We've seen this film before with this other Republican President guy. Whatsisname?

I suppose next we can look for a false-flag (blaming Iran) terrorist incident that kills a number of Americans. This will justify American intervention and legitimize making any protests against the regime government look "anti-American". What goes around comes around. Also, the price of oil will skyrocket. Enjoy, MAGgats.

I.e. another proxy war/coalition of the extremely willing. An orientalist sequel with "the anti-war President."

The fork-tongued mobster and his attack dog

Pretty damn obvious that the NRA and all those guns and all those flags were NEVER actually about defending anyone from tyranny.

These militia types, they tell you they are the spiritual inheritors of the 3%, the Minutemen, who once rose up against a king.

But they're really the Loyalists, those miserable bastards who embrace absolutism and who would turn their guns on their neighbors and who only became patriots AFTER the revolution was over.

~Jim Wright

Thoughts and prayers

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But protest peacefully! We abhor violence.

Flag fetish redux

 R_P wrote:
"Not Aware" - where were these people hiding? 

Genocide + Trump
US popularity collapses worldwide in wake of Trump’s return
The world is more divided than ever, but there’s still something (nearly) everyone agrees on: The U.S. is unloved.

Trump DISMANTLES DC Foreign Policy Dogma?

DOGE Proof
Report: Pentagon will likely fail audits through 2028
GAO says DOD still ‘faces significant fraud exposure’ and massive financial deficiencies

The Government Accountability Office conducted the report to assist the Pentagon in meeting its timeline for a clean audit by 2028. DOD has failed every audit since it was legally required to submit to one each year beginning in 2018. In fact, the Pentagon is the only one of 24 federal agencies that has not been able to pass an unmodified financial audit since the Chief Financial Officers Act of 1990.

For more than two decades, the GAO has given over 100 recommendations on how the Pentagon can fix its financial weaknesses. Most cases are still open, with no progress satisfied other than a “leadership commitment.” Additionally, many of the thousands of identified deficiencies found in its 2018 audit remain outstanding. (...)

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth promised to return a clean DOD audit by the end of Trump’s administration, an outcome the GAO report and experts say is unlikely, barring significant changes.

Despite inadequate answers to these massive financial deficiencies, President Trump has ordered the Pentagon to increase its budget to over $1 trillion, up from the around $850 billion that the Biden administration requested for FY 2025.

The First Forever War
The Vietnam War Is Still Killing People, 50 Years Later
Nick Turse

When a tank crashed through the gates of the presidential palace in Saigon 50 years ago today, the Potemkin state of South Vietnam collapsed, and the Vietnamese war of independence, fought in its final phase against the overwhelming military might of the United States, came to a close.

America lost its war, but Vietnam was devastated. “Sideshow” wars in Cambodia and Laos left those countries equally ravaged. The United States unleashed an estimated 30 billion pounds of munitions in Southeast Asia. At least 3.8 million Vietnamese died violent war deaths, an estimated 11.7 million South Vietnamese were forced from their homes, and up to 4.8 million were sprayed with toxic herbicides like Agent Orange.

April 30, 1975, was also, the New Yorker’s Jonathan Schell observed at the time, “the first day since September 1, 1939, when the Second World War began, that something like peace reigned throughout the world.”

Peace on paper, perhaps, but the violence never really ended.

The U.S. did whatever it could to cripple the reunited Vietnam. Instead of delivering billions in promised reconstruction aid, it pressured international lenders like the International Monetary Fund and World Bank to reject Vietnamese requests for assistance. The newly unified nation of farmers had no choice but to till rice fields filled with unexploded American bombs, artillery shells, rockets, cluster munitions, landmines, grenades, and more.

The war’s toll continued to rise, with 100,000 more casualties in Vietnam in the 50 years since the conflict technically came to a close and many more in the neighboring nations of Southeast Asia.

Symposium: Was the Vietnam War a mistake or fatal flaw in the system?
It's been 50 years since the Fall of Saigon and we still haven't reckoned with the biggest question of them all. Until today.

The photographs, television images and newspaper stories make it perfectly clear: there was an urgency, a frenzy even, as the U.S. Embassy in Saigon shuttered and its diplomats and staff were evacuated, along with other military, journalists, and foreigners, as well as thousands of Vietnamese civilians, who all wanted out of the country as the North Vietnamese victors rolled into the city center.

It was April 30, 1975 — 50 years ago today — yet the nightmare left behind that day only accentuated the failure of the United States, along with the South Vietnamese army, to resist a takeover by the communists under the leadership of the North. It was not only an extraordinarily bloody chapter for Vietnam (well over 1.5 million military and civilian deaths, depending on estimates, from 1965 to 1975), but a dark episode for America, too.

Beyond the failure of Washington’s Cold War policy — that intervening in Vietnam’s post-Colonial struggles for independence was necessary to prevent the “dominoes” of communism from tumbling across Southeast Asia — more than 55,000 Americans were killed. An untold number who returned suffered lifelong injuries, impacts of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and illnesses and other symptoms due to Agent Orange and other toxic exposures.

The nation had been ruptured politically and socially over the war, a divide that one could say has never really healed.

Yet ironically, Washington’s proclivity to intervene in other countries’ affairs and to use military power as the first resort has only grown. It would seem the true lessons of Vietnam were left on that iconic rooftop from which the last helicopter left Saigon 50 years ago.

Some say after WWII, U.S. power and intervention has maintained the global liberal order and that Vietnam was a “mistake” — a one-off. Others say it was a sign that the pretense of America as the "indispensable nation” was folly from the beginning, that the Cold War had blinded us to the realities of the world and the limits of military intervention.

So we asked experts, both in geopolitics and history, what they think:

Was the failure of Vietnam a feature or a bug of U.S. foreign policy after WWII?

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The Army’s XM1202 Tank Fiasco Is a Warning for Future Weapons Development

Pentagon fires Greenland base commander after she criticized JD Vance visit
Actions to “subvert President Trump’s agenda will not be tolerated,” U.S. military warns.