I saw this last night.
Dick Cheney has endorsed Kamala Harris and said he'll be voting for her, because he regards Trump as an existential threat to the USA.
Yep, you heard that right, THE BIG DICK IS HERE!
Think about that for a second.
And we didn't even have to bomb nobody, although if these MAGA's get their way and try to start a Civil War, that may well change.
Frankly, I don't doubt that the Never Trump Republicans hope MAGA does something that stupid, because one hell of a lot of those people have military and/or National Security Hawk political experience and would love to go all Global War On Terror against guys like Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, and against MAGA and the alt-Right Nazis and Wagner Group and all the rest of this shit.
Anyway, Welcome to the Resistance, Darth Sidious.
And yes, I was a Republican at the time and I still remember all those Doonesbury comics in the aughts that invoked exactly that comparison. I didn't necessarily always (or even often, at times) agree with dude back in the day but Garry Trudeau is a goddamned Master and don't you dare forget it.
Like, goddamn, this is awkward. Yes, I think so, and I don't care who knows it.
But it's also exactly how and what America is supposed to be, we absolutely are one big goddamned awkward coalition, we don't have a common language, a shared culture or a thousand years of history.
All we have is what we want to be.
And an American Caesar...Red or otherwise...would mean the end of America.
Somebody steps up and demands "My way or the highway" guess what? Half the damn country will fucking just say "Fuck that" do exactly that, declare independence and tell that guy to go fuck himself.
Democracy, the vote, Diversity, multiculturalism? Fuck, it's all we have.
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
~Emma Lazarus, The New Colossus.
But that ain't who we are.
There's a lot of Republican elected officials and government employees that are afraid of Trump, or at least of his MAGA goons and the mob he's ginned up. But, speaking as a veteran here, I can guarantee you if...or as I personally believe when...it comes down to a test of arms, that will change.
And when enough people get tired of it, like it or not the awesome power of the State will be used against These Fucking People.
Why? Because right or wrong, that's simply what happens.
Any Republican can tell you this, they just always believe they'll be on the button-pushing, god's-eye-view, order-giving side of that equation. But enough of us have had it with their bullshit, and they're obviously going to keep it up and make common cause with America's enemies against our country.
This is America and that tends to only end one way.
Even on the rare occasions that it doesn't, the other side usually has a lot more bodies to bury.
Anymore we don't even have to have "Boots on the Ground" or get directly involved! Just ask the Russians how their 3-day "Special Military Operation" is going over two-and-a-half years later!
And as for MAGA?
I mean, like, if you think about it Donald Trump and all this Authoritarianism, Inc. bullshit is basically the "Meme Stock" of nations.
You get these guys...at least the "American" ones discussing actual policy and all they even have is that so and so can't do this or such-and-such can't do that. Their latest bits are basically hating on Black people for having basically any kind of professional or prestigious job, hating on women for serving in the military and hating on LGBT people for doing basically anything at all.
Like, yo, for a good percentage of the time that I was in the Air Force my Lieutenant, my day-to-day superior officer that I (being a Senior Airman and then a Sergeant, I spent a fair amount of time as a squad leader or behind a desk) had to answer to and deal with every day on a professional basis was a woman. And she'd have eaten Jabronis like Charlie Kirk or Tucker Carlson for lunch, and then gotten sick off of doing it.
There's no place for misogyny in government, the military, or the [civilian] workforce. I don't give a damn. Simply put, aside from the moral components (of which there are many) American-style Capitalism and economics cannot afford to "Other" whole groups of people right out of the country and/or the economy or have people that cannot or are rendered unable to contribute to it.
51% of the US population is female, for fuck's sake! You eliminate half our economy, we lose the damn country. Most of my direct co-workers at my job are women.
And guess what? Conservatives...but people like Dick Cheney and Ronald Reagan, not Donald Trump...were absolutely balls-deep in making it that way.
Women can do anything that men can do. The only thing that stands in the way of people admitting that is bigotry.
And that's just one category, one example.
And they mostly think that because in those kinds of countries wealth is very concentrated in the hands of elites...which MAGA and a lot of modern Republicans see themselves as and think they always will be. They don't realize how interdependent things are or that once you start fucking with the system and whole parts of it stop working, the whole thing comes flying apart.
Or, to put it another way, a lot of them do and they just don't care because they think somehow if the world goes to shit their status will improve. Like, all these goddamned AR-15 CHUD's think they're gonna be the local warlord...not the catamite the local warlord has strapped to the back of the truck for when he gets bored with the women, who men other than him also do not have access to.
Just sayin' if women lose agency, that tends not to work out well for the men either.
And I happen to remember, when we were picking up the pieces and trying to turn Afghanistan back into something resembling a country, Republicans had a pretty good understanding of stuff like that.
For fuck's sake I read The Kite Runner and I remember it being a big fuckin' deal that George W. Bush and his wife Laura had both read it too.
Donald Trump rather infamously doesn't even read.
So yeah, think about that.
Being a better citizen requires living according to reality, even when it's inconvenient or uncomfortable.
You either believe in freedom or you don't.
Remember that, because there's going to be a test, citizenship and freedom require some level of allegiance to reality and truth. Without truth, we don't even have a floor to stand on to push back against Power.
Trust me, I paid attention during the Trump years, what's unnatural and weird isn't Dick Cheney voting Democratic or women serving in the military, it's shit like how Donald Trump conducts himself and his goddamned gold-digger wife publicly saying shit like "Fuck Christmas" and the fact that Republicans of all motherfuckers were Okay with all that.
This is America, all we have is what we want to be.
You MAGA's wanna go be some piss-ant ruling-class in a country that's basically Burkina Faso, but for White People? Go get your own damn country, this one and its land are taken.
We The People have fucking had it.
Слава Україна!
We welcome change and openness; for we believe that freedom and security go together, that the advance of human liberty can only strengthen the cause of world peace. There is one sign the Soviets can make that would be unmistakable, that would advance dramatically the cause of freedom and peace. General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization, come here to this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev...Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!
~Ronald Reagan
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