Outside the Beltway

Comments

1. charontwo says:
   Sunday, 22 March 2026 at 08:48

   The Trump regime way of waging its holy war:

   “NYT Gift”

   Excerpts:

   And yet, as I watched a video posted by the White House in which a group of angry, rifle-wielding bowling pins labeled “Iranian Regime Officials” are struck by a Stars and Stripes bowling ball that turns into an airplane, followed by actual combat footage of U.S. airstrikes, I realized how one rationale for this war has remained clear and consistent: the administration’s delight in displays of violence and domination.

   The bowling video is one of many sizzle reels posted on White House social media accounts celebrating the war by mixing images of death and destruction with footage from video games or sports highlights. The president declared that military officials told him “it’s more fun to sink” ships than to capture them, and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth exulted, “We are punching them while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be.” The Trump aide Stephen Miller proclaimed that the Iran war showcased a military “that isn’t fighting with its hands tied behind its back.”

   At another news conference, Mr. Hegseth made the macho posturing even clearer: “No stupid rules of engagement, no nation building quagmire, no democracy building exercise, no politically correct wars.”

   The men who want to Make America Great Again are searching for a clean break from the Global War on Terror. That conflict was launched with lofty rhetoric about democracy and freedom but led to years of civil war, chaos, swollen ranks of terror groups, genocide, a refugee crisis and, in Afghanistan, a complete, humiliating failure. What these men don’t seem to realize, or care about, is that their language of brute force represents a fundamental break with American traditions around war going back to the Revolution.

   Boastful talk about slaughter is as old as war itself. “The wheels of my war chariot,” bragged one Assyrian king, “were bespattered with filth and blood. With the bodies of their warriors, I filled the plain, like grass.” But America’s founders asserted universal principles that should make such an attitude unthinkable. If you believe not only that all men are created equal but also that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, then war cannot be justified as a pure display of power and dominance.

   In his addresses to the troops, George Washington would bring up the imagery of violence not as a spectacle to be enjoyed but as horrors to be endured — from “mercenary hirelings fighting in the cause of lawless ambition, rapine and devastation” to those who wished to keep revolutionary America in “bondage and misery.” And when news of British atrocities reached him, Washington wrote that “their wanton cruelty injures rather than benefits their cause; that, with our forbearance, justly secures to us the attachment of all good men.”

   Likewise, Abraham Lincoln carefully used the bully pulpit of the presidency during the Civil War to articulate a firmness of moral purpose that extended beyond the success of military aims and toward an ultimate reconciliation with the South. Instead of bombastic rhetoric, Lincoln suggests in his Second Inaugural Address that God “gives to both North and South this terrible war” as their mutual punishment for the evil of slavery, and declares that they must continue “with malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right.”

   These people are sadists who love war crimeing, see Pete Hegseth call for “no quarter,” see Trump’s history of pardons for military convicted of war crimes. Assholes like Hegseth and Miller are having real fun with this war, enjoying themselves.

   So this is the reputation the U.S. is building for itself.

   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRl6-bHlz-4

   Reply

   2
2. CSK says:
   Sunday, 22 March 2026 at 10:26

   On March 26, my prosthetic leg and I get out of rehab. I’ve been either here or in a hospital since July 11, 2025.

   Reply

   13
3. Gregory Lawrence Brown says:
   Sunday, 22 March 2026 at 10:40

   @CSK:..March 26…

   We are counting the days with you…

   Reply

   3
4. DK says:
   Sunday, 22 March 2026 at 11:09

   To tilt Hungarian election, Russians proposed staging assassination attempt (Washington Post)

   In the run-up to Hungary’s pivotal election in April, a unit of Russia’s foreign intelligence service last month began sounding the alarm over plummeting public support for Prime Minister Viktor Orban, whose friendly ties to Moscow have long given the Kremlin a strategic foothold inside NATO and the European Union.

   Officers from the intelligence service, or SVR, suggested that drastic action might be necessary — a strategy they called “the Gamechanger.” In an internal report for the SVR obtained and authenticated by a European intelligence service and reviewed by The Washington Post, the operatives proposed a way to “fundamentally alter the entire paradigm of the election campaign” — “the staging of an assassination attempt on Viktor Orban.”

   Well it worked pretty well when they did it for Trump, why not try again?

   Reply

   5
5. CSK says:
   Sunday, 22 March 2026 at 11:16

   @Gregory Lawrence Brown:

   Thank you!

   Reply

   2
6. Sleeping Dog says:
   Sunday, 22 March 2026 at 12:09

   A bit of Dr T bait for a Sunday morning

   What Is the Left’s Theory of Power?

   Writing for the blog of the Law and Political Economy Project, Beau Baumann, a professor at the University of Utah’s S.J. Quinney College of Law, has a provocative question for would-be left-wing political reformers: What is your theory of constitutional politics?

   By “constitutional politics,” Baumann means “a movement or coalition’s core claims about who should wield state power and on what terms.”

   TL/DR is that while the MAGAt R’s have settled on authoritarianism that Bauman labels “neo-Bonapartism,” while he feels that the left is bereft of a modern theory of power and what they have is the reheated FDR administrative state, that is being checkmated by the supremes.

   A possible Dem path forward is a renewed and activist Congress, but good luck with that. Dr T has expressed that in the mid-term, he sees our governing future being alternating, rightist-leftist presidencies leaning on authority to get things done (I hope I summarized him accurately). A dim future, indeed.

   Reply

   2
7. Sleeping Dog says:
   Sunday, 22 March 2026 at 12:31

   @CSK:

   Yay!!

   Reply

   2
8. steve222 says:
   Sunday, 22 March 2026 at 14:12

   My nephew and his significant other (SO) visited me yesterday. The SO does logistics for one of our military branches and is fairly high up in the food chain so he communicates directly with military people pretty often. He is too young to remember Desert Storm and he wasn’t particularly politically aware during the Iraq War and most of Afghanistan. I was taken aback when he asked me the following question. “Is the media coverage of what’s going on being censored? Why is it that what I hear from talking with the officers I work with so different from what I see and hear in media?”

   It kind of took me aback but I did try to answer but I am not sure I got it right. I think many people on the right at least partially blame the media and its vivid portrayals of the war as being responsible for the protests and our losing the war. As a result I think the media was pressured into going along with avoiding graphic representations of our wars and avoiding dwelling on our wounded. (I was in the Navy during Vietnam War.) With Desert Storm we very largely avoided anything graphic and much of the war was made to look like video games showing videos of our precision bombing. With both that war and Iraq and Afghanistan reporters were limited on the photos they can show and IIRC they were limited in what they could actually publish. At present, I suspect this is even worse as media need to sign pledges to get access to to some military related info and we know that the major networks have been sued by Trump and false charges have been brought against companies like Anthropic when they disagreed with a military issue.

   So in sum. I told him that I thought we have gone to great lengths to sanitize our wars. Occasional pictures leak through but we rarely get an idea of the total impact. I think this is worse under our current admin.

   Steve

   Reply

   4
9. Gustopher says:
   Sunday, 22 March 2026 at 14:59

   I’ve really enjoyed how “Thank you for your attention to this matter” has become Trump’s closing line on his off-brand tweets. It reminds me of Abe Simpson’s “I am not a crank” closing to his letters to the editor.

   Definitely the best part of this second administration.

   It succinctly says “I am not a man who should be given power, and yet here we are.”

   Reply

   4
10. Kathy says:
    Sunday, 22 March 2026 at 17:20

    Ann Telanes nails it again

    Reply

    1
11. DK says:
    Sunday, 22 March 2026 at 20:32

    @Sleeping Dog: The Democratic Party’s theory of power, politics, and constitutional order:

    “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”

    The right abandoning the constitution for tyranny (and pedophilia) is one reason I and others are no longer Republican. The left need not overcomplicate things in response, the constitution is already there.

    Reply

    2

Speak Your Mind