Ever wonder what the end of the world will look like? The people of Hawai’i can tell you now. They just had a trial run.
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BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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I just wish every Trump supporter realized that their man thinks its just fine and dandy if everyone in the country lived this moment every day, simply as a matter of course. Only pussies don’t enjoy using nuclear weapons. You know, losers.
I was near the end of college during the Cuban missile crisis. That was my generation’s trial run.
Stood with my father on the front porch of our home a few miles from O’Hare airport watching the “Flying Boxcars” heading Southeast in waves for hours. We thought it was WW III for sure. Years later I heard there were B-47’s there too, at the Air Force Reserve Annex, but of course they were heading North, not towards Florida.
i was stationed in hawaii during the cuban mess. we were loading up subs with missiles and torpedoes. also loading marine brigade from kanioe and all the time we were expecting the missiles to fly. it was a scary scene.
We were watching TV when this happened, and a news anchor was talking by phone to someone in Hawaii. The anchor asked what she was doing to prepare for the attack and the woman said, nothing, because there was nothing that could be done. The news anchor was shocked — she just couldn’t believe that the interviewee wasn’t going to try to protect herself at all. The woman just said she lived next to a military base, which would be a target, and it would be destroyed along with everything nearby so that was it. The woman seemed remarkably calm, really, but the news anchor was increasingly hysterical as the interview went on.
My heart goes out to the victims of that false alarm. It was a travesty. It affected many people who will never be the same.
People called their family members to tell them their final good-byes.
People lowered their children into sewers to protect them. Sewers.
People panicked because our “president” has created an atmosphere where nuclear war is balanced on a fine and fragile edge.
Trump was, of course, playing golf. Actually, it was better that he should be away from the “red button” on his desk to respond to a crisis. Who knows where that might have gone.
I hope this inspires a radical review of these alert procedures and how the system actually works. Why would it come down to one guy pushing the wrong button on any given day? This has to change.
Didn’t you hear? The governor now says he is going to have two guys handle the button work! Im sure that will work.
Sure told NK and our enemies more than it should have.
This is the way the world will end. Not with a bang, and not with a whimper. Only sheer incompetence will be to blame.
I do not know how, why or as a result of whose incompetence this happened, but incompetence is now rampant all up and down this system.
Incompetence reigns, from your local garage helpers and checkout people right on up to the Senate and the White House with seemingly endless steps in between.
Senator Franken, meet Senator Arpaio. Senator Arpaio, meet Senator Manning. Senator Manning, meet President Trump. President Trump, meet the next president, President Winfrey. President Winfrey, meet your incompetent predecessor, President Butch II. President Clinton…if you are not too busy playing sex games with a star-struck intern/secretary and a cigar on the Oval Orifice rug…you oughta pay attention, too. Or are you too busy wondering when the #MeToo tribe is going to catch up with your compulsive, philandering ass?
Alla you schmucks, meet the shade your first true forbear…the real founder of the incompetence brigade, President Reagan. In 1981 the president of the massively nuclear armed United States was a wooden B movie actor rapidly descending into senility, a man who governed by the advice of his equally incompetent actress wife’s astrologer. Why keep trying if that’s the case? At that point we had already descended into Marx’s second stage all history, farce. When you get there, It’s every man for himself and competence has no more value. Only greed and the most primitive survival instincts are left.
And here we jolly well are, aren’t we…37 or so years later, our tails between our legs, cringing at every glance at the news and every “HOTTEST THING EVER” mass notification on our cellphones.
Farce, up and down the system.
We await the ultimate pratfall with nothing but fear as our protection.
A great man once said:
It only took about 48 years to descend from FDR to President B Movie, and it’s been almost entirely downhill from there.
As the radio comics Bob and Ray used to say…themselves products of the FDR years, witnesses to the beginnings of our decline:
It’s back to work for me…
And…have a nice day.
Later…
AG
This post in now a standalone.
Incompetence Reigns
Please comment there if you wish to do so.
Thanks…
AG
A business analyst’s view: Everyone expects to be paid handsomely for reading from a script.
Could anyone do more to expose the limitations of US power and competence than Bush/Cheney and now Trump?
Talk softly and carry a big stick has become obsolete under Republican `alpha’ dogs (don’t call them leaders – they ain’t).
The Republican mantra has become
`Run your fucking mouth,
Don’t respect anything or anybody,
Don’t spend any time or money getting prepared,
And then look to scapegoat others when you (predictably) fail.’
Their party, their cult, their lack of morality is a national disgrace on every level.
The new mantra in town is Trumps rhetorical signature. Political Science Quarterly has a lengthy discussion about it. “Disruption, Demonization, Deliverance, and Norm Destruction……” It all kinda fits. Sounds like just Nazi bastards to me.
More like dirty dogs.
Bingo!
Some important things to note:
A lot of this turns out to be useful knowledge about Trump’s America.
Trump was apparently unconcerned about all this fuss. Golf you know. Meanwhile some thought the world was about to end. Some jamok pushed the wrong button and 38 minutes later someone figured out how to stop the panic. Meanwhile Tulsi Gabbard was tweeting this was a false alarm. I got a much better idea. Let’s get an outlook to tell us when he sees one coming in. How about Eric?
Apparently you haven’t read summaries of Wolff’s book.
It’s likely to be the “Fear and Loathing in Los Angeles” of the Trump administration.
Completedly inconsistent and a complete fool is how Wolff characterizes him without coming down on sanity or insanity.
I’ve got an even better idea. Why don’t we find someone of substance, Dennis Rodman perhaps, and make him the people’s emissary to North Korea and to the South Korea government. What are the terms that those two seek in order to get a nuclear-free peninsula? That doesn’t mean that it happens; it just means that we get out of the mutal crazy-man dynamic.
I’ve been expecting the end of the world since Trump became President. I hope it scared the s*** out of all the Trump supporters. If it did, they deserved it!
Trump supporters still think Hawaii, like Puerto Rico, is a foreign country.
I find it hard to believe this was the kind of “mistake” that the news talkers described it as this morning, that the person who was manning the emergency response system “pushed the wrong button.” And left it “pushed” for 38 minutes while alerts and warnings were surely going off within sight and earshot of this errant button pusher. Given the proximity of Hawaii to North Korea, the most likely source of such a threat, they would have been blown to smithereens long before 38 minutes had passed. Point being that it seems unreasonable that this “mistake” was allowed to go on for this long.
Putting on my tin foil hat, I believe this was actually a planned exercise, to test how people would respond and what would happen in the event of a “real” nuclear attack. Doing a test like this in the continental US or even Alaska could get out of hand as it could easily spread to bordering states. Hawaii being isolated as it is, not so.
Well, what can you expect when we only spend $1 trillion a year on “national defense”? Freeedum isn’t Free!! #safetythrumilitarism!