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Zambero
(8,979 posts)Hopefully, this realization will also be his undoing come November.
zebonaut
(3,688 posts)uhnope
(6,419 posts)where a president can arbitrarily decide to do such things as drop a nuclear bomb.
North Korea--probably. Russia? maybe
silvershadow
(10,336 posts)R. Daneel Olivaw
(12,606 posts)They're not dumb, and if there ever was a reckless president, that for whatever reason brought us close to the nuclear option...that both parties despise but did not remove, I believe that the military would not allow armageddon and would remove said POTUS.
uhnope
(6,419 posts)
I guess someone has a crystal ball, or something.
Ned_Devine
(3,146 posts)
newthinking
(3,982 posts)this is a concern with both frontrunners.
Hillary brought in Victoria Nuland as assistant SOS (NeoCon and wife of one of the founders of PNAC).
and
Hillary's Military "mentor" is Jack Keane, a NeoCon and a Chairman of the "Institute for the study of war"; a NeoCon think tank run by Kimberly Kagen. She is linked on all sides with them and their goals.
From NYTimes:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/24/magazine/how-hillary-clinton-became-a-hawk.html?&_r=0
Jack Keane is one of the intellectual architects of the Iraq surge; he is also perhaps the greatest single influence on the way Hillary Clinton thinks about military issues. A bear of a man with a jowly, careworn face and Brylcreem-slicked hair, Keane exudes the supreme self-confidence you would expect of a retired four-star general. He speaks with a trace of a New York accent that gives his pronouncements a rat-a-tat urgency. He is also a well-compensated member of the military-industrial complex, sitting on the board of General Dynamics and serving as a strategic adviser to Academi, the private-security contractor once known as Blackwater. And he is the chairman of an aptly named think tank, the Institute for the Study of War. Though he is one of a parade of cable-TV generals, Keane is the resident hawk on Fox News, where he appears regularly to call for the United States to use greater military force in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. He doesn’t shrink from putting boots on the ground and has little use for civilian leaders, like Obama, who do.
Keane first got to know Clinton in the fall of 2001, when she was a freshman senator and he was the Army’s second in command, with a distinguished combat and command record in Vietnam, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo. He had expected her to be intelligent, hard-working and politically astute, but he was not prepared for the respect she showed for the Army as an institution, or her sympathy for the sacrifices made by soldiers and their families. Keane was confident he could smell a phony politician a mile away, and he didn’t get that whiff from her.
“I read people; that’s one of my strengths,” he told me. “It’s not that I can’t be fooled, but I’m not fooled often.”
Clinton took an instant liking to Keane, too. “She loves that Irish gruff thing,” says one of her Senate aides, Kris Balderston, who was in the room that day. When Keane got up after 45 minutes to leave for a meeting back at the Pentagon with a Polish general, she protested that she wasn’t finished yet and asked for another appointment. “I said, ‘O.K., but it took me three months to get this one,’?” Keane told her dryly.
Clinton exploded into a raucous laugh. “I’ll take care of that problem,” she promised.
FairWinds
(1,717 posts)with that other time we nuked children, so I have no reason
to suspect that they will be upset with the next time we
do it.
uhnope
(6,419 posts)The Allies firebombed Germany too.
AtheistCrusader
(33,982 posts)War is hell. News at 11.
At least it WAS war with declarations, and terms of surrender, and a goal that could be articulated.
FairWinds
(1,717 posts)You will seriously stand up and salute smartly the
next time our fearless lidders incinerate a bunch of kids.
Yeah, there wuz declarations, and actual goals, WHAAAAAAAT?
Shame on you.
Vietnam vet, and Vets For Peace member
AtheistCrusader
(33,982 posts)One of these days you should try reading what people actually write.
And no, Neither Hiroshima nor Nagasaki were LESS humane than what we did to Tokyo or Dresden. The atomic bomb had lingering effects, but actually killed fewer people (short and long term) than good old incendiaries, and there were just as many children suffocated, crushed, and torched by that.
Weapons themselves don't have much in the way of moral implication. It's what you choose to do with them. We warned them extensively that we were going to utterly destroy some of those cities. They believed us. They evacuated what they wanted to.
Until the day the emperor himself got on the radio and spoke to his people for the first time, they were prepared, and they were going to fight for every last inch, knowing full well they would die and lose. There's a fantastic anti-war book, by John Hersey; called Hiroshima. I have a first edition print of it. It's one of the few paper books I will never part with, even with the ready availability of eBooks. You should read it. It captures the horrors of the weapon, AND the people themselves, and what state they were in.
They didn't blame us for it. They understood. The means were crude, but the terms were honorable.
The horrors we visited upon Vietnam were even LESS honorable AND less stoppable by activists than even that, given we couldn't be bothered to actually declare war, and shoulder even the political burden that would entail.
