You know, we could almost consider this one a Valentine’s Day joke, too, but you’d have to click the link to figure out why.
And, hey, would that be a trick up the sleeve or an ace in the hole?
(Detail of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, by Zach Weiner, 13 February 2015.)
Perhaps it is a bit early in the day to be diving into the comics page, but we might as well pick up where we left off yesterday. Well, okay. Sort of. You know what I mean.
Mark Fiore animates the “Frog of War”, who in turn reminds that NBC News’ Brian Williams is hardly the only person to have lied about what went on in Iraq during the Bush Wars. The cartoonist himself reminds:
Sure, it boggles my mind how Brian Williams could embellish and “misremember” an event like his helicopter ride in Iraq years ago, but the firestorm around his imagined combat experience is inordinately fierce compared to the relative silence around all of the other Iraq War-era ‘misrememberings’, journalistic and otherwise.
Remember the networks’ “military analysts” who were part of a coordinated Pentagon propaganda campaign to sell the war, who personally profited from defense contracts at the same time? I don’t remember any higher-ups in the media or the military getting fired or suspended because of that shameful episode.
I wonder if this would have been yesterday’s Lede of the Day had I noticed at the time:
President Barack Obama should be asking for more power to wage war against Islamic State extremists, some Republicans on the U.S. House Foreign Affairs committee said.
If Kathleen Miller’s lede for Bloomberg seems strange, well, you wouldn’t be the only one to think so. To the other, though, remember, this is war, and this is President Obama, so naturally Republicans would object that he isn’t asking to kill enough people. Besides, the GOP has a plethora of reasons―current potential candidate field notwithstanding―to think maybe 2016 will be their year. And, well, you know, since they expect one of theirs to take the White House before this AUMF expires, they want to make sure the next Republican president has as much legal backing as possible in order to kill as many nonwhites around the world as possible.
Plenty will note that the GOP has apparently rolled on executive authority, but these are Republicans, and this is war, so we probably shouldn’t be surprised.
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Miller, Kathleen. “For Once Obama Should Have More Power, House Republicans Say”. Bloomberg. 12 February 2015.
Benen, Steve. “GOP flips the script, endorses executive overreach”. msnbc. 13 February 2015.
This Is 