Never known a time without war

The nasty guy seems to believe that Iran tossing missiles at a couple US military bases in Iraq and avoiding fatalities was their whole response to his assassination of their top military leader. I’ve heard that Iran has lots of other ways to retaliate.

So was war averted? At the moment, who can tell?

Philip Bump of the Washington Post created a pie chart for each year since 1905 (when Hester Ford, the oldest currently living American, was born). The chart shows what percent of the lifetime of someone born that year the US has been at war. Right off – for anyone born 2001 or after it is 100%. Those born about the time the Afghanistan War began are now old enough to fight in it. Nearly a quarter of Americans have never known a time without war.

We’ve been at war for 35% of Hester Ford’s life. We’ve been at war for 45% of my life.

For this chart Bump didn’t include minor skirmishes, like the invasion of Panama or Grenada. He limited the definition to declared wars: WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam, Gulf War, and Afghanistan.

Bump notes that the Afghanistan war does not feel as immediate as WWII (the sheer scale of it) and Vietnam (when the draft sent men to death and TV brought war to our living rooms).

Which is why it’s worth noting that the conflict continues nonetheless. War isn’t — or shouldn’t be — just an ongoing presence in the background, something that’s simply there over the course of our lives. For most of those 78 million Americans, though, that’s exactly what it has been.

Bill in Portland, Maine, who writes a weekday Cheers and Jeers column for Daily Kos, reminds us and tries to remind the media that during the last unnecessary war who got it right? The liberals did. So as we face another unnecessary war listen to them.

The liberals knew there were no WMDs in Iraq. The liberals knew we were being flat-out lied to. The liberals knew we'd win the war and lose the peace. The liberals knew every propaganda tactic the conservatives threw at us, up to and including planting a male hooker in the White House press corps to toss out softball questions, and passing off staged news conferences as actual news stories. The liberals followed the mountains of money being bulldozed to the coffers of incompetent private “reconstruction” companies run by Republican cronies. And we knew the real death toll.

We nailed the Iraq War fraud. The beforehand, the duringhand, the afterhand.
...
The credible voices still come from Dirty Liberal Hippie Land. We have the best bullshit detectors, and the best memories. Full stop.

Kerry Eleveld, also of Daily Kos sees one bid difference between the war the nasty guy seems to be trying to start and the one Bush II started. Voters already know the nasty guy is a serial liar. He doesn’t get the benefit of the doubt – at least not from citizens (news outlets are another matter).

The Daily Kos quote from last Friday:

Have we raised the threshold of horror so high that nothing short of a nuclear strike qualifies as a 'real' war? Are we to spend the rest of our lives in this state of high alert with guns pointed at each other's heads and fingers trembling on the trigger?
~~Arundhati Roy

As part of a longer discussion of the nasty guy Propane Jane tweeted:

We’ve reached the moment where we don’t just need to be in the streets clamoring for Trump’s removal b/c he’s unfit, corrupt and incompetent, but because dissociating ourselves from him is necessary for our collective safety and survival. The world needs to see us apart from him.

There were lots of protests last Saturday (images here). More today, and I hope they went well. I wasn’t a part of them this time, though I’ve been a part of protests several times over the last three years.

One of my favorite comic strips was Calvin and Hobbes which ended 24 years ago (my sisters know well that another favorite was Peanuts). I was delighted to learn there is a Calvin and Hobbes Twitter account, which is now posting some of the old strips. I learned this when someone linked to a strip that is excellent commentary of this past week. So I’ll let Calvin and Hobbes have the last word on today’s discussion of war. Click here and here (though you may have to click on the image to see the full text).