2024

[OCanada]

YA tries go be on both sides at once. Going back millenia and into recent times: Not to act is to act; not to speak is to speak. He is a good example of that

Dietrich Bonhoeffer:

Silence in the face of evil is itself evil. God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.

[youthathletics]

I also have skin in the game, which makes me even more furious when I hear from the boots on the ground how they were hung out to dry. Again.....your BS argument of this being a Trump vs Biden or R v D is just some make believe assignment / label YOU want to put on it. I've stated at least a dozen times it's not partisan to me, so I don't need to play your silly R v D game.

So then:

1. don't complain when Biden gets us out

2. show me the post where you cite the General in charge (do you even know his name?) of Afghanistan, and rip him a new one.

Did you do that? Nope. How long will it take me to find you blaming Biden for the withdrawal? And yes, this is a trick question....you are LYING, and blamed Biden. It's right there in writing, and here you are, claiming you didn't do that, and instead blamed the General..and that i'm being a jerk.

Steak dinner says you have to Google which General was in charge of the withdrawal.

Two dinners says you never once mentioned him here, let alone criticized him by name.

Dude, if you MEANT to blame the Generals? Great. But you didn't do that here, and I'm not a mind reader.

Pro Tip: you should really consider trying to separate party, from point of discussion, when chatting with me, OS, cradle, Kram, et al.. It may really help the conversation.

oh for f's sake.

Dude: you JUST told me that you refuse to criticize the R's here. And we already know OS and Kram don't either.

Yet you want to give ME grief for calling out this partisan horsesh(t? And better still, tell ME I'm the one putting party before any discussion here?

How hard were you laughing when you typed this out? You're making ZERO sense.

For the record, I hated Trumps tax changes, even argued (on here) how it screwed me and so many others and they don't even know it was his doing. I hated his big fuggin mouth and how his return forced me to recently changed party.

Great news. Next step: stop playing your petty, silly game where you refuse to criticize Trump or the R's here for your invented reason that makes no sense. Do that? Watch how I react. I'll treat you the same way I treated OS on laxpower, when he criticized both parties, and we had wonderful exchanges.

Don't do that? Sorry mate, you don't get to yell at me for calling out your partisan "Dems are always bad, and I'll never criticize the R's" horsehockey.

You are not good at listening. Which makes sense, because it shows you didn’t bother to understand what I wrote, but we’re quite certain enough to know what I meant. Nice deflection.

Why would I cite the general? I just wrote about how Austin, the friggen SoD was likely to blame but ultimately it’s on the POTUS, followed by the example of your products….and you now add in a General that is waiting for orders . You’ve completely gone off your rocker by adding layer upon layer of BS, to move us so far away from where we started.

And now…..blame us for being partisan, when YOU are the one the inserts it and damned near every discussion. Maybe, just maybe….you are the one that changed?

[a fan]

Why would I cite the general?

A. Because unless you are an idiot, you know doggone well that the POTUS has NOTHING to do with the logistics of going into, or out of, a war zone.

B. Because you JUST CLAIMED you weren't blaming Biden. Now here you are, contradicting yourself, telling us the POTUS is indeed responsible.

C. And again, you "forgot" to blame Trump for the deaths while he was in oddice----which are FAR higher than Biden----and then show up here, and rip Biden for "causing" deaths. Oh, and then tell me you're not being partisan. Yeah, right.

And now…..blame us for being partisan, when YOU are the one the inserts it and damned near every discussion. Maybe, just maybe….you are the one that changed?

Did you bump your head? How many times to I have to remind you that YOU JUST TOLD US you refuse to criticize R's here.

In what F'ing world isn't that playing partisan games??


I don't do that, and in fact, as I'm telling you twice now, ripped Obama as the guy who failed to pull troops out after popping OBL.

in summary, I JUST blamed Obama for us still being there when Trump showed up, and you told me you refuse to criticize the magic letter R....and from this, you conclude that I'M the partisan problem here? So 1+1= no, because squirrels can't dance is what you're telling us?

Dude. You're being an over the top partisan, and you and everyone here knows it. I have NO IDEA who you think you're fooling here, but it ain't me.

Make you a wager. Steak dinner says you can't ONLY criticize Republicans until the election. I, on the other hand, can hammer nothing but Dems for as long as you want. Can do it in my sleep. But sure, I'm the partisan guy here.

[youthathletics]

Why would I cite the general?

A. Because unless you are an idiot, you know doggone well that the POTUS has NOTHING to do with the logistics of going into, or out of, a war zone.

B. Because you JUST CLAIMED you weren't blaming Biden. Now here you are, contradicting yourself, telling us the POTUS is indeed responsible.

C. And again, you "forgot" to blame Trump for the deaths while he was in oddice----which are FAR higher than Biden----and then show up here, and rip Biden for "causing" deaths. Oh, and then tell me you're not being partisan. Yeah, right.

And now…..blame us for being partisan, when YOU are the one the inserts it and damned near every discussion. Maybe, just maybe….you are the one that changed?

Did you bump your head? How many times to I have to remind you that YOU JUST TOLD US you refuse to criticize R's here.

In what F'ing world isn't that playing partisan games??


I don't do that, and in fact, as I'm telling you twice now, ripped Obama as the guy who failed to pull troops out after popping OBL.

in summary, I JUST blamed Obama for us still being there when Trump showed up, and you told me you refuse to criticize the magic letter R....and from this, you conclude that I'M the partisan problem here? So 1+1= no, because squirrels can't dance is what you're telling us?

Dude. You're being an over the top partisan, and you and everyone here knows it. I have NO IDEA who you think you're fooling here, but it ain't me.

Make you a wager. Steak dinner says you can't ONLY criticize Republicans until the election. I, on the other hand, can hammer nothing but Dems for as long as you want. Can do it in my sleep. But sure, I'm the partisan guy here.

So disingenuous or intentionally obtuse on your part.

A. I’ve been saying this all damned day, you are proving you do not listen. For the third time, I said it was likely the SoD/ Austin. But the CiC gets the blame. That is not partisan and giving R’s a pass for deaths prior. It’s solely focused on Abbey Gate execution.

B. Again, for the 3rd time. I’m only blaming Biden because he is the CiC on this one instance, Abbey Gate, based on the feedback he received from his staff. Party does not concern me one damn bit.

C. Why would I blame Trump for an executable decision like Abbey Gate, when there were none? False equivalency on your part

Yes, I do post a lot of things that are partisan. I’ve articulated that over and over, it’s no secret and I’ve explained it because the majority of everyone here sh(TS on the R’s like the D’s are GOD and never err. Heaven forbid someone not join in on the teenaged gossip group echo chamber and that things are as not pristine as they’d like to believe.

I have no reason to to play that silly game. Just look how far this got dragged out b/c the one line I mentioned to you about 18 months of death free war prior to Abbey Gate was not your 12/yr claim. You couldn’t, and still haven’t admitted that simple fact….even with pictures.

[Farfromgeneva]

YA tries go be on both sides at once. Going back millenia and into recent times: Not to act is to act; not to speak is to speak. He is a good example of that

Dietrich Bonhoeffer:

Silence in the face of evil is itself evil. God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.

This is quoted from a site in the book not my words:

In his book The Fall why does Camus say that it will always be too late to save?
'So tell me, please, what happened to you one evening on the banks of Seine and how you managed never to risk your life. Say the words that for years have not ceased to echo through my nights and that I shall finally speak through your mouth: "Young woman! Throw yourself in the water again so that I might have once more the opportunity to save us both!"

A second time - huh! That would be rash! Just imagine, dear colleague, if someone were to take us at our word. You'd have to do it. Brrr ... The water's so cold! But don't worry. It's too late now, it always will be too late. Thank goodness! '

This is how The Fall, by Albert Camus, ends.

Why does Camus say that it will always be too late to save?
Is he speaking of saving our innocence - that we are doomed to lose our innocence, and it will always be too late whenever we realize?
What I find more strange is when we says, "Thank goodness!".
Why does Camus find solace in the inability of man to save himself?

[a fan]

C. Why would I blame Trump for an executable decision like Abbey Gate, when there were none? False equivalency on your part

Are you kidding me? In what world is leaving the troops there to get picked off not an "executable decision".

You had your chance to hit him for this. You had FOUR YEARS of chances. You. Said. Nothing. THAT is what I'm hitting you for.....that you never blame R's.....and ONLY hit D's.

Yes, I do post a lot of things that are partisan.

Great. I don't. And you want to trundle over this fact, and treat me like I'm Brookie or DocB.

I’ve articulated that over and over, it’s no secret and I’ve explained it because the majority of everyone here sh(TS on the R’s like the D’s are GOD and never err. Heaven forbid someone not join in on the teenaged gossip group echo chamber and that things are as not pristine as they’d like to believe.

Yeah, but that's not me, my man. You don't get to lump me in, and you really need to stop doing that. I call balls and strikes, my man...always have. It's why I'm indie, and why I would NEVER give a dime to either POS corrupt party.

I have no reason to to play that silly game. Just look how far this got dragged out b/c the one line I mentioned to you about 18 months of death free war prior to Abbey Gate was not your 12/yr claim. You couldn’t, and still haven’t admitted that simple fact….even with pictures.

Oh FFs: dude, follow the logic.

-you are advocating Biden take his sweet time getting out. Actually, not true. You advocated that they stay and not leave.

-so what do I do? Look at what that means ON AVERAGE. Yep, it can be better with each passing year they stay. But yep, it can also be WORSE. So using an average makes perfect sense.

I don't give a fig about Biden. What I DO care about is making rational choices as a nation. And that RATIONAL choice is: every year we stay, we can expect 15 military deaths....and what do we get from that? Nothing, other than more wasted money, more grift for Federal contractors, and more dead Americans. I'm apparently the ONLY American on Earth who's taken a logic class or two, and think the concept that we should intentionally let 15 Americans die per year in the hopes that (checks notes) these same wankers don't (checks notes) kill Americans.

Did you get that? OS and everyone else thinks it makes sense to intentionally let Americans die, in the hopes that Americans don't die. Top shelf thinking right there.

So sorry mate, your partisan thinking it throwing stones at Biden for an evac that worked just fine. It's a freaking war zone, so duh, we had deaths. In other news, water is wet, and we've had ZERO deaths since we left....and instead of crediting Biden for this accomplishment, you're throwing stones, while not so much as noticing the deaths when Trump was in office.

Simple. Rational. Non-Partisan.

[old salt]

So now you've doubled down so much, you now wants to ban the military, said as much, that's how you've rationalized this....b/c wait for it, people die. Even if by suicide, training accident, covid19, etc...the military must cease to exist, even if only one death, regardless if it is combat related.

This should also help save us a bunch of money.

So now you move the goalposts to a new place where deaths don't matter now that you figured out that if we stay in Afghanistan, you can count on a dozen or so military deaths per year......meaning you can't find a way to do better than Biden did.

Great. Let's keep the goalposts there: now that you're telling us that military deaths happen no matter what....explain why your underwear is tied in knots over the deaths that happened during the withdrawal?

I'll wait. You are DESPERATE to make Biden bad, and Trump good. And it's just sad watching you feverishly try and move the goalposts to a place when you can make this make sense.

It ain't working.

Deaths most certainly matter, so much so, you want zero....forever, so let's shutdown the military. But of course, you still can not discern between combat related/KIA vs anything else. Kinda like the guy that got that was eaten by a shark but tested positive, so now he's a CV19 death.

We've been over this 1000 times, and a dozen this past Sunday.....the plan and execution was poor. OF course it 'could have been worse or even better had another plan taken place....the argument is that the plan that was executed was not favorable for those soldiers and Afghan friendlies.

This has ZERO to do with partisanship...stop making it about that. It's like you have OCD that there must be good side and a bad side...when it just be a good or bad decision...having nothing to do with poltics.

...afan is still celebrating it as the most awesome airlift ever.

[old salt]

I’d simply like to know how the US military would have done it better under Trump.

Oh, it's simple: if this was Trump? YA and OS would be on here asking us "tell us how you could have planned a better withdrawal. Death is part of being in a war zone".

No one here is fooled by their moronic fake complaints that "just so happen" to blame Dems.

The troops who died under Bush or Trump? "Oh, they were just doing their jobs, and war is hell"

The troops who died under Obama or Biden "OMG, Obama and Biden did it wrong!!!! No one would have died if R's were in charge.".

It's like talking to children with chocolate all over their faces, claiming they don't know what happened to the Hershey bar you left on the table. They want us to believe that death is part of war....except when Dem is to blame.

Under Trump, the withdrawal was to be conditions based. Not rushed to be done by the 20th anniversary of 9-11, to give Biden a talking point.

Don't withdraw the military until the civilians are out. Give our Afghan allies visas earlier & get them out. Start withdrawing the civilians months earlier. Fall back on Bagram & the NATO base in Herat, then the ASF would have stayed intact. It's not conclusive that Trump would have ever have completed a full withdrawal. He now admits he intended to retain Bagram. Trump said from the start -- our withdrawal was to be conditions based.

[jhu72]

I’d simply like to know how the US military would have done it better under Trump.

Oh, it's simple: if this was Trump? YA and OS would be on here asking us "tell us how you could have planned a better withdrawal. Death is part of being in a war zone".

No one here is fooled by their moronic fake complaints that "just so happen" to blame Dems.

The troops who died under Bush or Trump? "Oh, they were just doing their jobs, and war is hell"

The troops who died under Obama or Biden "OMG, Obama and Biden did it wrong!!!! No one would have died if R's were in charge.".

It's like talking to children with chocolate all over their faces, claiming they don't know what happened to the Hershey bar you left on the table. They want us to believe that death is part of war....except when Dem is to blame.

Under Trump, the withdrawal was to be conditions based. Not rushed to be done by the 20th anniversary of 9-11, to give Biden a talking point.

Don't withdraw the military until the civilians are out. Give our Afghan allies visas earlier & get them out. Start withdrawing the civilians months earlier. Fall back on Bagram & the NATO base in Herat, then the ASF would have stayed intact. It's not conclusive that Trump would have ever have completed a full withdrawal. He now admits he intended to retain Bagram. Trump said from the start -- our withdrawal was to be conditions based.

...

It was a trap set by the republiCONs after Trump lost. No matter what Biden did you would be whining (along with the rest of your crew). Give the Afghan allies time to get out -- your anti-immigrant party would have rioted!!

If Trump meant what he said, he would have done the evac on his watch. But like most things, the only thing your party is capable of organizing under Trump was and is a cluster fu*k!!

[old salt]

I’d simply like to know how the US military would have done it better under Trump.

Oh, it's simple: if this was Trump? YA and OS would be on here asking us "tell us how you could have planned a better withdrawal. Death is part of being in a war zone".

No one here is fooled by their moronic fake complaints that "just so happen" to blame Dems.

The troops who died under Bush or Trump? "Oh, they were just doing their jobs, and war is hell"

The troops who died under Obama or Biden "OMG, Obama and Biden did it wrong!!!! No one would have died if R's were in charge.".

It's like talking to children with chocolate all over their faces, claiming they don't know what happened to the Hershey bar you left on the table. They want us to believe that death is part of war....except when Dem is to blame.

Under Trump, the withdrawal was to be conditions based. Not rushed to be done by the 20th anniversary of 9-11, to give Biden a talking point.

Don't withdraw the military until the civilians are out. Give our Afghan allies visas earlier & get them out. Start withdrawing the civilians months earlier. Fall back on Bagram & the NATO base in Herat, then the ASF would have stayed intact. It's not conclusive that Trump would have ever have completed a full withdrawal. He now admits he intended to retain Bagram. Trump said from the start -- our withdrawal was to be conditions based.

...

It was a trap set by the republiCONs after Trump lost. No matter what Biden did you would be whining (along with the rest of your crew). Give the Afghan allies time to get out -- your anti-immigrant party would have rioted!!

If Trump meant what he said, he would have done the evac on his watch. But like most things, the only thing your party is capable of organizing under Trump was and is a cluster fu*k!!

I'm not convinced that Trump would have completely withdrawn any more than he completely withdrew our forces from Syria, where they remain today.

Biden ordered the withdrawal. It took place when he was CinC. Biden was not bound by it any more than any of the other Trump decisions he reversed. Just as Trump (if elected) won't be bound by any of the agreements re. Ukraine that Biden is rushing to make before his term ends.

[a fan]

Under Trump, the withdrawal was to be conditions based. Not rushed to be done by the 20th anniversary of 9-11, to give Biden a talking point.

Right. And more US soldiers would die because we stayed, and you'd be on here telling us that was their job, so who cares.

You think it's smart to let a dozens Americans get killed over there, because if we leave Afghanistan (checks notes) Americans MIGHT get killed if we leave. Brilliant strategy, right up there with Bush starting a war to prevent a war in Iraq.

You all think like this, and yet you CLAIM you're not a neo-con. Yeah, right.

Don't withdraw the military until the civilians are out. Give our Afghan allies visas earlier & get them out. Start withdrawing the civilians months earlier. Fall back on Bagram & the NATO base in Herat, then the ASF would have stayed intact. It's not conclusive that Trump would have ever have completed a full withdrawal. He now admits he intended to retain Bagram. Trump said from the start -- our withdrawal was to be conditions based.

Right so go from 2,000 to a poorly defended hundred, and they get to sit there and get picked off.

And naturally, right on cue, you're here telling us that Trump is a GENIUS military tactician, who would evacuate the troops flawlessly. Never mind, of course, that far more American died under his watch than Biden, right?

Right. More trolling, wasting your own time trying to sell us a steaming pile of poo. Dems are bad. Wow, what insight.

[old salt]

Under Trump, the withdrawal was to be conditions based. Not rushed to be done by the 20th anniversary of 9-11, to give Biden a talking point.

Right. And more US soldiers would die because we stayed, and you'd be on here telling us that was their job, so who cares.

You think it's smart to let a dozens Americans get killed over there, because if we leave Afghanistan (checks notes) Americans MIGHT get killed if we leave. Brilliant strategy, right up there with Bush starting a war to prevent a war in Iraq.

You all think like this, and yet you CLAIM you're not a neo-con. Yeah, right.

Don't withdraw the military until the civilians are out. Give our Afghan allies visas earlier & get them out. Start withdrawing the civilians months earlier. Fall back on Bagram & the NATO base in Herat, then the ASF would have stayed intact. It's not conclusive that Trump would have ever have completed a full withdrawal. He now admits he intended to retain Bagram. Trump said from the start -- our withdrawal was to be conditions based.

Right so go from 2,000 to a poorly defended hundred, and they get to sit there and get picked off.

And naturally, right on cue, you're here telling us that Trump is a GENIUS military tactician, who would evacuate the troops flawlessly. Never mind, of course, that far more American died under his watch than Biden, right?

Right. More trolling, wasting your own time trying to sell us a steaming pile of poo. Dems are bad. Wow, what insight.

How many of our remaining residual force in Syria have been "picked off" ?
The Kurds are still safe, holding the oil fields, & guarding thousands of IS prisoners.

The proposed residual force for Bagram was 2500.

[Typical Lax Dad]

https://apnews.com/article/redistrictin ... 301d7b8438

[Typical Lax Dad]

Under Trump, the withdrawal was to be conditions based. Not rushed to be done by the 20th anniversary of 9-11, to give Biden a talking point.

Right. And more US soldiers would die because we stayed, and you'd be on here telling us that was their job, so who cares.

You think it's smart to let a dozens Americans get killed over there, because if we leave Afghanistan (checks notes) Americans MIGHT get killed if we leave. Brilliant strategy, right up there with Bush starting a war to prevent a war in Iraq.

You all think like this, and yet you CLAIM you're not a neo-con. Yeah, right.

Don't withdraw the military until the civilians are out. Give our Afghan allies visas earlier & get them out. Start withdrawing the civilians months earlier. Fall back on Bagram & the NATO base in Herat, then the ASF would have stayed intact. It's not conclusive that Trump would have ever have completed a full withdrawal. He now admits he intended to retain Bagram. Trump said from the start -- our withdrawal was to be conditions based.

Right so go from 2,000 to a poorly defended hundred, and they get to sit there and get picked off.

And naturally, right on cue, you're here telling us that Trump is a GENIUS military tactician, who would evacuate the troops flawlessly. Never mind, of course, that far more American died under his watch than Biden, right?

Right. More trolling, wasting your own time trying to sell us a steaming pile of poo. Dems are bad. Wow, what insight.

How many of our remaining residual force in Syria have been "picked off" ?
The Kurds are still safe, holding the oil fields, & guarding thousands of IS prisoners.

The proposed residual force for Bagram was 2500.

What were the surrender terms?

[Seacoaster(1)]

Long and interesting article about the second most dishonest politician in the Presidential race:

https://thedispatch.com/newsletter/wand ... ield-ohio/

"They come to Ohio from one of the most desperately poor places in the Western Hemisphere. They have few to no belongings. In many cases, they are uneducated, and most don’t speak English well. They do not understand the local culture where they have settled—and it shows: in their dress, in their speech, in their manners, in their housing arrangements, in the food they eat, and in the music they dance to.

Most profess to be Christians, but many maintain superstitious folk magic traditions from their homeland, and many quietly hold to a belief in witchcraft. They blithely violate social taboos. Locals complain that they are stealing their jobs, driving up costs, and consuming too much in the way of social services. And then there are the dietary norms: Though the rumors no doubt exceed the reality, some of them eat animals not generally considered food by the good people of Ohio. Ask the locals, and many of them will quietly say that they wish they would all go back to where they came from.

But that was a long time ago. And while J.D. Vance’s hillbilly ancestors may not have been the inbred, possum-eating, superstitious bushwhackers of legend and lore, as they descended on Ohio from the hills of Kentucky they had more than a little in common with the Haitian immigrants Sen. Vance now spends his days vilifying in terms that would have been familiar to Fritz Hippler, the filmmaker whose 1941 propaganda film Der ewige Jude comes to its climax with images of leering kosher butchers covered in the blood of animals slaughtered in the service of “the so-called Jewish religion.”

Lord Acton would have us believe that it takes absolute power to corrupt absolutely. But even the dream of the vice presidency—that “bucket of warm piss” in the immortal words of Vice President John Nance Garner—will do the trick, if you are the right kind of person.

By which, of course, I mean the wrong sort of person—the wrong sort to wield power. You can send little J.D. to Yale to make him polished, you can send him to Silicon Valley to make him rich, and you can send him to the Senate to make him powerful, but you cannot stop him from being what it is he apparently wants to be: Cleetus the Gap-Toothed Twitter Troll.

Poor people have been coming to Ohio in search of jobs in its factories and warehouses for centuries: From the original New Englanders who settled in the Northwest Territory to the Scots-Irish to the Irish and Germans in the 19th century to the Haitians today, that story has been repeated over and over. At the turn of the 20th century, a majority of Cincinnati’s population consisted of those who either were foreign-born or were the children of foreign-born parents, mostly German. Naghten Street in Columbus, on the other hand, became “Irish Broadway” in the middle of the 19th century. The J.D. Vances of that era didn’t much care for the whiskey-drinking, potato-eating papists invading their cities, but they made good use of the canals and railroads built by those illiterate exotics from distant lands.

The guy who wrote Hillbilly Elegy understood all that. This jerk who is running for vice president, on the other hand …

I fuel up and have the big 6.7L diesel spooled out and growling happily as I speed by the exit for Possum Hollow Road—honest to God, that’s the name of the place; you can’t make up details like that—way out here in the Blue Ridge Mountains where it is 40-odd degrees early in the morning in the last days of summer. The Appalachian Highlands are gorgeous this time of year, with all sunshine and sapphire skies and cool breezes, good green hills and splendid rivers, and pretty good asphalt that is, barring the occasional construction backup, wide open for RPMs. If you like to drive, it doesn’t get much better in the eastern half of these United States. There’s a lot of that gross, weird old leg-tattoo America out there, too, of course, including a guy with a leg tattoo of the Monster Energy logo, along with the inescapable herpetic rash of Dollar General stores and the strip-joint billboards sprinkled like pox along the highways and backroads from the fine vistas of southwestern Virginia to the alpine rivers of West Virginia to the literal amber waves of grain in Ohio’s cornfields.

It makes you wonder why they ever left—the Vances and the rest of those Appalachian folk who followed Steve Earle’s “Hillbilly Highway” up to Detroit or down to Houston or wherever else the Scots-Irish diaspora ended up. And then you remember why: need and desperation. There weren’t a lot of Dairy Queens or Walmarts out here, and even if there had been, there were no jobs to earn money to spend in them. It was a world—and a life—of subsistence agriculture and hustling, with very little in the way of rule of law or decent public administration, where the biggest business was organized crime and where politics vacillated between demagoguery and banditry, beautiful in some parts, hideous in others, and poisonously backward—you know: Haiti, but with white people.

“Columbus: 162 miles.”

There are signs everywhere, of course, in our advertising-addled country: for deer corn, for Biscuit World, for the Beef Jerky Outlet (and how much beef jerky do you eat before you become a jerky-outlet shopper?), for the Sen. Robert Byrd Memorial This and That (the Exalted Cyclops is immortalized everywhere in West Virginia), for “Fox Run Featuring Go-Go Dancers!” and for “YouTube Denvil Curry the Man with No Vocal Cord.” Out of nowhere, a Tim Horton’s appears for a dash of cosmopolitanism.

I do not, however, see very many signs for Donald Trump. There is one roadside house with a “Truckers for Trump” banner, one billboard in Ohio with a dead raccoon rotting in front of it, and a GMC Sierra HD 2500 with “Trump” written on the window in weird sci-fi Tron letters and the inevitable “FJB” details on the side windows, but not much else. For perspective, the ratio of signs for adult bookstores (and how do these brick-and-mortar establishments survive in the age of ubiquitous digital pornography?) to Trump signs runs about 8 to 1.

Funny thing about those Trump signs: Even in Ohio, there is a name conspicuously omitted from them. Denvil Curry, the Man with No Vocal Cord, gets his name on a highway placard, but not J.D. Vance, that horny-handed son of Ohioan soil and Yale Law School. It’s just Grandpa Joe’s $5 candy buffet—candy buffet, you wild-hearted people of this vast diabetic republic!—sounding its barbaric yawp across the roofs of the great wide American world.

“You can send little J.D. to Yale to make him polished, you can send him to Silicon Valley to make him rich, and you can send him to the Senate to make him powerful, but you cannot stop him from being what it is he apparently wants to be: Cleetus the Gap-Toothed Twitter Troll.”
And, toward the end of the road to Springfield, Ohio, where I’m going to report on a story that isn’t happening—“In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs! The people that came in! They’re eating the cats! They’re eating! They’re eating the pets of the people that live there! And this is what’s happening in our country! And it’s a shame!”—one last sign, as though TikTok slang had seeped into real-world meatspace and been made literal and geographic:

“Mid Ohio.”

“I believe that Sen. Vance’s comments were spoken without … real knowledge of what the workforce situation in Ohio is,” says Ross McGregor, CEO of Pentaflex Inc. His company makes brake and axle components for trucks. Which trucks? “All of them,” he says proudly. He tries to be diplomatic about Sen. Vance. “I don’t think he really understands from a boots-on-the-ground perspective what employers are dealing with in trying to have a consistent and reliable workforce. If he were to apply a business mindset to this situation, he would see the benefit that we get from simply being able to rely on somebody coming to work every day.”

Eventually, he stops trying so hard to be diplomatic: “It doesn’t help all the memes going around about eating cats and geese and crazy sh-t like that. None of that helps.” The McGregors have been active in business and community life in Springfield for more than a century, and the CEO is proud of that longevity, which also gives him a little bit of perspective that the senator seems to lack.

“He is a highly intelligent man,” he says of Vance, “and he has a fantastic education. But from a business standpoint, I don’t get why he doesn’t understand what a stable workforce means for us.” He compares Springfield to Vance’s hometown. “Springfield and Middletown are like twin sisters. The Appalachian migration—this is a documented historical fact—was real, and it was about jobs, people looking for jobs, here and on up into Detroit. They came here for jobs. They needed work. They needed to take care of their families. And that’s exactly what the Haitians need as well. In Springfield, it’s history repeating itself. Before it was the Haitians, it was German and Irish immigrants, and they were treated like sh-t. This is nothing new. It’s not that there are no issues trying to assimilate 12,000 to 15,000 people in a community of 58,000. They are stressing our social services networks, our health care, and our education system. It’s hard.”

Then, there’s the real issue.

“And they are horrible drivers.”

A school bus seen on its way to pick up students in Springfield, Ohio, on September 13, 2024. (Photo by ROBERTO SCHMIDT/AFP via Getty Images)
A school bus seen on its way to pick up students in Springfield, Ohio, on September 13, 2024. (Photo by ROBERTO SCHMIDT/AFP via Getty Images)
There were tensions with the new arrivals in Springfield before the August 2023 accident in which a reckless driver—a Haitian—crashed his minivan into a school bus, killing 11-year-old Aiden Clark. But that amplified the stress. The boy’s father has been publicly critical of attempts to use his son’s dead body as a soapbox from which to deliver political speeches, and he laments that “hate-spewing people” have glommed onto the case. “My son was not murdered,” he said. “He was accidentally killed by an immigrant from Haiti.”

Springfield, like many similar cities, had been suffering from a declining population and economic stagnation when it joined a number of other Rust Belt cities in an effort to actively recruit immigrants to settle there. The town fathers may not have had 12,000 Haitians in mind, but that is what they got—and the results were pretty good: Contrary to the rhetoric you hear from Vance et al., employment went up, not down—and wages went up, too. In fact, Springfield handily outperformed nearby Dayton—and the country as a whole—in wage growth coming out of the COVID-19 downturn. And where population is increasing and wages are rising, some things—notably housing—will typically get more expensive. The Haitian newcomers, who are in the main legal immigrants under “Temporary Protected Status,” do use a lot of social services—those who are eligible have made heavy use of programs such as Medicaid—but they also work a lot of hours and put a lot of money into real estate, buying houses and commercial properties to start businesses of their own.

And that is where this gets politically interesting. With the Haitians working overtime—McGregor, the Pentaflex CEO, reports losing Haitian workers because he couldn’t offer them as much overtime as they wanted—and putting their money into houses, landlords who had been participating in affordable housing voucher programs widely used by the preexisting (largely white) population of Springfield began shifting to offering their properties on a market-price basis, and found Haitian renters willing to pay. From the traditional conservative point of view, the Haitian story in Springfield is, at least in part, a success: Hard-working people got jobs and put in a lot of hours and drew assets out of the subsidized welfare-state economy into the free market. Which is great if you are the ghost of Milton Friedman but a real inconvenience if you are an underemployed denizen of Springfield looking for a subsidized housing arrangement and unwilling to match the … rigorous Caribbean work ethic? … of your new neighbors.

J.D. Vance and Donald Trump practice a form of European-inflected right-wing politics known in academic circles as “welfare chauvinism,” which rejects the traditional Republican emphasis on individual responsibility and free enterprise and instead embraces a combination of welfare statism and Kulturkampf sensibilities: populism and nationalism shading into ethnocentrism and xenophobia. The case against the Haitians isn’t that they are welfare malingers or cat-eaters—or even that they are illegal immigrants who came here thanks to Joe Biden’s lax border enforcement, which most of them aren’t. The real issue is that by working overtime and investing in the community, they have made life more challenging for a reliable Trump-voting constituency: marginally employed white people on the dole.

Springfield, as you may have deduced by this point, is a surprisingly cosmopolitan place, and the scene outside the First Evangelical Haitian Church of Springfield offers a rich, diverse mosaic of … mostly white media people: There’s me, der Spiegel, the Times of London, Reuters, and a very severe Australian gentleman who doesn’t speak to the rest of us. Collectively, our presence explains why it suddenly costs $250 and takes a bit of effort to secure a crappy hotel room in Springfield, Ohio, on a Wednesday night. The streets around the area where the Haitian community center is located are beaten to rubble, somewhere between those of East St. Louis and the ones in Española, New Mexico, in drivability, and I’m glad to be in the truck.

Reporters on the road are a funny bunch: The men almost all dress like war correspondents in-country (cargo pants, Merrells, unshaven) while the women wear business casual, sneakers their only concession to the rigors of American travel. We’re all here to see Viles Dorsainvil, president of the Haitian Community Help and Support Center, and other representatives of the Haitian community who drift in and out of the storefront facility. In the modest community hall next door—the walls of which are festooned with framed photographs of Haitian musicians and other prominent figures in the community—they are decorating for a girl’s 15th birthday party. There are no pets on the menu. One suspects there may be cake. Considering the dramatic story of Haiti’s convulsions and the Haitian exodus, it is all just breathtakingly normal.

Dorsainvil, who, like most of the other leaders of the community center, has an education in (among other things) theology and ministry, is one of those compact young men who can look dressed up in an untucked button-down shirt. He speaks confidently and easily and with a certain amount of practiced diplomatic misdirection. Somebody asks about voodoo, because there are tales of voodoo, along with the stories of dognapping and cat-devouring. “There is no voodoo here,” he answers serenely. “I would know of it.” Somebody points out that a shop around the corner sells voodoo paraphernalia. He offers a diplomatic non-recognition of the fact. “But it is not practiced.” I assume he expects us to believe that the Haitians are doing so well that they spend their disposable income on voodoo gear to not practice voodoo with—like we’re in New Orleans rather than Springfield, Ohio. He is very forthcoming about some things, and other things he clearly would prefer not to talk about. Like many of the Haitians in Springfield, he has worked in the warehouse business (Amazon, which has a pretty big footprint in Ohio, is a big employer), and he is proud of having mentored workers who struggled with English. Other social challenges he downplays.

“They want to work,” he says. “But they need some help.”

Asked about threats, he says there haven’t been any serious ones. He gets the occasional nasty phone call or text message, and somebody apparently stopped in to ask whether they’re really eating pets behind closed doors. But no bomb threats or anything like that.

As it turns out, our conversation is happening about four hours before city hall will be evacuated over bomb threats. After that, the schools, and then several health-care facilities.

The community center was founded in December after the bus accident, but didn’t open its doors until April, just a few months before J.D. Vance and Donald Trump would make the Haitian community in Springfield a big enough story that you have der Spiegel parachuting in to ask uncomfortable questions about ethnonationalism-tinged right-wing extremism in the United States, transmitting the troubling news back to Hamburg. Weird times, indeed.

But also totally normal ones.

“When there is an influx of people arriving in a specific place, some people will feel threatened,” Dorsainvil says. It’s normal and not necessarily unreasonable. What’s needed? “More ESL classes and interpreters,” he says. “Cross-cultural education, which goes both ways.” Anything else?

“Driving lessons.”

He’s serious about the driving lessons. In Ohio, nobody has to take a driver’s education class to get a license: If you are at least 18 years old and can pass the test, you can drive. And, of course, some people don’t bother with the license at all. Dorsainvil concedes that this is a real flashpoint, that it isn’t a stereotype invented by local bigots who just don’t want Haitians around. Haitian driving culture is different, and Haitians from the poorer and more rural parts of the country may not have driven at all before arriving in Springfield, which gets about 20 inches of snow a year. He’s not surprised that the locals are a little freaked out, and he doesn’t really blame them: A lot of the tensions in Springfield are the result of real things. When people look different from you, don’t speak your language, don’t understand your culture, come from a faraway place with an abysmal reputation, there’s going to be friction. But Vance and Trump aren’t talking about the real things: They are talking about imaginary ravenous fiends for cat-flesh stalking the mean(ish) streets of Springfield.

“That’s the American story: weirdos and geniuses, scoundrels and patriots, pimps and roadside horsemeat dealers and other entrepreneurs of a fancier sort.”
Dorsainvil is one of those guys who believes—naïvely—that elite education in the United States is associated with character formation. He is genuinely surprised that a man with Vance’s educational credentials could be so dishonest or would choose to be. He says the same thing of Trump. “They had almost 48 hours between Vance’s post and when Trump walked onto the debate stage,” he says. “They had enough time to check and see that what they were saying was not true.” I suggest that the most obvious explanation there is that they do not care about what is true and what isn’t, a proposition for which there is abundant evidence. He doesn’t quite respond. Because foreigners often have a better education in American civics than Americans do, he indulges some very old-fashioned language, talking about the United States as a “melting pot” (he doesn’t know it’s supposed to be the “salad bowl” these days) and references E pluribus unum—his English isn’t perfect, but he knows what that Latin means. And he knows that scapegoating a powerless minority group is fundamentally un-American—something of keen interest to a man who would like to have for himself and his family a more American kind of life, and not only when it comes to consumer goods.

“Words are powerful,” he says. “And words from a powerful man are even more powerful.”

But many local institutions and leaders here are a lot less wordy than you’d expect. The city government is worried about getting blamed for this mess. In July, Springfield Mayor Rob Rue and city manager Bryan Heck went on Fox and Friends to talk about the state of affairs in their community, and the clip ended up being: “Ohio city battling housing crisis stemming from Haitian migrant surge.” The mayor has been out front about the cat-eating nonsense, but he’s still in the middle of the mess in a way that must be politically uncomfortable. Vance has made a point of citing Springfield leaders in his disquisitions on the situation, but local organizations such as the Greater Springfield Partnership are currently practicing omerta and won’t even talk to media about ordinary stuff such as the general state of Springfield’s economy or business environment.

(“No comment,” says the terrified-sounding woman answering the phones at the Greater Springfield Partnership. On anything? “No comment.”)

Even accounting for the native cowardice of the public-sector and public-sector-adjacent functionary, this is a sign of dysfunction—and it is dangerous in its own right. Somebody is going to flood the zone: either with information, misinformation, or disinformation. The zone is going to get inundated, for sure. The less people are willing to be forthright and voluminous about what is really happening, the more opportunity it creates for propaganda merchants, demagogues, social-media trolls, and conspiracy kooks—two of whom have a pretty good chance of becoming president and vice president in November. And they are really, really miffed that people think that they—with their kitty-carpaccio fantasies—are weird.

Words are powerful. Words from powerful people are more powerful still. And the silence of the powerful is powerful, too.

As of this writing, Springfield’s schools had been closed for two days in a row—bomb threats. City hall was evacuated—bomb threat. Other municipal buildings—bomb threats. An elementary school—bomb threat. Two medical centers—bomb threats. Meanwhile, Donald Trump is on Truth Social posting images of kittens holding a sign reading: “Don’t let them eat us, vote for Trump!”

Do you know the most important word in that sentence? Them.

At the end of my time in Springfield, I turn around and head back into the mountains, taking a different route toward the south, moving in the direction opposite from the ghosts of J.D. Vance’s ancestors, eternally marching the other way. In West Virginia, I think of John Brown—hanged on the other side of the state at Charles Town—and his last words, not the famous summation of his life and his jihad but what he said when he was led up onto the scaffold, where he could take in the view: “This is a beautiful country. I did not have the chance to see it before.”

And it is a beautiful country. But one of the little ironies of life that you really come to appreciate wandering around Appalachia after some time in Springfield, Ohio, is that the things that make a place quaint or unspoiled are also the things that make the people there poor, while the engines of human flourishing bellow black smoke, spoil the view, take the tops off the mountains. There is a price to pay for everything, for prosperity most of all.

When J.D. Vance’s hillbilly antecedents came pouring out of the Appalachian mountains into the factory towns of Ohio, they were looking for jobs and a decent standard of living. They were leaving something behind—something they loved but couldn’t live with. Vance knows all about that: He wrote an interesting and moving book on the subject of moving on. He is an intelligent and energetic man: If he had been born in Haiti, he’d have made it to Ohio a long time ago, and he surely would be thriving there.

Some of these Haitian newcomers are going to send their children to Ohio State, the Marine Corps, and Yale Law, too. Some of them will end up in Silicon Valley and Wall Street and, bless their hearts, in elected office. Donald Trump is the grandson of one of those German immigrants, the man who started building the Trump fortune—and the Trump reputation—by operating a whorehouse in a Yukon mining town and a restaurant that did not serve kitty kebabs but did offer freshly slaughtered horse meat. Young Ewan, Mirabel, and Vivek Vance are the grandchildren of immigrants, too. That’s the American story: weirdos and geniuses, scoundrels and patriots, pimps and roadside horsemeat dealers and other entrepreneurs of a fancier sort. J.D. Vance made good, but the upstanding people of Ohio were not offering three cheers for the Vances when they hauled his mother off to the pokey. The Haitians are no doubt a mixed bag. So were the Irish.

But I wonder if Vance thinks about his ancestors in terms of anything other than book sales and political posturing. Because his life as a politician is very difficult to fit with their hillbilly lives as the Haitians of their time, endless parallels right down to the tales of eating animals not meant for eating. Very few of those internal economic refugees from Appalachia had any sense of themselves as participants in some great historical happening. They were not marching out of the shadows and into the light, toward the sunlit uplands of history, but simply trying to make a living. Vance, with the benefit of his admirable education, can take a longer and wider view. He knows precisely what he is doing: He is marching back into the shadows in search of something ghastly but fascinating.

Vance has turned Solzhenitsyn’s maxim on its head: “Let the lie come into the world, but only through me, and only if I get something good out of it.” A man who is not suffering from whatever disease of the soul with which Vance is afflicted would have a hard time even imagining wanting to be vice president—of all petty things!—that bad. A different and better sort of man would understand that bearing false witness against 15,000 poor and vulnerable people in the pursuit of political power is the same as bearing false witness against anybody else.

But I’ll give Vance the last word. Here he is on Twitter, back when Twitter was Twitter and J.D. Vance was J.D. Vance: “Trump makes people I care about afraid. Immigrants, Muslims, etc. Because of this, I find him reprehensible. God wants better of us.”

[a fan]

How many of our remaining residual force in Syria have been "picked off" ?

Like you notice. Or care.

Let me guess.....you think these deaths and casualties "don't count".

https://www.military.com/daily-news/202 ... -says.html

The Kurds are still safe, holding the oil fields, & guarding thousands of IS prisoners.

That's odd. You told us ISIS was wiped out. What happened?

The proposed residual force for Bagram was 2500.

So your new idea of "withdrawing from Afghanistan" is to...... add 500 more troops???

Now we have another word you don't understand. First it was socialism, now it's "withdrawal".

So Biden "did it wrong".....and when I ask how you'd leave Afghanistan more efficiently, your answer is, "I'd add 500 troops".

Brilliant answer. Congratulations, not only have you failed the Grad Seminar, the school yanked your undergrad degree.

[a fan]

...afan is still celebrating it as the most awesome airlift ever.

How many died there in 2022, 23, and 24? You need help with the math?

So yep, it's better than your plan, where you want a dozen US deaths per year until the end of time.

But please, tell the class how those dozen deaths per year don't count, or don't matter.

Come on, give us a swell excuse as to how those 12 deaths per year are better than zero.

I'll wait.

You're ability to keep Americans alive is lacking. If you were in charge, we'd still be fighting in Vietnam.

[jhu72]

Scientific American has for the second time in its 179 year history backed a presidential candidate.

[Seacoaster(1)]

More from JD's putrid mouth:

https://x.com/harris_wins/status/1835802841769783595

[Seacoaster(1)]

Esper:

https://x.com/LyingWrongAgain/status/18 ... 5602378785