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For those unfamiliar, Pete Hegesth is the executive director of Vets for Freedom. Vets for Freedom was founded a few months after the progressive Veterans’ organization I work with (not for, since I volunteer), VoteVets.org. You’d have to ask Pete and his cronies to confirm this, but as best I can tell Vets for Freedom has served no other purpose than to be a GOP front group countering the work of VoteVets.
During election season, it became common place to see Pete Hegseth and VoteVets Chairman Jon Soltz debating on cable news shows. Routinely, Hegseth was owned.
Apparently tired of being exposed as a token yellow ribbon pin on the lapel of the Republican Party in front of millions of viewers, Hegseth has taken to penning typing his thoughts out on the web site of a prominant publication. Now, just what publication would have a GOP mouthpiece who will parrot neoconservative talking points and Cheney worship?
You guessed it: The Weekly Standard.
I’m not going to rehash Hegseth’s piece on the dueling speeches from the President and some evil sith. You can probably guess fairly accurately how it read (Obama blah blah surrender blah looking back blah blah Cheney blah blah torture works blah blah over there so we don’t have to fight them here blah..). I just want to be petty for a moment and point out that, as Atrios noted, Hegseth has difficulty counting, even in single digits:
Laying aside the debate over what is and what isn’t “torture,” it’s hard to argue with 8+ years of safety since 9/11. Yet, somehow, the interrogations we used to get valuable intelligence have "undermined" our safety.
Do the math. "8+ years"? Really?
And, to add to the tear down of this argument, here is Yglesias:
The overwhelming majority of Americans to ever be killed by foreign terrorists were killed during Bush’s presidency. And even if you give him a pass on 9/11 itself it’s still the case that his conduct of the “war on terror” led to the deaths of thousands more Americans.
This post is really just my spin on this ThinkProgress piece. For real.
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Thanks. Honest Memorial Day Posts are rare.
It is a bit of a challenge, as while the obvious solution is to simply ignore the dishonest and unenlightening prose of the tools of an authoritarian regime, one does fear that the less politically involved segment of American society may be influenced by their disingenuous fables.
But ultimately? In the end, you cannot provide compelling discourse without providing compelling truths. The edifice of lies these extreme and radical visions are built upon cannot withstand the most basic of scrutiny, for they are fabrications built on lies and assembled on a foundation of falsehoods.
We merely need to let them build their straw man, knock it over and offer a small amount of guidance, in the form of actual statements and links, that can be used to determine the honesty and efficacy of these positions. It’s time to trust the American people and it’s associated electorate. They showed us in November ultimately they can clearly differentiate between those policies that work and those that are nothing more than an ideology writ large.
And until the Republicans can accept that their base will vote Republican no matter how egregiously treated, much as the Democrats have treated the left wing of their party, they will continue to wander in the wilderness, for people are not willing, at the end of the day, to vote against their own well being, no matter how compelling the ideology…
mikey