Max Boot, feelin’ full of pith n’ vinegar. Again.
Back in the day, when invading other countries first began to seem like a good idea to some people, Max Boot rushed to the very front of the queue o’ stupidity by opining that “Afghanistan and other troubled lands cry out for the sort of enlightened administration once provided by self-confident Englishman in jodhpurs and pith helmets”. In my review of Max’s semi apologia, The Corrosion of Conservatism, Max tried to “explain” that he knows he went too far, but it’s clear that he doesn’t, for just last week he was doubling redoubled racism by “explaining” that the U.S. needs to be in Afghanistan for, oh, another century or two (or three): “These kinds of deployments are invariably lengthy and frustrating. Think of our Indian Wars, which lasted roughly 300 years (circa 1600-1890), or the British deployment on the North West Frontier (today’s Pakistan-Afghanistan border), which lasted 100 years (1840s-1940s).”
The stupidity of that remark, which surpassed even that of the first one, generated enough blowback to penetrate—by several millimeters—Max’s otherwise impenetrable brainpan. Affecting the bemused tone of many pundits who have put their foot in it (“Since everyone is criticizing me, I must have done something right”), in his latest column he explains that just because he spoke approvingly of deeply racist—at times, even explicitly genocidal—wars of European aggression and exploitation against “troubled lands” (who weren’t all that “troubled” until the Europeans showed up), and indeed wants to see similar wars pursued for another century or so, doesn’t mean that, well, doesn’t mean that he meant what he said. He meant something else.
But Max did mean this: We can’t trust the Afghans (and, quite possibly, the Venezuelans, and the Syrians, and the Iraqis, and the Iranians) to run their country in a way suitable to us, so we will run it for them, indefinitely. It doesn’t matter how many “natives” die, how completely we turn their country upside down and bring want and suffering to millions of innocent people. What matters is us, and only us, because we are the only ones who count. As long as we are “happy”, that is all that matters.
Ann Coulter, last seen beating her breast mightily
Ann Coulter, so pissed at Donald Trump because, I guess, he wasn’t personally running over Honduran babies with a steamroller, sneered that George Herbert Walker Bush was no longer the biggest wimp ever to sit in the Oval Office.
Ann, when Aitch Dubya was 18, he was a carrier pilot in the U.S. Navy. For his heroic service in combat, he was awarded Distinguished Flying Cross and three Air Medals, all awarded by the age of 21. What did you do in the war, girlfriend?
Ann Coulter’s idea of bravery is having her hair done by a new stylist, or appearing at a public event even though she’ll be photographed from her “bad side”. Donald Trump thrilled Ann by turning politics into a species of professional wrestling. He’s broken her heart by revealing to her that it’s all fixed. Ann Coulter is giving blondes a bad name.
