Nick66
Rock n' Roll Doggie ALL ACCESS
Praying Russians? What are we coming to!? I heard Paul Ryan was spotted drinking vodka last week...and needless to say, it wasn't Swedish.
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It's one of the most prestigious events in Washington. And the President of the United States is there, along with powerful pols and other elites.
What's not political expedient about being there?
Fuck the fucking fuck off with your "big scoops" or whatever, Omarosa. Honestly.
Fuck the fucking fuck off with your "big scoops" or whatever, Omarosa. Honestly.
Praying Russians? What are we coming to!? I heard Paul Ryan was spotted drinking vodka last week...and needless to say, it wasn't Swedish.
Outrageous!Remember when Obama wore a tan suit?
I long for those scandals
In the imagination of the Cold War era, military parades were the thing that the Soviets did. This notion was not entirely historically accurate—the United States paraded its own might in Washington on a couple of occasions during the Cold War. But it made for a powerful image. I still have a mounted copy of a New Balance poster from the late nineteen-eighties or early nineties, depicting a jogger—the very picture of Americanness, rendered in color—running in the opposite direction of a black-and-white Soviet parade in Red Square. The tagline: “Why runners make lousy communists.” Military parades, it went without saying, were a feature of totalitarian regimes and the opposite of freedom. (In 2016, the New Balance owner and chairman, Jim Davis, gave nearly four hundred thousand dollars to the Trump campaign.)
Around the time of that ad campaign, the Soviet Union held the last of its military parades—on May 9, 1990, to commemorate the forty-fifth anniversary of victory in the Second World War (these parades had taken place on the big anniversaries, in 1965 and 1985) and on November 7th, to mark the seventy-third anniversary of the October Revolution (these parades had been held annually). After that, the parades were discontinued until, in an effort to mend a torn and disillusioned society, President Boris Yeltsin haltingly brought back the Victory Day parade. The step was politically fraught, both domestically and internationally. It made clear that Yeltsin was abandoning any hope of forging a Russian identity that wasn’t tied to notions of imperial greatness. Also, Western leaders, including Bill Clinton, did not want to take part in parade festivities in 1995, when Russia was prosecuting its first brutal war in Chechnya. Yeltsin had the parade moved off Red Square and separated from the official celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War. The next parade wasn’t held for another four years.
Vladimir Putin, by contrast, has relished the parade and weaponized it. For my most recent book, “The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia,” I made myself sit through video recordings of the military parades held in Red Square on May 9th every year since Putin came to power. The display is subject to inflation: five thousand troops took part in 2003 (I couldn’t find earlier numbers) and fourteen thousand did so in 2012. Pieces of military equipment—tanks and rockets—were added in 2008. An air show was added in 2010. The parade is the central event of the Russian political year, and it reflects contemporary Russian identity: great, frightening, built entirely around the victory in the Second World War. The Russian sociologist Lev Gudkov has said that the victory is a perfect national myth, because it shines its light both on the past and on the future: it explains how the U.S.S.R. became a twentieth-century superpower, and it justifies the terror that preceded and accompanied the war.
The Bastille Day military parade in France that apparently inspired Trump is not exactly free of connotations of terror, but its over-all symbolism is more appealing. It celebrates the power of the people who overthrew the monarchy and won freedom (though they certainly didn’t wear uniforms or march in lockstep).
What would an American parade signify? Trump’s understanding seems clear on the surface: he thinks that parades go with the Presidency like gold-leaf furniture goes with wealth. Also, Trump wants it seen that he—and not the generals who are charged with taming him—is the Commander-in-Chief. Plus, his button is bigger than Kim Jong Un’s.
But, demagogue that he is, Trump is also tapping into something deeper: a sense of lost American greatness, and, even more, a sense of a lost American story. In this way, the United States isn’t different from the rest of the Western world, which has suddenly discovered that its post–Second World War story is no longer as convincing as it used to be, and can’t serve as an anchor for its identity. The rise of the right in Europe is a symptom of this phenomenon. Sweden, which in the wake of the war forged an identity as a humanitarian superpower, has seen that story punctured by the meteoric rise of an anti-immigrant right. Germany has seen the unthinkable: the rise of a far-right party that explicitly rejects the idea that Germany must continue to reckon with the ghost of Nazism. And the United States has a President who has no use for stories like “America is a nation of immigrants,” and who is trying to make America great again by ordering a military parade.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/what-would-trumps-military-parade-symbolize
While you can be frustrated with the Democrats for playing too nice with GOP, or being too Centrist, or too cozy with Wall Street
At least they didn’t
Support a sexual assaulter, 3x married, and bangs porn stars behind his wives backs
Support a pedophile
Support a domestic abuser
That’s the party of Family Values and the state of the GOP
I really don't get the overreaction to Donnie Orange's desire to have a military parade.
He's a nationalist and he's trying to win support from nationalists.
Also, the US swings its military dick in like, every country. It's navy is very ceremonious across the world. It frequently utilizes training exercises as shows of force, worldwide. If it's going to be a shit sandwich, now it will wear a nice suit. It really isn't a big deal, just a heaping waste of money.
They were also the party of fiscal responsibility while Obama was in office. What happened to that?