Hegseth

[Zapranoth]

The secretary of defense for America, who has been thrown out of multiple jobs due to his alcoholism, is responsible for significant cabinet members discussing classified war plans on a private messaging service. Not a classified channel, and what's more, they accidentally added a journalist to this classified discussion and didn't even notice. And then the journalist wrote an article about this entire massive f**k up. And then yesterday, Donald Trump stated several hours after the story broke, that he was unaware of it.

This administration is not serious people, not competent people. They don't value merit or competency. They are not capable of safely looking out for American people. And they aren't even interested.

[Zapranoth]

[I don't care, reverend.  America has turned into the worst kind of bad movie.]

[RCMerchant]

It would be funny if it weren't so scary.

[indianasmith]

Inmates running the asylum.

[LilCerberus]

Eh, the mission went off without a hitch, & Goldberg's (who already has a reputation for lying) not in any trouble for leaking classified info...

[RCMerchant]

It's like watching Shemp Howard trying to iron a pair of pants.

[claws]

Just because a mission went smoothly doesn't mean there wasn't a security breach. And if someone already has a reputation for dishonesty, wouldn't that make leaking classified info even more plausible?

[RCMerchant]

It's like watching a monkey try to fvck a football.

[Trevor]

It's like watching Shemp Howard trying to iron a pair of pants.

😳😅😄😆🤣

[ER]

Ye gods....

I don't often comment on politics but (when I do I drink Dos Equis) things are far more of a mess than has been touched on here. I think there's been a discouraging streak of insanity in American politics and society over the second half of my life.

In 2001 we acquired a president who started a war for no good reason that cost a lot of people I knew their lives, a president who would not be swayed from his tunnel vision of the world no matter what information was presented to him.

Then eight years later Democrats elected what they held to be a messianic figure, who was much more a conman than a master of statescraft, and across the 2010s we watched the fullest manifestations of leftist insanity run amok over the land, with Occupy Wall Street, Defund the Police, the shakedowns associated with Black Lives Matter, the McCarthy-like tyranny of the cancel movement, and the destructiveness of woke culture, before people tired of it and seemed to catch on what a bad joke it was. Under the Obama administration a secretary of state slept through a crisis in North Africa that saw US service personnel butchered like pigs, and who then got rewarded with a chance to run for President.

Sticking to the left side of it all, this was followed in the near future by a doped-up senile old figurehead whose greatest contribution in four years seems to have been putting a price tag on his family's influence. And all that is the tip of the iceberg.

Now we find ourselves back under the gun of an administration run by an egomaniac who thinks it is sound policy to side with a Russian dictator who invaded a number of foreign nations, and remains at war with one of them today. (Yes, Ukraine's leadership is corrupt to the core, but Ukrainians don't deserve to live under a state of war.) We have a president who took classified materials to his Florida vacation home and left them there in violation of federal law, and whose cabinet disregards security protocol and allows sensitive intelligence to leak out to the press. Under him we are seeing the madness of the right getting equal time  the left had in the '10s as books are seized from public libraries and the libraries of schools. We see bizarre accusations of school systems teaching Satanism to kindergarteners. The move to annex unwilling foreign countries? The efforts to rename the world? Highly questionable executive actions used as ex cathedra pronouncements? Placing government in the oligarchical hands of billionaires?

Look, I worked within the government for twenty-five years, since I was seventeen years old, in fact (yes, you read that right), and knew the first time this president was around to keep my mouth shut about him, because I wanted my retirement which was so close at hand, and I was warned that criticism of him was perilous, even if posted on a message board at the ass-crack side of the internet. But, hey, I'm retired, I can mouth off all I want now, and I can shout to the universe that things are a way bigger mess than either hemisphere of the domestic political spectrum seems willing to face as they gripe their way down a road to the sundering of the United States, followed one day not long after by global destruction.

I wish each side would put its own house in order and then go after the other, but that'll never happen. Dark Age 2.0 here we come!

I used to take some cheer from the fact if all else failed in the US I had another country to go to, but things over there are probably even worse these days, reminding me of what my maternal grandmother used to say:

When the world goes completely insane, you'll know the devil finally has control of it.

She meant it literally, I think it makes a good metaphor, but hey, guess what, Grandmother...?

[lester1/2jr]

The content of the chat is fascinating. They seem to understand the whole thing is bs but are committed to doing it anyway. That's what being a "superpower" is. Europe are the ones who had the most skin in the game re ships getting attacked and Israel are the ones who are attacking Gaza, which is the whole reason Yemen are attacking ships (they had stopped in accordance with the ceasefire, which Israel then broke).

Neither Europe or Israel took care of it, though. We did, at our own expense. because we have no backbone whatsoever when it comes to this stuff

[RCMerchant]

It's like-

[Trevor]

It's like-

😳😆😅🤣😂😃😄😃🐢