoid to think that the headline “… (Shitgibbon) may back Erik Prince plan to privatize war in Afghanistan” is scary?
I mean, the possibilities that could sprout from a move like this are utterly terrifying. Once there is a government-funded mercenary force, checks and balances start to crumble.
It gives Trump his own private army to do with as he pleases.
And once the idea of private contractors acting as warfighters in a foreign land becomes normalized, how long before they’re called upon to fight ‘domestic terrorism’ in the form of, oh, anyone that criticizes Il Douche? After all, such contractors wouldn’t be prohibited from conducting operations within our borders, like the military is constrained from doing (National Guard units and the like notwithstanding). Or am I too paranoid, slipping down that slope?
That’s okay. ‘Contemptible’ works just as well.
1st Lt. Milo Minderbinder, Catch-22, Joseph Heller.
Hey, I just realized something. We’re all missing something very important here. Agent Orange loves dictators, what with him wanting to be one of course. The PRC has a dictator who is in charge of their military. Here’s the fun thing: it’s not because their dictator is the country’s president that he’s in charge of the military; it’s because he’s chairman of the party. The PLA belongs to the party, not the country. So, Agent Orange wants to do something similar in the US; however, even he apparently realizes he can’t just haul off and call it a dictator’s army.
I suspect that the GOP leadership was expecting that the obese lazy bad-tempered septuagenarian would be called home by Satan after a few months, enabling them to install Pence without flak from the derplorable peanut gallery.
I’ve been concerned about this for a long time. Erik Prince himself is a pretty lowly character, with his company getting the legal smack-down in Iraq.
Mercenaries acting abroad is nothing new; the danger that I can envision is if Trump were to whither federal law enforcement and somehow, with congressional approval, legalize the creation of another national security force that could be privatized. He’ll probably need to stick around for another term to make that a reality, particularly if mid-terms don’t go so well. But that thought has crossed my mind more than once. He might not need to even get approval to create a new security force; he’d probably just need authorization to outsource homeland security to private security.
Unless I’m overlooking something (lawyers feel free to help me out here), but I don’t think he can do something like that currently; he’d need to change the federal law to allow the involvement of contractors in actual arrests and hostile situations. There are already contractors involved in homeland security - in fact they probably outnumber actual federal employees. But I think they’re involved in consulting and support services, not police work. Even so, we know the authoritarian leanings of this administration and the current congress.
The one thing that I’m learning from the Manafort trial is that I should be laundering considerably more money. Because, apparently, unless you are unbelievably obvious about it AND decide to run a presidential campaign, nobody cares if you do it.
I was thinking this a few months back wrt to Trump. If he weren’t such an ass, then I would almost feel bad for him (but he is an ass so frak him). There’s virtually no doubt his financial past is dirty dirty dirty. And if he had never run for president he probably would have gotten away with it too, if not for those darn kids and Mueller. Basically, nobody cared he was a dirty businessman, until he ran for president.
And a whole bunch of people still don’t care.
And that’s why we cannot have nice things.
Environmental groups caught the Department of the Interior trying to sell off part of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Utah, despite a pledge by Secretary Ryan Zinke never to put public lands up for sale.
Truly, it is fascinating how the law is different for rich people. I am quite sure if I tried to launder $100,000 I’d be arrested and sent to jail and my life ruined. These people launder millions and commit crimes the way I eat snacks, and they get away with it.
The Pentagon says Trump canceled The Parade before the estimates of costs came out.
Good. The cost was just a convenient cover. They really can’t just refuse because the piece of shit is still “Commander in Chief”. So they had to have a “reason”. That draft dodger/traitor/coward doesn’t deserve a parade anyway.
At this point, I can’t possibly insult them ENOUGH.
Pence is just as bad, just in a different way.
To decent people with a shred of humanity, yes. To the GOP leadership, not so much.