Sunday was Pearl Harbor Day, so it feels fitting to give a shoutout to the Ace of Aces, a legendary dubya-dubya-eye-eye pilot whose obit shared the front page with news of the Hiroshima bombing. His name? Dick Bong, leading to the (now) hilarious headline:
"Jet plane explosion kills Major Bong, Top U.S. Ace."
In this post-9/11 world of heavy, unironic patriotism, I think we could all stand to remember that there was a time in our history when we revered Major Dick Bong.
Monday, December 8, 2008
Monday, December 1, 2008
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Thought for the Day:
Fuck Chuck Klosterman.
Dear Chuck,
About GNR: if you like GNR, when you hear an awesome GNR song, you don't immediately shove three fingers up your butt and use your other hand to write a long-winded review of the album. Acceptable alternatives to the Klosterfuck?
1. Drink Heavily
2. Air Guitar
3. Uh, Drink Heavily?
(If you must meta-appreciate, play Sweet Child of Mine on Guitar Hero or watch Heavy Metal Parking Lot. Work in #1-3 as circumstances permit.)
If Axl Rose is who you say he is, I hope the two of you meet in a dark alley someday and engage in a loving 69 of forward-looking musical/critical insecurity. Maybe have John Woo nearby to release some pigeons at the moment of climax. You know, for gravitas.
Chuck Klosterman: History's Greatest Monster?
"At this juncture in history, rocking is not enough."
FUCK. YOU.
Dear Chuck,
About GNR: if you like GNR, when you hear an awesome GNR song, you don't immediately shove three fingers up your butt and use your other hand to write a long-winded review of the album. Acceptable alternatives to the Klosterfuck?
1. Drink Heavily
2. Air Guitar
3. Uh, Drink Heavily?
(If you must meta-appreciate, play Sweet Child of Mine on Guitar Hero or watch Heavy Metal Parking Lot. Work in #1-3 as circumstances permit.)
If Axl Rose is who you say he is, I hope the two of you meet in a dark alley someday and engage in a loving 69 of forward-looking musical/critical insecurity. Maybe have John Woo nearby to release some pigeons at the moment of climax. You know, for gravitas.
Chuck Klosterman: History's Greatest Monster?
"At this juncture in history, rocking is not enough."
FUCK. YOU.
Monday, November 17, 2008
Repeal Prop 8!
... so members of the 1985 Rams can get married.
You know, I could write more jokes, but they would just distract you from the homoerotic glory that is THIS:
You know, I could write more jokes, but they would just distract you from the homoerotic glory that is THIS:
Monday, November 10, 2008
Fuck Joe Lieberman
Seriously, fuck that guy.
For those of you who haven't been keeping up on the Saga of Lieberman, he endorsed John McCain on December 17th, 2007. If you're keeping score, that was way before McCain even looked like he had a shot at winning, which I guess means that Lieberman had the courage of his convictions. Chief among those convictions is that we shouldn't be backing out of our hideously tragic, financially ruinous war with Iraq. I'm sure Joe has his reasons, but no matter what your premises you should never be able to argue yourself into putting your penis in a blender, much less keeping it there once you've punched the "liquify" button.
So Joe, lover of national-dick-in-blender foreign policy, gave a speech at the GOP convention, hurled a lot of slime at Barack Obama, and skulked around in the background during McCain's concession speech. In other words, he chose poorly.
Now he's trying to mend fences, and hopefully continue to drape his saggy posterior over the chairmanship of the Homeland Security and Government Affairs committee. Barack Obama has appealed for a less vindictive solution that keeps Lieberman in the Democratic Caucus, and Harry Reid is in talks with Benedict Joe. As Kos points out, there are essentially three outcomes for Joe:
1. No comeuppance--Joe keeps his chair, keeps his seniority, gets to pick Harry Reid's nose.
2. Some comeuppance--Joe loses his chair, keeps his seniority, has a good sulk before the new congress convenes.
3. Maximum comeuppance--Joe loses his chair, loses his seniority, is dragged down 1-95 by a sled team of cannibals.
Joe, with typical prescience, has indicated that everything except option 1 is unacceptable. That's essentially the equivalent of putting all your money on "Harry Reid is a wuss. D'you hear that Harry, you big wuss?!" Unfortunately, Lieberman's bargaining position is highly dubious. With an absolute majority short of 59 seats in the Senate, the Democrats need for a little Joementum has never been less acute. Of course, Joe has the weapon of last resort: he can hitch his wagon to the party that's compared BHO's volunteer corps to Soviet forced labor practices and the Holocaust. Oh, and let's not forget the incoherent GOP ravings about some sort of Obama-sponsored Marxist gestapo.
Yeah, that'll get him re-elected.
There is an alternate possibility. I'm sure Rahm Emanuel is pulling for option 3, possibly in the hopes of rustling up a replacement finger. Barack Obama may be burnishing his huggy bipartisan credentials while encouraging Reid to hang Lieberman out to dry. When Lieberman eventually walks the plank, Obama can be gravely disappointed while acknowledging the legislature's right to police its own. Reid gets a much-needed spinal graft, Obama isn't seen as vindictive, and Joe Lieberman and Ted Stevens can give each other reacharounds in hell.
For those of you who haven't been keeping up on the Saga of Lieberman, he endorsed John McCain on December 17th, 2007. If you're keeping score, that was way before McCain even looked like he had a shot at winning, which I guess means that Lieberman had the courage of his convictions. Chief among those convictions is that we shouldn't be backing out of our hideously tragic, financially ruinous war with Iraq. I'm sure Joe has his reasons, but no matter what your premises you should never be able to argue yourself into putting your penis in a blender, much less keeping it there once you've punched the "liquify" button.
So Joe, lover of national-dick-in-blender foreign policy, gave a speech at the GOP convention, hurled a lot of slime at Barack Obama, and skulked around in the background during McCain's concession speech. In other words, he chose poorly.
Now he's trying to mend fences, and hopefully continue to drape his saggy posterior over the chairmanship of the Homeland Security and Government Affairs committee. Barack Obama has appealed for a less vindictive solution that keeps Lieberman in the Democratic Caucus, and Harry Reid is in talks with Benedict Joe. As Kos points out, there are essentially three outcomes for Joe:
1. No comeuppance--Joe keeps his chair, keeps his seniority, gets to pick Harry Reid's nose.
2. Some comeuppance--Joe loses his chair, keeps his seniority, has a good sulk before the new congress convenes.
3. Maximum comeuppance--Joe loses his chair, loses his seniority, is dragged down 1-95 by a sled team of cannibals.
Joe, with typical prescience, has indicated that everything except option 1 is unacceptable. That's essentially the equivalent of putting all your money on "Harry Reid is a wuss. D'you hear that Harry, you big wuss?!" Unfortunately, Lieberman's bargaining position is highly dubious. With an absolute majority short of 59 seats in the Senate, the Democrats need for a little Joementum has never been less acute. Of course, Joe has the weapon of last resort: he can hitch his wagon to the party that's compared BHO's volunteer corps to Soviet forced labor practices and the Holocaust. Oh, and let's not forget the incoherent GOP ravings about some sort of Obama-sponsored Marxist gestapo.
Yeah, that'll get him re-elected.
There is an alternate possibility. I'm sure Rahm Emanuel is pulling for option 3, possibly in the hopes of rustling up a replacement finger. Barack Obama may be burnishing his huggy bipartisan credentials while encouraging Reid to hang Lieberman out to dry. When Lieberman eventually walks the plank, Obama can be gravely disappointed while acknowledging the legislature's right to police its own. Reid gets a much-needed spinal graft, Obama isn't seen as vindictive, and Joe Lieberman and Ted Stevens can give each other reacharounds in hell.
Friday, November 7, 2008
Strategy and Tactics
One of the recurring notes throughout this campaign has been the invocation of jargon like "strategy" and "tactics" as a way to establish foreign policy chops. John McCain attempted to do this during a presidential debate when he asserted that "Senator Obama doesn't know the difference between a strategy and a tactic." It would've been a real zinger if he hadn't thereby implied that THE SURGE was a strategy.
You can think of any large-scale military endeavor on a couple of levels. First, there are the minutiae of combat: how do I kill those guys 300m away using the capabilities I have at my disposal? You can expand the lens of tactics to larger scale considerations as well, including securing an area so that supplies can move freely, and so on and so forth.
We can conceptualize a strategy as a plan for victory. A solid strategy contains an internal logic that propels it toward the accepted definition of victory for the current conflict. Because of its broad nature, a strategy influences decision making at many levels, from battlefield tactics to logistics.
This is all a little arcane, so let's take a look at these concepts in (hot, napalm-y) action: the Vietnam War. General Westmoreland implemented a strategy of attrition according to which the massive US military machine would be used to drive up costs on the North Vietnamese until they decided "fuck it, this communism shit just isn't worth it" and leave South Vietnam alone. Victory! All of the horrors of the war were to some extent connected by this strategy. Everything from the Rolling Thunder campaigns to free fire zones, from kill counts to My Lai could be seen in the context of a war of attrition. It didn't really matter who you killed, because murdering the fuck out of anyone would make life worse for the North Vietnamese. Anyway, you can see that the strategy was driving the tactics, and the strategy itself was pointing at a condition that we (mistakenly!) believed would cause N. Vietnam to break off hostilities.
As an aside, much like strategic bombing campaigns, these "morale breakers" didn't really work. When you slaughter the fuck out of someone's village, the survivors are A) completely dependent on the government and B) hate you with the fire of a thousand suns because you just destroyed their livelihood and their family. When there's a ready-made national unification movement for them to hitch their wagon to, things tend not to go so well for you.
Anyway, Iraq is a bit atypical because we have no clear idea of what victory looks like. Yes, we'd like it to be fully democratic, pluralist and free, but it's a bit unclear how we use the Marines to do that. The problem is that the internal logic of our occupation was a bit weak. To wit:
1. Topple Saddam.
2. ...
3. Democracy!
There's obviously no purely military solution to our problems in Iraq, but we can understand the Surge (tm) as part of a unified political and military strategy to allow national reconciliation. The problem is, that with the election coming up relatively soon after the Surge was announced and the Iraq War, the President and the GOP deeply unpopular in the United States, the incentive structure for Maliki was, shall we say, skewed. Did pissing on fires all over Iraq give us any increased leverage over Maliki that might lead him to share power with the other factions in Iraq? Probably not. On the other hand it definitely improved the optics of the Iraq War at home in the United States, enabling John McCain to run on the "Surge=Victory" platform and eventually make it to a debate in which he idiotically called out his opponent for not knowing the difference between a strategy and a tactic.
On a larger scale, the problem with the Surge is simple. If I were a betting man in Maliki's shoes, and some unpopular lame duck came to me and said "I'm going to fill your country with soldiers, calm shit down and suchlike and in the meantime I want you to make nice with these other factions." My answer would be "Sure thing, Hoss! How much longer will you be running things over there?" Then, immediately after our conversation I'd set about entrenching myself in power and building alliances with people who share my interests so that once he's quenched the fires with American blood and gone home, I would be in a position to outmaneuver my rivals and run the country as I saw fit.
Obviously, the situation is a good deal more complicated than that, and I'm not sure exactly how it will play out in '09 and '10. I am prepared to offer the following bit of sound tactical advice to the readership: don't turn into a snake. It never helps.
You can think of any large-scale military endeavor on a couple of levels. First, there are the minutiae of combat: how do I kill those guys 300m away using the capabilities I have at my disposal? You can expand the lens of tactics to larger scale considerations as well, including securing an area so that supplies can move freely, and so on and so forth.
We can conceptualize a strategy as a plan for victory. A solid strategy contains an internal logic that propels it toward the accepted definition of victory for the current conflict. Because of its broad nature, a strategy influences decision making at many levels, from battlefield tactics to logistics.
This is all a little arcane, so let's take a look at these concepts in (hot, napalm-y) action: the Vietnam War. General Westmoreland implemented a strategy of attrition according to which the massive US military machine would be used to drive up costs on the North Vietnamese until they decided "fuck it, this communism shit just isn't worth it" and leave South Vietnam alone. Victory! All of the horrors of the war were to some extent connected by this strategy. Everything from the Rolling Thunder campaigns to free fire zones, from kill counts to My Lai could be seen in the context of a war of attrition. It didn't really matter who you killed, because murdering the fuck out of anyone would make life worse for the North Vietnamese. Anyway, you can see that the strategy was driving the tactics, and the strategy itself was pointing at a condition that we (mistakenly!) believed would cause N. Vietnam to break off hostilities.
As an aside, much like strategic bombing campaigns, these "morale breakers" didn't really work. When you slaughter the fuck out of someone's village, the survivors are A) completely dependent on the government and B) hate you with the fire of a thousand suns because you just destroyed their livelihood and their family. When there's a ready-made national unification movement for them to hitch their wagon to, things tend not to go so well for you.
Anyway, Iraq is a bit atypical because we have no clear idea of what victory looks like. Yes, we'd like it to be fully democratic, pluralist and free, but it's a bit unclear how we use the Marines to do that. The problem is that the internal logic of our occupation was a bit weak. To wit:
1. Topple Saddam.
2. ...
3. Democracy!
There's obviously no purely military solution to our problems in Iraq, but we can understand the Surge (tm) as part of a unified political and military strategy to allow national reconciliation. The problem is, that with the election coming up relatively soon after the Surge was announced and the Iraq War, the President and the GOP deeply unpopular in the United States, the incentive structure for Maliki was, shall we say, skewed. Did pissing on fires all over Iraq give us any increased leverage over Maliki that might lead him to share power with the other factions in Iraq? Probably not. On the other hand it definitely improved the optics of the Iraq War at home in the United States, enabling John McCain to run on the "Surge=Victory" platform and eventually make it to a debate in which he idiotically called out his opponent for not knowing the difference between a strategy and a tactic.
On a larger scale, the problem with the Surge is simple. If I were a betting man in Maliki's shoes, and some unpopular lame duck came to me and said "I'm going to fill your country with soldiers, calm shit down and suchlike and in the meantime I want you to make nice with these other factions." My answer would be "Sure thing, Hoss! How much longer will you be running things over there?" Then, immediately after our conversation I'd set about entrenching myself in power and building alliances with people who share my interests so that once he's quenched the fires with American blood and gone home, I would be in a position to outmaneuver my rivals and run the country as I saw fit.
Obviously, the situation is a good deal more complicated than that, and I'm not sure exactly how it will play out in '09 and '10. I am prepared to offer the following bit of sound tactical advice to the readership: don't turn into a snake. It never helps.
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
The Utley Award
So, Newsweek has had this "Special Election Project" running for some time, where reporters were embedded with the campaigns and their reports embargoed until after election day. They seem to have unearthed some gems, including this one from our 44th President:
So when Brian Williams is asking me about what's a personal thing that you've done [that's green], and I say, you know, "Well, I planted a bunch of trees." And he says, "I'm talking about personal." What I'm thinking in my head is, "Well, the truth is, Brian, we can't solve global warming because I fucking changed light bulbs in my house. It's because of something collective."
Collective, eh? Socialismo o Muerte! Seriously though, I'm very happy this guy is going to the White House. So on behalf of all of use at FTB, I'd like to congratulate Barack Obama for being the first recipient of the Chase Utley Award for Excellence in Dropping the F-Bomb.
So when Brian Williams is asking me about what's a personal thing that you've done [that's green], and I say, you know, "Well, I planted a bunch of trees." And he says, "I'm talking about personal." What I'm thinking in my head is, "Well, the truth is, Brian, we can't solve global warming because I fucking changed light bulbs in my house. It's because of something collective."
Collective, eh? Socialismo o Muerte! Seriously though, I'm very happy this guy is going to the White House. So on behalf of all of use at FTB, I'd like to congratulate Barack Obama for being the first recipient of the Chase Utley Award for Excellence in Dropping the F-Bomb.
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