We have too many men of science, too few men of God. We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon On The Mount. The world has achieved brilliance without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living. ~General Omar Bradley
Last night, I saw this. Tucker Carlson, who has served exactly zero days in uniform as a member of the United States Armed Forces, accused Joe Biden of trying to "Feminize" the military.He used the example and image of a pregnant female Airman in a flight suit.
Listen here, you misogynistic chickenhawk dickbag, I served with plenty of women back in the early to mid-1990's and their presence, even in my career field (I was a US Air Force Security Policeman) was something nobody, even the most strident conservatives then extant, even bothered to comment on. The entry of women into many non-direct-combat career fields in the United States Armed Forces was signed off on by Republican president Richard Nixon in 1973. The first women to become Air Force Security Policewomen would enter basic military training and tech school later that year. That was also, coincidentally, the same year I was born, I'm 47.
Since my own time, women have served in combat as everything from fighter pilots to light infantry. One of the 'stars' of my own day, former USAF Captain Martha McSally, went on to become a US Senator. Granted one who couldn't get elected in her own right and was appointed only to fill John McCain's spot, but there you have it.
Tucker seemed like he was OK with that. Martha didn't "Feminize" the Republican Party?
So why, oh why, is so-called exemplar of "Conservative" Manhood...that is, impotent Chickenhawk fascist insurrectionist Tucker Carlson, frozen fish stick heir and avoider of military service and personal responsibility for basically anything...only commenting on this now?
Perhaps because the last Republican President was a dishonest, fat, lying impotent old fart factory of a traitor who aspired to become a real dictator, and wore heels and more makeup than a South Beach drag queen revue? (Apologies to drag queens for the comparison.)
Perhaps because modern Republicanism is itself more associated with Milo Yiannopoulos and Peter Theil and with CPAC being a mecca for gay prostitution than with John Wayne and Ronald Reagan and 1960's Orange County style conservatism?
Because if you're a modern conservative, being a current internet troll is considered more useful in real terms than being a veteran.
And do you ever notice, these fucking people only say this kind of dumb shit when a Democrat is in office?
Because being a veteran itself is only useful to others to assuage their insecurities and those of their parents and grandparents, many of whom knew what needed to be done in Vietnam, in Bosnia, or in Afghanistan but chose with malice aforethought to pawn that responsibility off onto others.
Possibly because modern Republicans don't see the military and its people as defenders of the country or instruments of national policy, but simply as yet another partisan flag to grab in their perpetual effort to "Own the Libs" itself a bizarre, ritualistic ethos of eternally counting coup on "enemies" that mostly exist only in these fucking people's heads...yet somehow said enemies encompass everybody from Tea Party Joe Walsh on leftward ad infinitum, current North Korean and former Soviet Communists excepted, especially one former KGB Colonel, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. Sword and shield of the Party, y'all.
Tucker Carlson isn't upset because women are serving in the military, he's upset because the military reflects the makeup of this country and its culture, and the diversity thereof strapped up in blue, in green, and haze gray, reflecting the reality of our nation...as if it could do anything else...rather than existing solely to performatively reassure the bottomless sexual insecurities of "Conservative" white men.
Tucker and men like him are upset because the military is sworn to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution, because it isn't the Sword and Shield of a Republican Party whose conduct and tone are increasingly Soviet.
Men who, in too many cases, own enough weapons to outfit a squad of soldiers, but can't shoot worth a good goddamn...because it isn't about that. It's not about being able to fight, or having real skills, or holding our government to account, it's not about hunting or even self-defense, for the most part a lot of these fucking people own so many guns because American capitalism has told them that's intimidating and makes them look tough and scares their neighbors and oh by the way give us money.
For too many, gun ownership and the implied fascism of modern conservatism alike aren't even about Donald Trump, or their "vision" of America, it's about papering over all the holes in their egos and perpetuating their own mythos about themselves, which mostly still exist because far too few of these fucking idiots have ever had to try and live up to them. 1/6 and our debased "Look Mom, I'm on TV" attempt at overthrowing the country while looking like a bunch of circus sideshow freaks should have caused this stupid bullshit to die of embarrassment.
Hell, one of the fucking people who died in that shit was a female USAF Security Forces veteran, Ashlii Babbitt, a bisexual conspiracy theorist from California who by her very existence proved that Tucker Carlson is full of shit...and she was on his fucking side!
The mythos of conservatism is so far behind the reality of it that it'll never catch up, and perversely that's probably a good thing. It means somebody on that side, at least, will be remembered as something other than an immoral traitor to America.
Meanwhile, the late-night TV commercials I see every night on the break room TV's are full of ads for everything from tactical electric shavers to tactical sunglasses, with everything from endless ads for impotence medication to open ads for pornography.
Not because we are a nation of Men and Warriors, but because we're anything but that, and frat-boy chucklefucks like Tucker Carlson and manipulators like Donald Trump and Rupert Murdoch are balls-deep in making that so. Capitalism overruled social conservatism a long time ago, and no one cared.
The problem is, to a great extent, nobody cared enough to notice, either.
The avatars of my parents' generation of conservatism, men like Jerry Falwell, Sr. and Ronald Reagan, would weep to see what their movement has become.
American conservatism has gone from ending the Cold War in our favor to desperately trying to restart it, not out of some reborn ideological fervor but simply to try and keep itself relevant and see if it can somehow reinvent the glories of Reagan and Bush 41 even as it now openly reviles both men.
Conservatism has come a long way, a long way down, that is.
And the bar didn't start all that high.
If we want to have a better country, hell, if we want to remain one country, or the country we are...we had best stop tolerating this silly bullshit.
If you want a better nation, be better citizens.
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