The Republican side of the House being sworn in. They’re like leftover instant mashed potatoes in the fridge: white, cold, weirdly uniform, and way too easy to stir.
Thursday’s House speaker vote and opening of the 116th Congress set up a striking visual moment in the lower chamber: On Democrats’ side of the aisle, a historically diverse class of women and people of color were clad in bright outfits as they were sworn in, while on the Republican side, a relatively homogeneous group of mostly white men wore nearly identical dark suits.
The Democrat side of the House being sworn in. A little bit of this, a little bit of that, and much closer to the American ideal.
Great googley moogley! There are times when you have to express strong emotions and still stay family-friendly; that’s when this chart will come in handy.
A country rarely fights the same war twice in one generation, especially from opposite sides. Yet that in many ways describes the U.S. role in Afghanistan today. In the 1980s, the Central Intelligence Agency, working from a safe haven in Pakistan, engineered the largest covert operation in its history to help defeat the Soviet 40th Red Army in Afghanistan. Today, the United States is fighting a Taliban-led insurgency in Afghanistan that operates from a safe haven in Pakistan. Many suggest that the outcome will be the same for the United States as it was for the Soviet Union—ultimate defeat at the hands of the insurgency.
This is the kind of claptrap that you’d expect from an academic institution — the kind where they’re indoctrinating our fine young people into snowflake social justice warrior libtards. “Where’d you find this garbage,” you ask?
It turns out that the institution in question is the United States Military Academy, which you might know better through its colloquial name: West Point.
“Russia used to be the Soviet Union. Afghanistan made it Russia because they went bankrupt fighting in Afghanistan. Russia. So you take a look at other countries. Pakistan is there. They should be fighting.”
“But Russia should be fighting. The reason Russia was in, in Afghanistan was because terrorists were going into Russia. They were right to be there. The problem is it was a tough fight. And literally they went bankrupt. They went into being called Russia again as opposed to the Soviet Union.”
It is now understood that Moscow blundered into Afghanistan with little appreciation of the difficulties it would face. Its goal was to shore up a communist regime that was on the edge of collapse in the face of a national uprising. The Soviet leadership wanted an Afghanistan that would be similar to other Soviet satellite states and under virtual Soviet imperial rule with only the façade of independence. The Soviets may also have had ambitions to use Afghanistan as a base to project authority further south.
From the point of view of the United States, the Afghans weren’t terrorists, but freedom fighters. The essay said so in its first paragraph (see the top of this article) — they were assisted covertly by the CIA.
The Great Communicator, Ronald Reagan, was all for the Afghan freedom fighters. If you don’t believe me, believe this video, in which he dedicated the 1982 launch of the space shuttle Columbia to them:
Is it me, or is the Afghan kid with the gun at the start of video saying “Durka durka durka”, just like in Team America: World Police?
And if you find history lessons boring, you can always learn a dramatized verson of it by renting the 2007 Tom Hanks film, Charlie Wilson’s War, on Amazon Prime:
