The Award for Best Iraq Bombing Goes To…

Who War it Best?

For all those in need of some Emmy counter-programming, here is an award that will sadly be missing from tonight's ceremony.

"The Award for Best Iraq Bombing Goes To…" was originally released on Dec. 8th, 2014 and the original text is below.

It's often said that "you can bomb the world to pieces but you can't bomb it into peace." The finalists for the coveted Best Iraq Bombing Award beg to differ. From Tomahawk cruise missiles to Predator drones, these Oval Office humanitarians have brought peace to the very cradle of civilization no fewer than four times in the past 25 years. Find out which of the last four presidents war it best.

Approximately 1:30 minutes.

Comments

[Paul.]

The jacket is wearing a jacket...

[Juvenile Bluster]

The jacket is wearing a person. The jacket's actually the living part of the duo. Nick is just a puppet.

[AlmightyJB]

I never win anything

[Austrian Anarchy]

Same here. Yet, I will not embrace the flip-flop even for a special award.

[straffinrun]

Here ya go, JB

[Scarecrow & WoodChipper Repair]

You have to win the Presidency first. Your campaign has to bear fruit.

[Scarecrow & WoodChipper Repair]

Ah gee, I think I got the wrong A--- commentor. My apologies to both of you.

[Almanian - Micro Trumper]

Almanian for President - 2016
I Probably Won't Make It Any Worse

And I'm indistinguishable from Almighty JB from a city block

[Sevo]

The picking of nits:
"Who War it Best?"
Not really sure...

[Quincy.]

"Who War it Best?"

I'm gown to go with nobody.

[Paul.]

In government, everyone's a winner!

[Quincy.]

Corsage you think that.

[Troy muy grande boner]

I bet you could find 3 children and two monocles in Nick's unibrow.

[Hyperion]

By the time he's 60, he'll look exactly like the Fonz meets Leonid Brezhnev:

Hi Nick, they have these nifty new western unibrow trimmers now

[Sevo]

I assume Obo got it simply as a result of accepting the (he's-not-Bush) "peace prize" and then bombing the shit out of anything that moves in the near-east.

[Hyperion]

The One is not a rank amateur like Boosh, just bombing random targets. He hand picks those funerals, wedding parties, and day care centers.

[Ken Shultz]

I think the better wars were the ones that didn't put boots on the ground--and in Iraq, that makes it between Bush the Greater and Clinton.

Between them, the better President would be the one who had the most pressure to put boots on the ground and resisted--and so that award should go to Bush the Greater.

In fact, the worst war of all award should go to Bush the Lesser because all the reasons not to invade Iraq and depose Saddam (effectively gifting regional hegemony to our enemy Iran, for instance, among them) were just as good in 2003 as they were in 1991.

In fact, all the reasons we wish we hadn't invaded Iraq in 2015 are all the reasons Bush the Greater didn't invade in 1991.

Give him the award.

[Hyperbolical (wadair)]

It seems that democrats like to bomb from afar with drones and cruise missles while republicans would rather do it the old fashioned way with boots--on the ground and in the air.

Maybe it has to do with democrats affinity for cool technology over the republicans fear of it. /sarc

[Ken Shultz]

The Democrats simply had no cohesive foreign policy philosophy, and they still don't. Or, rather, their foreign policy has been all about the UN and international consensus. Made Carter a laughing stock.

Pragmatism and neoconservatives played out as an intellectual argument on the right, but the neoconservatives were new to the right--many had formerly been Marxists. They abandoned the left because the left had no cohesive foreign policy philosophy, and there was room for debate on the right.

Clinton was basically following the Powell/Weinberger Doctrine, which was formulated as a pragmatic reaction to Kissinger's brand of realism--and the debacle that was Vietnam. Reagan followed the Powell/Weinberger doctrine to a large extent, and Bush the Lesser followed it as closely as anyone.

Clinton followed it, too. It's why we stayed out of Rwanda.

Bush Jr. famously went full one brand of neo-con, and some of our biggest long terms security threats are because of that abandonment of pragmatic realism and the Powell/Weinberger Doctrine. We should not lose sight of that form of neconservatism having its roots in Marxism. The reason people like Christopher Hitchens supported Bush the Lesser's foreign policy of emancipator wars was because his roots were still Marxist.

[Ken Shultz]

I still think of neoconservatives as leftists and Marxists--even if so many people have come to imagine them as being on the right. George W. Bush wasn't a conservative in the tradition of Ronald Reagan or Barry Goldwater. He was a Southern Democrat in the tradition of Lyndon Johnson--both domestically (expansion of Medicare and the Great Society) and internationally (Vietnam was also an elective war of supposed emancipation).

[SIV]

W and LBJ were peas in a pod. NCLB was nothing but a reauthorization and expansion of LBJ's federalization of education. "Compassionate Conservatism" was a restoration of The Great Society after the beating it took from Gingrich and Clinton.

[Hyperbolical (wadair)]

I certainly agree that W. Bush was no conservative. Neither was his father. W used his born-again-christian narrative to win the presidency, but he was no conservative--and your examples explain why.

You make an interesting comparison between W and LBJ. Too many people think the South is filled with republicans when the truth is more variated and complex. W was born and educated in the Northeast while his father spent most of his career in government. Both Bushes are progressive as far as I'm concerned.

[mfckr]

I tend to think modern conservatism became a variation of progressivism awhile ago.

As the sociopolitical norms have drifted so far towards progressivism over time and forced conservatism to continually redefine itself accordingly.

[Hyperbolical (wadair)]

I can't disagree that present day conservatism is very much like progressivism. But I understand conservatism as reactionary to progressivism. Maybe you're right and conservatism lost the war. If so, there's an important lesson here for libertarianism. What, I'm not sure. One lesson is: don't become reactionary.

[mfckr]

Maybe you're right and conservatism lost the war. If so, there's an important lesson here for libertarianism. What, I'm not sure. One lesson is: don't become reactionary.

Conservatism never had a chance because they allowed Progressives to rig all the goalposts and control the parameters of debate.

So I guess the lesson for Libertarianism would be to not play into that game. Though you'll see self-professed Libertarians do it anyway when they try to argue that a given policy which might be "kinda Libertarian" in some aspects is therefore good enough and ought to be supported, etc.

[Hyperbolical (wadair)]

You may be right but I think conservatives lose when they react. That is they play defense with never a chance to score. Their only purpose being to stop the progressives from scoring. Instead, the opposition needs to go on the offensive and rack up some points.

Socialism/Progressivism/Fascism is evil and should be attacked as such. They lie, they steal, they destroy. This is the message. No defense, only offense.

[Pl?ya Manhattan.]

I won't know what to think until Cytotoxic tells me.

[Grand Moff Serious Man]

Well, for starters the US should raze entire villages and execute 100 Arabs for every American soldier killed.

And if that doesn't work, just bomb everything to smithereens.

[straffinrun]

I get the blues before and after doing that.

[Pl?ya Manhattan.]

Bomb Iran, and let the survivors emigrate.

It's the libertarian thing to do.

[Sevo]

Which GOPer candidate said he (I think) wanted to 'bomb ISIS', as if ISIS were a physical location? I know it's qualifying season, and you run your qualifying motor, but for pete's sake, get one that makes it a full lap before it grenades..

[Hyperion]

Graham? Just guessing since he want's to bomb everything.

[Sevo]

I think it might have been.
"BOMB 'EM ALL!"

[commodious spittoon]

So it has fallen to me as a recent convert to spread the good word among my friends and family, and my efforts so far have yielded... disappointment, to say the least.

I can't blame the word for that. I have been an insufficient conduit. Despite my supplication, despite my enthusiasm, I have been unable to turn around those closest to me. They know not what they do not know. But yet I retain faith, and faith giveth me patience. I shall persevere.

So despite the fact my closest friends grew weary of BoJack Horseman after only the first two episodes, I will continue preaching the good word. Because it is righteous. Because it is good. Because it is necessary. And above all, because it is an excellent television show.

[Quincy.]

Don't sit so close to the TV, it'll make you cruel.

[Pl?ya Manhattan.]

White people problems.

[Quincy.]

Why don't you stand over there and make sure no one trips over that cable?

[Pl?ya Manhattan.]

Only if I get an assistant. I'm really unreliable.

[Hyperion]

White people survived a drop of around 14 degrees farhrenheit during the last ice age, living only a few miles south of a wall of glaciers over a mile high. Yet our fragile snowflakes today cannot survive a .0001 degree increase in global temperature over the next 100 years without giving up any gains in their life style during the last 3000 years and submitting to the tyrannical rule of some luddites in an ultra corrupt government. Go figure.

[Pl?ya Manhattan.]

I know. My people survived on fish and reindeer milk. I can comfortably wear flip flops in the snow.

I sure hope my kids don't turn out to be pussies.

[Limpee Wiltstock]

My folks survived on kvass and... I hate to say "fish" when it described such an outrageously broad category of different preparations. I remember as a child my mother extolling the virtues of fishbones and fishfaces as some kind of superfood. I remember eating fish soup (with faces and fins if possible), fried fish (if possible, including the bones), baked fish, barbeked fish, dried fish, smoked fish (itself a whole category of varieties), reconstituted fish, canned fish (with bones and faces), canned smoked fish, fish in aspic, pickled fish, and on a few occasions raw fish prepared only by a period of (inevitable) freezing and minimal rewarming. Perhaps it's a strangeness, but the only time as a child I stopped and said, "I'm sick of this!" (quietly, to myself, in the middle of the night, if my door was closed and I could hear my father snoring), was with respect to canned smoked fish. Otherwise, my attitude was one of, "boy oh boy! I sure hope we get fish for tea again!," and "Lucky me!" Even now, when there's not as much economic reason for it, my freezer is half full of various fishes caught by family members.

[Limpee Wiltstock]

Those of my elders that persisted in fish at least twiced a day all lived nearly a century. The couple of them that somehow got born without the fish gene and et something else whenever possible died off in their mid-seventies. My mother at 76 has just "retired" from normal work to a lighter schedule (which is still probably more than most younger people can tolerate today), and in her life she's called in sick one time. She still makes her own pickled fish out of raw fish (including bones) and a brine of fermented milk from her cow.

[mfckr]

Yet our fragile snowflakes today cannot survive a .0001 degree increase in global temperature over the next 100 years without giving up any gains in their life style during the last 3000 years and submitting to the tyrannical rule of some luddites in an ultra corrupt government. Go figure.

It's surrogate religionism replete with its own doomsaying prophecies. Something to give people feelz and a contrived sense of meaning that they're too bored/safe/affluent to find elsewhere.

[Hyperbolical (wadair)]

Many luddites progressives are suspicious of technology because they're afraid of the power and independence it gives people. How are they going to make the earth a socialist paradise with people running off and doing things their own way?

[mfckr]

For whatever reason, they seem fond of the idea that there exists some sort of collective destiny or shared future that human societies somehow inexorably hurl towards (or perhaps with some enlightened 'guidance'). Where Progressivism incorporated that notion from, I'm not sure?maybe Hegel?

So yeah, anything which might give humans too much individual agency could undermine said faith in that collective future. Which naturally becomes its own self-reinforcing ontological tyranny.

[Sevo]

"Yet our fragile snowflakes today cannot survive a .0001 degree increase in global temperature over the next 100 years without giving up any gains in their life style during the last 3000 years and submitting to the tyrannical rule of some luddites in an ultra corrupt government."

I linked the (SF Chron) story where the Stanfoo guys decided to change the data processing program to show there has been no 'hiatus' in the warming trend. In the same issue, there was a prediction that the sea level was gonna rise 3' (affecting the SF Bay by that amount) by 2100,
Now that's 85 years off; compare, oh the migrations of people to Los Angeles during a similar period: 1.2m in 1930 to 3.8M in 2015
And in that time, it took no government action whatsoever to cause people to move there, or for that matter to move away from there, as well they might if the waters are rising.
So, what is it that the people can't do on their own that which needs the assistance of assholes like Obo?

[Sevo]

Sorry; the 2015 population figure was LA city only, while the 1930 was LA 'area"
Corrected:
1930: 1.2m
2015: 17.8m ( http://geography.about.com/od/.....lation.htm )
Regardless, even the mistaken numbers tell anyone who chooses to look that population migrations in response to various incentives require no governmental assistance at all.

[Pl?ya Manhattan.]

Government did cause a part of that, unintentionally. Our war on drugs.

[Sevo]

And WWII war production, but neither of those begins to cover what happens when people look around and say, 'ya know, the water seems higher this year. Maybe we should find a new place to live'.
Unless they're living where the government *pays* them to live; the Ohio River flood plain is a good example.

[MJGreen - Docile Citizen]

What a difference a weekend makes.

[Rhywun]

I hate to be one of those superior ignoranti but Emmy wut? I have taped Bundesliga to watch.

[Sevo]

Rhywun, not worth it. I don't bother posting that I never watched Star Treck; those who did don't care and those who didn't also yawn.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZaB_G1WNT70
Oh, and you TAPED something to watch? I still haven't figured out how to get my VCR to stop blinking "12:00 - 12:00 -12:00"

[Pl?ya Manhattan.]

Are you SURE you aren't my dad?

[Sevo]

Absolutely! Cheer for Cal? Not on your life!
And you don't make enough...

[Limpee Wiltstock]

And then there's my father, with whom I was having in-depth discussions regarding some innovations in DVD programming I was working on when he was dying of brain cancer at 80. Whilst Grandma Jesus was still publishing pamphlets (that invariably began with, 'This is your God speaking.') till she drop dead at 97. Going from apparently health and vigour to dead in a very short span (five days for her) seem to be another characteristic of the sempiquotidian fish-for-teaers. The fisheaters never seemed to suffer any ill-effects from making up the remainder of their diet in alcohol; all cases of alcohol-related illness was in the few despisers-of-fishmeat changelings that somehow got slipt into the family.

[Rhywun]

Oh, and you TAPED something to watch?

Am I supposed to say "DVR'ed"? Pff.

[SIV]

I'm having to rethink my support for quota-free open border immigration for all hot Scandinavian chicks. We'll need a high wall and narrow gate and scrutinize their twitter and tumblrs.

I don't want to be forced to share an insurance pool with anyone who identifies as a fuckin' "spoonie".

[SIV]

Nothin' on the TeeVee? Here's some dead culture from the late boomer/early Gen-X era.