Quotes and Summations of the Summer

BDR:

"I've been saying what Yglesias said - that as shitty as the economy is, our overlords believe (or pretend) it would truly crater without permanent war - I just haven't been saying it approvingly."

Commenting upon:

"...But there's something wrong -- something sick, really -- with Ygelsias' war-as-stimulus argument that strikes me as far more offensive than the fact that some fiscal conservatives are hypocrites when it comes to the National Security State. If you believe the war in Afghanistan is vital to protecting America, well, go ahead and make your case. Explain why pushing the couple dozen or so members of al-Qaeda allegedly still in the country over to Pakistan, while creating new enemies with each errant air strike, actually makes us safer.

What you shouldn't do in a debate over war, at least if you want to maintain your status as a Non-Despicable Person, is argue that bombing and occupying a foreign nation makes good economic sense. Even if it were true as an academic point, it's grotesquely out of place in a discussion of matters of life and death. War, if it can ever be justified -- and I have my doubts -- can only be so on the grounds that it is absolutely necessary to protecting human life: there is no other choice, it's a last resort. Yet Yglesias discusses the continuation of a major, bloody armed conflict as if it were just another jobs program; perhaps not the most effective one to his mind, but hey, it's better that the federal government spend money on a pointless war than do nothing at all (like actually save money by ending said pointless war). Read the line again: "I believe that with the economy depressed it’s better to spend the money in Afghanistan than not to spend it." Sorry, but someone truly familiar with all the horrors of war, someone who could actually empathize with an Afghan mother or father losing their child to an American smart bomb -- or a child watching their parents die in a botched night raid by U.S. marines -- could never write that...."

From Charles Davis.

Again, Yggie provides the really low hanging fruit. But that doesn't change the observable data. A monster, that twit. An actual monster. Not on par with his beloved Imperial Barack, or with the man he loved to hate, George Junior. But, the sort of court sycophant who spends the entirety of his existence trying to pretty up the ignoble and heinous choices of his betters, his face covered in lickspittle, his mind long colonized by devotion to power.

Had I Calvinist bone in my body, I'd rest assured that Yggie had an eternity of torment awaiting him. Alas, no religion in me. So, perhaps the non-existent fates and Furies can settle that score.