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Schmidt Versus Gabriel; Who Do You Got?
Never Trump likes to think of themselves as the thoughtful, reasoned, and above all principled(TM) alternative to MAGA. They are the wise, diplomatic Picards to MAGA’s boorish James T. Kirks. Which makes watching Lincoln Project founder Steve Schmidt’s descent into madness so compelling. And the most recent target of his outrage is our own fearless leader, Jon Gabriel. Who, according to Mr. Schmidt, is “a Christian Nationalist … an extremist and a fascist.”
The backstory is here. The TL;DR version is that Mr. Schmidt gets very, very testy when people point out that one of his Lincoln Project co-founders, John Weaver, had an unsavory interest in teenage boys and that this troubled the rest of his Lincoln Project cohorts about as much as teaching five-year-olds about gender ideology bothers Disney executives. After this and another recent Schmidt Twitter tirade against Sarah Palin (whom Schmidt called a “nut ball”) and Meghan McCain whom he called insane; Mr. Gabriel gently recommended Mr. Schmidt should perhaps seek help. And it was this that prompted Schmidt’s “Christian Nationalist, extremist, and fascist” riposte. Mr. Gabriel handled the insult with the class and aplomb we have come to expect.
Seriously, though, it does kinda look like the shingles are coming off Mr. Schmidt’s roof and maybe someone ought to look into that.
Really wanted to work in a reference to the crack pipes that the corporate media claimed no way would there be crack pipes in the taxpayer-funded safe smoking kits the Biden administration was distributing, but yeah, there totally are crack pipes in those kits, but… maybe I’m feeling too nice today to suggest a metaphorical connection between Mr. Schmidt’s tirades and the contents of the Biden Administration’s safe-smoking kits.
By the way, the “principled conservatives” at the NAMBLincoln Project have laid out their “2022 Roadmap for Republican Defeat.”
“The Lincoln Project’s mission heading into 2022 is simple and direct: Defeat the Republican Party and their candidates in key states and Congressional districts.”
Certainly sounds like something a group led by principled conservatives who aren’t at all a grift operation fronting for the Democratic Left would say.
Speaking of things angry people say on Twitter, Texas Republican Dan Crenshaw says if you don’t support sending billions of dollars to Ukraine with no financial oversight, you’re probably a Russian stooge.
Published in General
So what? That still doesn’t change the motivation of the Ukrainians. They are desperately fighting against an invader and we shouldn’t aid them because their enemy is also our adversary? How does that make any sense? If the Ukrainians weren’t fighting the Russians, would we? Nobody believes we would so obviously this is about more than our own geopolitical interest. Some things just ain’t that complicated.
Uh . . . yeah, it’s definitely a proxy war. If the amount of weaponry we’re pouring into Ukraine isn’t enough, our own members of Congress have made that clear.
Listen to the speechifying by the Democrats who went to Ukraine last week. They seemed to forget all about Ukraine and kept talking about how “we” were going to fight until “we” achieve victory.
MTG’s isolationism isn’t unAmerican. Instead, it’s as American as apple pie. Think of Charles Lindberg and the American Firsters before WW2. The isolationist crowd puts in an appearance after every major US foreign policy disaster. Vietnam and Afghanistan come to mind. From time to time they’ve also received a boost from the public’s fears about nuclear war.
I think aiding view Crane in the way we have has been a geopolitical mistake.
We have made the Ukraine about us. The idea that we’re helping them out and we’re not otherwise involved is naive.
We need to stop gloating about how much Russian equipment and personal we are destroying and so forth.
DISCUSS! lol
Yeah. I thought this wasn’t about us.
“Seriously, though, it does kinda look like the shingles are coming off Mr. Schmidt’s roof and maybe someone ought to look into that.”
😂👏🏻
It’s on brand for TLP.
I think an awful lot of Ukraine is Brandon trying salvage a foreign policy legacy after his disastrous surrender in Afghanistan.
It seems strange for a guy who’s lost his marbles to worry about his legacy.
If his family cared about a legacy they wouldn’t abuse him like this. It appears they only care about power and cashing in.
Regardless of the terms “American as apple pie” or “unAmerican” the isolationists have mostly been in the minority in this country, even today, and among both parties.
Uh . . . Russia and Ukraine have a history that goes back centuries. All of a sudden some Americans figure out where Ukraine is on a map so that means it becomes our war? I don’t take my cue from what some random politician thinks about a thing. The only victory to be won there will belong to one of the two combatants.
They would be used up a lot faster, and take a lot longer to replace, if we had to fight Russia directly.
But if the Uyghurs started fighting China, we could send them weapons and stuff.
Could the difference have anything to do with their religions?
To use a tactic from an old High School PE teacher/coach, I don’t want to use names but the initials are Islam.
The point is, they should have had multiple layers of this stuff already. Now all kinds of commodities are taken off the market even if you don’t give a you know what about the Ukrainian people or suppressing Russian adventurism. It makes a hell of a lot more sense than worrying about who is in NATO or sticking tiny countries in NATO.
And I know what you’re going to say, that is an aggressive posture. Spare me.
A very angry Ethiopian who hates that he looks like a Somali and hates Somalis because they hate everybody for no reason, explained this to me. The answer is “yes”. It’s like a 60/40 split there and they all get along just fine.
They they did a good job to stay out of the news for probably around a year and a half and now they have a real doozy. They made the New York Times. The feeding our future scandal. The math around it is incredible. Some judge shot down Minnesota cracking down on them or something.
What? No, you don’t know what I’m going to say. Maybe Zafar would say that, but not me.
I think there should be lots more stockpiles of military equipment, and we should also still be making F-14s and such, but the political calculations made by politicians are that they get more votes from spending $1 Billion that goes to welfare recipients RIGHT NOW, than from spending $1 Billion on anti-tank missiles etc that you hope to use NEVER.
I’m not in the weeds on this. Putin got really mad at us around 2004, for whatever reason. I have no idea if that was mishandled. We stuck some really tiny countries in NATO. I’m talking about every level of defensive weapon like drones, barriers, medical supplies, all the guns and ammo up to a lot of 50 caliber. Then you can get into the technical stuff and heavier weapons. It just kills me that they are cutting and welding hedgehogs and caltrops after the war starts. Not an expert. I don’t know how to say this better.
Because they are a pain to store in quantity and aren’t made to be easily redeployed, whenever you retreat you need more hedgehogs and caltrops. Fortunately, that doesn’t take much in the way of specialized equipment or knowledge.
Right. They probably could have cut them and stored them. Weld them as needed. I don’t even know if it has to be done in Ukraine. We could have done it for them somewhere and shipped it to them.
Again not an expert, but basically how Switzerland approaches this stuff.
“Military preparedness” too often depends on politics rather than logic. One of the few times I can remember that turning out well, was when there was need for bunker-busting munitions during the Iraq War, it must have been. It turned out the Army (probably was the Army) had a number of obsolete/unusable tank barrels stockpiled. They were drilled out, filled with explosives, and used as bunker-busters in pretty short order.
Why were there obsolete tank barrels in warehouses? Not because anyone thought they might be useful later. Probably because the people who manage those things don’t have anything to manage if there’s no inventory. And it doesn’t even matter if the inventory is considered useful or not. (And they’re probably crushed now, perhaps even demoted or transferred, now that they no longer have obsolete tank barrels to inventory.)
But sometimes Having Stuff is its own reward.
Probably slowed down and reversed to avoid copyright complaints by auto-detection.
Most relevant portion starts at 18:15
Only since WWII which the horrors of the Holocaust guilted us into being interventionists.
I think the population leans more isolationist than you think, but not purely isolationist.
One good reason to not be isolationist, includes “First they came for the Ukrainians, but I wasn’t Ukrainian…”
Assign him to house to house canvasing in the Great Dismal Swamp. I hear the gators are due back any time now.