DAVID WALSH/ MAX ALVAREZ—”I remember director Abraham Polonsky, who was blacklisted and who was very committed to the Communist Party, once commenting, speaking of that era, that “the worst” were the liberals, in terms of how they responded and capitulated. I’m getting a sense of what he means by observing what’s taking place now. As I say, these attacks are coming from liberal or “left” areas. More so than in the 1950s.”
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ERIC ZUESSE—Not only is the U.S. trying to take over part of sovereign Syrian territory (using Al Qaeda and Kurdish forces as their boots-on-the-ground to do it), but the U.S. and its UK ally are, essentially, supporting Al Qaeda allied jihadists who shelled the Russian trade mission in Damascus.
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JIM KAVANAGH—As someone who finds it insulting to go to demonstrations in America’s most liberal cities, where protestors are literally penned in like cattle, I’d just like to ask those Americans who have seen what happened to their fellow citizen protestors in Seattle, and Pittsburgh, and Wall Street: If protestors from Zuccotti, or Central, or Lincoln, or Lafayette Park, tried to seize and occupy a nearby civil administration building, exactly how many inches do you think they would advance into that structure, exactly how many cops would they set on fire, before they would have the living shit beaten out of them? Before any means that were necessary to stop them were deployed against them?
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ERIC ZUESSE—In other words: the NPR (meaning Nuclear Posture Review, not National Public Radio) is based upon using nuclear weapons in order to win a nuclear war. That has actually been America’s real nuclear strategy ever since at least 2006. ‘Small’ nukes will now be used instead of conventional weapons, to “warn” “the enemy” against using “small nukes.” The problem with this line of thinking is that it ignores that, regardless of whether the conflict starts with regular weapons or with “small nukes,” the response to it will necessarily be a total blitz release of the other side’s entire strategic nuclear stockpile, because the first side to release its entire nuclear stockpile against the other will be the one that suffers the less harm.
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WILLIAM ASTORE—Give President Trump his due: he knows his audience. His supporters will revel in a military parade in Washington. So too will Trump. The rest of us? Why should we complain: we’ve been watching over-the-top military celebrations for nearly two decades. A big parade down Pennsylvania Avenue is the logical culmination of all this, especially with Trump in charge.
