Author Archives: r9q9gb

Don’t Ask Me To Explain. This Trump Steak Headline Is Really Hard To Write.

by r9q9gb Posted on April 13, 2017

Mother Jones

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Let’s say you’re throwing a dinner party and it is a very important dinner party and your boss is coming over and many other people you want to impress and you and your family spend all day getting ready for this dinner party—cleaning the house, preparing the food, rehearsing songs the children can sing as they depart for bed before the adults have post-dinner drinks—and it’s all very stressful but you’re committed to it because the play isn’t the thing, the dinner party is—and so you wake up early and clean the kitchen and the dining room and the entryway and the second bathroom and even the third bathroom, which probably won’t get used but it would be very bad if it did get used and it was dirty, and in a fit of panic you even clean the closets—because what if someone goes to put their coat in the closet and the closet is messy and they think “wow, what a sick, disgusting family this is” and then they take a photo of the sick closet and post it on Instagram with no filter and everyone on the internet laughs at you and you lose your job and have to move with your family to the arctic because that is the only place you can live without shame?—so you clean the closet; and the food is also important so you spend forever making the best recipes from the Top Chef cookbook, recipes you really aren’t even qualified to attempt but attempt them you do and after a few failures and misfires you make them good—and it is you who is the real Top Chef—and then it is the afternoon and you are ready, everything is perfect, but you are stressed and you want a drink but you don’t want to be drunk when people show up so you don’t drink because not again but you really are stressed out and your back is killing you, so you jump in the car and pop over to the local mall and go to the Sharper Image to sit in one of their massage chairs and while you’re sitting in the massage chair unwinding before the big party you get a frantic call from your partner saying that there was a problem with the refrigerator and the meal you’d slaved over all day is ruined and there’s no food and your dinner guests are going to be arriving any minute and now you’re panicking because what are you going to do and you look around the Sharper Image in a daze and realize that there is nothing you can do because it is too late and your life is over and you resign yourself to the arctic but then you think maybe just maybe they sell steaks at Sharper Image and you ask the Sharper Image salesperson and they say, “actually, yes, we do” and you say, “but are they good steaks” and they say, “oh they are the world’s greatest steaks” and so you buy a bunch of the steaks and go home and make the steaks and then the guests arrive and they love the steaks and the night is a success and when you sleep that night you dream of your new life where people come up to you on the street and say “I’d love to come to one of your dinner parties. I hear they’re great.” Maybe you’ll invite them. Maybe you won’t. Your fate is in your hands.

Bad news, my friend: You mishandled the steaks. You’re moving to the arctic.

tldr: The Sharper Image used to sell Trump Steaks. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort—which doesn’t actually sell Trump Steaks since Trump Steaks no longer exists—was just dinged by health inspectors for mishandling meat. There is no reason to believe that Trump Steaks were spoiled or that the Sharper Image didn’t handle their Trump Steaks correctly. This post is a joke about the fact that Donald Trump used to sell steaks at the Sharper Image. Please stop shouting at me.

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Don’t Ask Me To Explain. This Trump Steak Headline Is Really Hard To Write.

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In Syria, the Middle Course Is Our Worst Possible Option

by r9q9gb Posted on August 27, 2013

Mother Jones

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In the LA Times today, Ken Dilanian writes that plenty of foreign policy experts are skeptical about the effectiveness of lobbing a few cruise missiles against Syria:

Punitive strikes ineffective, even counterproductive, analysts say

In two major episodes in 1998, the U.S. government unleashed a combination of bombs and cruise missiles against its foes — Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s government in Iraq. In a more distant third case, in 1986, the U.S. bombed Moammar Kadafi’s Libya.

The bombs and missiles mostly hit their targets, and the U.S. military at the time declared the attacks successful. But in the end, they achieved little. Two years after the U.S. bombed Tripoli, Pan Am Flight 103 exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 270 passengers and crew. Investigators later concluded that the U.S. attack was a primary motive for Kadafi to support the Lockerbie bombing. Al Qaeda killed nearly 3,000 people in attacks in the United States on Sept. 11, 2001. Hussein kicked out international weapons inspectors and survived despite sanctions until a U.S.-led invasion deposed him in 2003.

….“If the U.S. does something and Assad is left standing at the end of it without having suffered real serious, painful enough damage, the U.S. looks weak and foolish,” said Eliot Cohen, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and a former State Department official in the Bush administration, who has long been skeptical about reliance on air power.

This is the fundamental problem. All the evidence suggests that Obama is considering the worst possible option in Syria: a very limited air campaign with no real goal and no real chance of influencing the course of the war. You can make a defensible argument for staying out of the fight entirely, and you can make a defensible argument for a large-scale action that actually accomplishes something (wiping out Assad’s air force, for example), but what’s the argument for the middle course? I simply don’t see one. It’s the act of a president who’s under pressure to “do something” from the know-nothings and settles on a bit of fireworks to buy them off and show that he has indeed done something. But it’s useless. The strike itself won’t damage Assad much and it won’t satisfy the yahoos, who will continue to bray for ever more escalation.

If Obama wants to intervene in Syria, then he needs to make the case that we should intervene in Syria. But if he does, I hope he listens to this short video first:

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In Syria, the Middle Course Is Our Worst Possible Option

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