Someone should ask Susan Collins why she thinks people join the military. Because based on that video, it seems like her answer would be, “because they’re idiots who want to throw their lives away on a politician’s whim.”
I mean… I get that a lot of people choose military jobs because they are poor or have limited options, and her response in context is really tone deaf.
But there’s surely a lot of enlistees that choose for very stupid reasons. The US armed services in post-911 were frothing at the mouth to get over to the middle east and exact some vengeance. Bush Jr still holds the highest approval rating of any president since tracking began in 1945.
That still blows my mind. What about 9/11 made people like Bush? If anything he shares some blame for failing to prevent it…
And they immediately hijacked it to ram through their neocon agenda, damaging America and many other countries and people in ways we may never recover from. It’s not like those things happened in secret, at least not all of them.
And don’t forget, he oversaw the (now first of several) once in a generation financial collapse. He left the country much worse off than he found it…. I don’t understand how anyone has nothing but contempt for him.
True but that came later and did substantially harm his popularity, unlike the events of his first term.
I mean he almost certainly was negligent in preventing 9/11 at best. At worst… Well. Bin laden worked for his dad fighting the [Soviets](Operation Cyclone - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Cyclone).
Pretty tone deaf response
Yep, responding to “look what you did to me” with “hey you gave me the ability to do it” isn’t some sort of moral flex.
I mean both are in the wrong. Volunteering to be a murderer for hire is bad, and hiring murderers to murder people for oil under false pretenses is bad too.
Jesus this woman is an idiot.
Why?
Because that was an idiotic thing to say.
Was any of it not factual? I don’t know who either of these people are, I’m not obsessed with politics like many, but it just sounded like she knew the facts.
It ignores the fact that the premise of the Iraq war was completely built on lies. There were no “Weapons of Mass Destruction” as Republicans claimed. A lot of people enlisted thinking they were protecting the US from a danger threatening the existence of the entire country, which ended up not being true.
OK I’m only speaking to the clip, not the entire Iraq war. The guy accused her of sending him to war when he’s enlisted. She’s just commenting the facts, right? That’s all I’m talking about.
It’s always easy to shit on stuff after the fact looking back, but the gov is good at covering stuff up; so at the time, yeah, a lot of people enlisted thinking they’re doing their duty. Probably the same as now with Iran and Israel. Just gov BS and a cover story to go with it.
Something can be 100% factual and still idiotic.
While technically true. She’s still the dumb bitch that voted to subject the troops to it.
“Senator are you healthy enough to serve again? I see you are shaking your head no…”
Look at this bitch trying to talk shit. The audacity.
“I might have supported a war built on a house of lies, but it’s that idiot’s fault that he believed me.”
This is the issue with antiwar discourse primarily focused on US troops. The troops are volunteers, and there are plenty of ways that harm to them can be minimized or negated while continuing to slaughter people, like through drones.
The actual victims of imperialism, the Iraqi people, did not volunteer for any of that shit. But to focus on them means treating them as human beings with moral worth, which, in US politics, is such an extreme far-left idea that it’s basically relegated to the “lunatic fringe.” The furthest “left” mainstream critique of the war is this stuff about the poor troops, which, yes, it’s still bad to send them into conflicts without reason even if they volunteered and even if the risk is mitigated. But it’s hardly the worst thing about the war, and it falls flat for a lot of people.
