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atomheartbevo

Certifiably Surly
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Posts posted by atomheartbevo

  1. 12 minutes ago, SpiralOut said:

    And now we see why that other Admiral that was previously in charge of this shit show resigned.  He knew what was coming down the pike and said, yeah, I'm not committing war crimes for you just so you can lay it all at my feet later.  Obviously Bradley was too fucking stupid to take a hint.

    Bradley is going to be in front of Congress next week, so get some popcorn between now and then.

  2. 9 minutes ago, C-Man said:

    I’m Team Silver Jews

    Silver Serpents were a much better band, but they went downhill for a good decade before merging with the Silver Jews to become the Jewish Serpents. Being that they are a prog-rock band based out of St. Paul, they are frequently confused with the Jewish Servants, the prog-rock band from Minneapolis.

  3. 9 minutes ago, chad.ihrig said:

    What the actual fuck?!?

    When your boss goes on social media and says you're an American hero and says he stands by the decisions you made, not the decisions he made and ordered you to carry out, but the decisions you made, well, we know where this ends...

    Animated GIF

    • Hook 'Em 2
  4. Sen. Mark Kelly just OBLITERATED Pete Hegseth - and by extension Trump himself - with one of the most brutal takedowns yet.

    Kelly says Trump put a man in charge of the Pentagon who “runs around on a stage like he’s a 12-year-old playing army.”

    A guy so unserious, so reckless, Kelly literally can’t imagine what our allies think watching this clown pretend to lead the world’s greatest military.

    Hegseth should’ve been fired after SignalGate. He should’ve been fired every single day after that.

     

    salutes jack black GIF

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  5. This administration is nothing but children with vast inferiority complexes

    Publisher condemns 'violent' use of Franklin the Turtle after Pete Hegseth's boat strike post

    The publisher of Franklin the Turtle released a statement Monday condemning the "violent" use of the children’s book character after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth posted an image with the title “Franklin Targets Narco Terrorists.”

    “Franklin the Turtle is a beloved Canadian icon who has inspired generations of children and stands for kindness, empathy, and inclusivity,” the publishing house Kids Can Press wrote in a statement on X.

    “We strongly condemn any denigrating, violent, or unauthorized use of Franklin’s name or image, which directly contradicts these values,” the statement read.

    Chief Defense Department spokesperson Sean Parnell responded to the publisher in a statement, saying: “We doubt Franklin the Turtle wants to be inclusive of drug cartels… or laud the kindness and empathy of narco-terrorists.”

     

    G7HlbzXW0AAZisJ?format=jpg&name=medium

    • Rage+1 1
  6. Fox News is out there defending it, so they've got their orders and it's probably worse than we thought.

    White House confirms second strike against Caribbean drug smugglers | Fox News

    And the headline makes it clear who the scapegoat is: Spec ops chief ordered deadly Caribbean strike ‘in self-defense’ with Hegseth’s sign-off, with this nugget:

    Quote

    The White House said Monday that Hegseth authorized the second strike, but the head of U.S. Special Operations Command, Adm. Frank "Mitch" Bradley, ordered and directed it. At the time of the strike, Bradley was serving as the commander of Joint Special Operations Command, which falls under U.S. Special Operations Command. 

    That's got to make both Hegseth and Bradley paranoid.

    And Bradley is making an appearance in front of Congress next week about the double strike.

    Who is Adm. Frank Bradley, commander who issued second boat strike order

    • Fuck Around and Find Out 3
  7. 24 minutes ago, Tuco said:

    I’m not sure if the Dems win on this. End of the day, there are a lot of Americans who would cheer a President murdering drug runners. Duarte got pretty popular in the Philippines following that path, at least for a while. I think Hegseth is more hiding behind Bradley than throwing him under the bus. Bradley was promoted to this role during Trump’s time; he may be a MAGA believer. If Bradley stands behind the order, then the Dems need to attack Bradley to get to Trump or Hegseth. For the ignorant electorate, it’s easy for MAGA to message that as the left wing radicals attacking the patriotic military in defense of those narcoterrorist drug runners.

    But, as with many battles, it needs to be fought even if you might get hurt.

    The wild card is that most of these people will not go down for each other.

    Hegseth is paranoid and insecure on two levels.  First, he and Trump lost their absolute shit when Kelly and the others put out that video. Called for their execution or prosecution. That is somebody getting caught with their hand in the cookie jar and now we know the cookie jar is Venezuela. Both Trump and Hegseth radiated guilt and Trump put it out there that Hegseth told him whatever he told him, so Trump has put it squarely on Hegseth's head. Hegseth knows MAGA will turn on anybody Trump says to turn on. Hegseth very clearly fears that some officer will go up in front of Congress and testify and that video scared him, and now he's couched the language he's using in reference to these strikes that he and Trump thought were popular. He thought that Franklin Turtle thing was cute, now he realizes it wasn't well-received.

    The second level of insecurity is that Hegseth is still, at heart, an Army major.  Him threatening to do a uniform inspection of Kelly was, as others have said, the most POG thing somebody in Hegseth's position could ever do. That was an Army major who has never held a major command and felt like he was disrespected and by gawd he's going to make the person pay.

    Combine all of this with the fact that every day, Hegseth is surrounded by people who had far superior careers to him and that has to wear on him. Think about it - he makes major and is pushed into the Individual Ready Reserve, which is weird as fuck to me.  He managed to get into the D.C. National Guard but wasn't allowed to participate in Biden's inauguration because of a dumbass tattoo. He only had about 10 years or actual military service, and part of that was National Guard, which great, kudos to him for joining, but at the end of the day, he had a very scattershot career with multiple gaps in service.

    And you can bet plenty of Navy, Marine, Air Force, and probably even some Army senior officers all look down upon for him because his military career seems to have went nowhere, and they will all still think of him as a major that never held a large command and that was jumped up to Secretary of Defense.

    • Hook 'Em 1
  8. 1 minute ago, tx ind said:

    We all know the answer to this.  He’s likely a decent dude and the bullshit was absolutely tearing him up inside.

    Even if he wasn't a decent dude, he probably saw where things were headed and wasn't going to take the fall. It was only a matter of time.

  9. Just now, Firemans4Horn said:

     President has a 38% approval rating and falling, random MRI’s, and doesn’t know what year it is. 

    And doesn't know that he pardoned the President of Honduras who tried to help smuggle 400 tons of cocaine into the US.

    And who was told by Hegseth that the two guys weren't killed, but if they were killed in a second strike, he wouldn't have done the second strike.

    And a surprising number of people don't want war with Venezuela, and this is an off-ramp of sorts for Congress to stop it.

    • Hook 'Em 4
  10. 1 minute ago, tx ind said:

    I’m thinking about leaning towards the fact that they’ve bit off more than they can chew and it will unravel.

    Of Course Yes GIF by PragerU

    None of these people can ultimately trust one another - they'll all burn everybody else before they are caught without a chair when the music stops.

    And I would be willing to bet that they absolutely believed they are right in their actions - I really doubt they spoke with "the best" civilian and military lawyers up and down the chain of command before all of this started. I want to know why that first admiral resigned.

    • Hook 'Em 5
  11. 15 minutes ago, hobbes2702 said:

    Go down meaning what? A cushy job in the private sector?

    Doubtful.  This is shit that ends careers.  Not a good market for former flag officers who lose their rank/end up with felonies on their record, because they are useless. The private sector hires flag officers because flag officers give them access to people or places they want access to.  They wouldn't get that here.

    And Trump and Whiskey Pete will absolutely burn this guy.

    12 minutes ago, HenryJames said:

     

     

    If you're a senior officer, and your boss, the Secretary of Defense, is on social media proclaiming you a hero and telling everybody he's got your back and that you did no wrong....

    Sucks Joel Murray GIF by CBS

     

    • Hook 'Em 4
  12. 29 minutes ago, Bozo_Casanova said:

    Jurassic Park Ian Malcom GIF

     

    "The combat decisions he made".

    The motherfucker was on a ship at sea surrounded by other ships, or back in Florida staring at television monitors. He wasn't in a doorway in Fallujah trying to figure out where sniper fire was coming from so he could save one of his guys who was pinned down.

    • Hook 'Em 5
    • Like 1
    • Rage+1 1
  13. 19 minutes ago, Eskimohorn said:

    "Our current operations in the Caribbean are lawful under both U.S. and international law, with all actions in compliance with the law of armed conflict—and approved by the best military and civilian lawyers, up and down the chain of command.”

    This one is really good, given how carefully the White House Press Secretary was dancing around the issue and trying to push discussion to the Department of Defense today, and how Hegseth's comments today were very carefully worded (while allowing for the possibility of the admiral taking the fall if the heat is too high).

    I fully expected them to come out and say "fuck you, they are combatants who were a threat to Amerka and we had to kill them" but instead they are being extremely cautious with their language.

    The interesting thing is that Trump this weekend said Hegseth told him that it didn't happen (two guys being killed after the boat was blown up) and then the DOD/White House couched their statements in a generic/vanilla way today. If Hegseth lied to Trump, that's a cardinal sin - Trump can lie to anybody at any time, but if you lie to him and he's called out for it, you're in deep shit and out of the trust circle.

    • Hook 'Em 2
  14. 1 hour ago, immamac said:

    I just didn't realize that nearly all the engagement there is fake. 99%+ of engagement here is real. 

    It's extremely high there.  I have been pestering a bunch of the Ukraine/Russia folks I follow to move to BlueSky, and some have, but the problem is that a lot of them have audiences that don't care about/know about BlueSky or don't care about Musk or bots.  Ironic because that area keeps getting flooded with Russian and African bots/trolls given the topics at hand.

    • Like 1
    • Rage+1 1
  15. 42 minutes ago, Chopper said:

    The bots have been used to support an actor's lawsuit so I guess a college football coach employment decision was the next logical step down the sewer.

    It's cheap to pay somebody a thousand bucks (or even less) and have a thousand bots try and drown out a conversation about something. If you are the agent of an athlete or coach or movie star or whatever, you probably have contacts with one or more companies with bot factories that can crank out what's akin to damage control by drowning out certain topics or conversations.

    Doesn't mean it works all the time - college football is firmly entrenched in twitter, and the bots aren't going to drown out the biggest news of the day, which is why we kept seeing those videos of Ole Miss fans swearing at and flipping off Kiffin and Co.

  16. From The Hill:

    The Trump administration has asserted that the U.S. is in a “non-international armed conflict” (NIAC) with “designated terrorist organizations,” as backed up by a classified opinion authored by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which argues that because U.S. troops participating in the strikes are taking orders that are in line with the laws of war, they cannot be prosecuted.

    “But ‘NIAC’ is a legal term of art which requires certain facts that are not met here,” said Sarah Harrison, a senior analyst at the International Crisis Group. “That means the law of war is not applicable and thus these are not war crimes, but rather murders or extrajudicial killings.”

    Harrison, who is a former associate general counsel at the Department of Defense (DOD), argued what is “distinctly disturbing” about the Sept. 2 strikes is that even with the U.S. not being engaged in a war with drug traffickers, the DOD is “operating under the assumption” that it is and is “claiming it is applying the law of war.”

    “But every officer and enlisted is trained to know that it is a textbook war crime to execute individuals who are ‘hors de combat’ or ‘out of the fight,’” Harrison told The Hill on Monday. “That no one down the chain of command refused this patently illegal order is shocking and sheds more light on the breakdown of the rule of law within DOD under the leadership of Secretary Hegseth.”

    —————

    Since they mentioned Navy SEALS, I would not be surprised if the admiral gave the team the orders directly, so there isn’t much of a chain of command.

    Whiskey Pete does appear to be looking for a scapegoat so he knows how serious this is.

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