Sandpuppy posted:

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Spalec posted:

What ethnicity was the shooter?

Sandpuppy posted:

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AnoHito posted:

A high corporate tax rate is necessary to keep the economy going, but it is currently being sabotaged. AGC

Actually the more I look at this one, the less I can think of any other interpretation. How the hell is Ramirez so bad at this?

Sandpuppy posted:

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Starshark posted:

I'm guessing white just because no-one's mentioned terrorism yet. Happy to be proven wrong.

Cat Mattress posted:

http://abcnews.go.com/US/texas-church-shooter-identified-white-male-mid-20s/story?id=50949455

The suspect is a young white man, named Devin Kelley, who had posted pictures of his new assault rifle on Facebook.

Sandpuppy posted:

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gowb posted:

This has happened to me before, when trying to get a lure out of a cypress. Don't trust water trees!

Pants Donkey posted:

I think I found the only agreeable Garrison cartoon.

And it should come as no surprise that he's a hypocrite considering the loving Christmas cartoon he put out a week before Halloween.

loquacius posted:

This is cool art and everything, but, does Prince Valiant ever have, like, dialogue in it

The fact that there are no speech bubbles in it makes the whole thing feel like exposition or a prologue to me for some reason

Pants Donkey posted:

I think I found the only agreeable Garrison cartoon.

And it should come as no surprise that he's a hypocrite considering the loving Christmas cartoon he put out a week before Halloween.

Sandpuppy posted:

2

Pants Donkey posted:

I think I found the only agreeable Garrison cartoon.

And it should come as no surprise that he's a hypocrite considering the loving Christmas cartoon he put out a week before Halloween.

Internet Kraken posted:

Yes well a brave vigilante stopping a madman with his gun loses its impact when the madman was committing mass murder with a gun.

King Possum III posted:

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Trapezium Dave posted:

Which Sunday papers publish Millard Fillmore and what other comics do they run? I want to get an idea of what that strip is in juxtaposition against.
edit: If it's stuff like Family Circus then does anywhere post that page online.

Apple Pie Hubbub posted:

Zemyla posted:

Is this an actual good cartoon about the exploitation of college students playing for the NCAA?

King Possum III posted:

7

quote:

“She was mad,” Mr. Horsey said in a telephone interview on Saturday night. “But she was good about it,” he added. “It wasn’t anything like the really nasty stuff.”

He said he replied to her email and told her, “I know I was wrong, and I sincerely apologize.”

Mr. Horsey sent his individualized note of regret a day after issuing a much broader mea culpa that The Times affixed to the top of his commentary.

Mr. Horsey had opened by writing that Ms. Sanders “does not look like the kind of woman Donald Trump would choose as his chief spokesperson.”

He went on to say that “the president has generally exhibited a preference for sleek beauties with long legs and stiletto heels to represent his interests and act as his arm candy.”

He continued: “Trump’s daughter Ivanka and wife Melania are the apotheosis of this type. By comparison, Sanders looks more like a slightly chunky soccer mom who organizes snacks for the kids’ games.”

Many people, including some reporters, were quick to lay into Mr. Horsey.

Several called the column sexist and accused him of body shaming. Others responded by attacking Mr. Horsey’s own appearance.

VitalSigns posted:

grande and venti are fake words now?

American education

FronzelNeekburm posted:

...and Doonesbury.

quote:

3. Combat Zones

After every war there probably comes a period of disillusion. In the case of the Vietnam War, the disillusion grew with the war, and in direct ratio to the time, manpower and effort expended on it. It has been a war with the nightmare quality of finding ourselves in a dreadful situation, removed from our daily lives and routines, without knowing quite how we got into it or how we were going to get out of it.

So much has been written and said about this long and involved conflict that I'll only set down a few personal reactions and observations.

In earlier days, before the Johnson administration, I felt about this remote jungle war that "they" – the North Vietnamese – were sending guerrillas into South Vietnam, and that we could help the South Vietnamese learn to fight back with guerrilla-war techniques.

President Kennedy did, in fact, stress this role of American "advisers," but he must have known a good deal more than most of us at the time about the not-so-simple background of the war in that divided land. He really summed up both sides of the arguments that were to become louder and more bitter in the next few years when he said, "In the final analysis, it is their war. They are the ones who have to win it or lose it.... All we can do is help, and we are making it very clear. But I don't agree with those who say we should withdraw. That would be a great mistake."

As long as we could stay and just help but let the South Vietnamese be the ones to win (or, perish the thought, lose), it was only Vietnam that was divided, and not yet the United States.

By 1965, President Johnson was escalating the help, and the American "advisers" grew into larger numbers of U.S. troops – and planes and pilots.

The Gulf of Tonkin incidents and the resolution which followed were accepted as cause and effect; and the bombing of North Vietnam after Tonkin Gulf in 1964 and then in February 1965 after the Pleiku raid, seemed – on the basis of general information at the time – to be a proper response.

What gave me greater pause was an intervention by American forces a couple of months later in an area much closer to home. In April 1965 the U.S. Marines were dispatched to the Dominican Republic. Here a revolt had broken out against the rulers who had been installed in 1963 after a military coup overthrew the first legally elected Dominican government in thirty-eight years. Many of those in revolt were supporters of the legally elected President who had been deposed by the junta. Ostensibly the Marines were sent to protect American lives. Actually the troops were dispatched for fear there could be a possible Communist takeover of the revolt. President Johnson compounded the credibility fracture by asserting that Communists had taken over the revolt. To support this claim, the Administration then put out lists of Dominican "Communists" – which turned out to be about as accurate as similar lists of American "Communists" that we used to hear about in the 1950s. There were also vivid if exaggerated accounts of our government representatives in the Dominican Republic phoning while under fire or under desks and to the sound of gunshot and broken glass. And for good measure there were even reports of hair-curling atrocities – which also turned out to be highly inaccurate and imaginative.

The cracks in public confidence that were opened up by the Dominican Republic situation spread and widened.

Murrey Marder wrote, in the Washington Post of December 5, 1965, of "creeping signs of doubt and cynicism about Administrative pronouncements, especially in foreign policy," which, he said, constituted a problem that "could be called a credibility gap." After citing some examples, including the Dominican situation, he went on:

quote:

What widened the credibility gap have been discrepancies between what the Administration was saying and what it was doing in the Vietnam crisis. The greatest backfire hit the Administration's handling of United Nations Secretary General U Thant's attempt to bring the United States and North Vietnam together for peace talks at Rangoon, Burma, in late 1964. The United States had nine months to correct the record; it did not do so until it publicly was pushed into a statement.... Privately, many officials now rue the missed opportunity to say in February what the Administration was forced to say in November: that it did receive such a proposal from U Thant, that it concluded that North Vietnam was not going to bargain on conditions that would interest the United States, and that the offer therefore was rejected.

The November 1965 cartoon of Secretary Rusk wearing TV-type "rabbit ears" relates to a statement which was made on November 15, 1965, by State Department press officer Robert J. McCloskey. Answering questions on U Thant and the 1964 peace feelers, he said, "... We saw nothing to indicate that Hanoi was prepared for peace talks, and the Secretary of State said he would recognize it when it came along. His antenna is sensitive."

Had his antenna been more sensitive he might have picked up danger signals on the escalating war, the widening credibility gap and the growing dissatisfaction at home.

"Teach-ins" were held, at which professors spoke against the war. But what really brought the growing war at home into the home occurred in February 1966, when hearings of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, under the chairmanship of Senator J. William Fulbright, were televised. These opened the war in Asia to greater American public scrutiny and reappraisal than ever before. "The struggle for men's minds," so often referred to in wars abroad, was now getting into full swing at home.

The Johnson Administration escalated its war against its critics as the President spoke about "Nervous Nellies" and said, "We're not going to be Quislings, and we're not going to be appeasers, and we're not going to cut and run." Finally dissent in the U.S. was cited as the key factor that was keeping the enemy fighting.

The Administration compared Vietnam to World War II and Korea as examples of resistance to aggression – unfortunate and ironic comparisons in their way, when it turned out that by the end of December 1967 we had dropped more tons of bombs on North and South Vietnam than we had on all of Europe in World War II. By the middle of March 1968, total American wounded in Vietnam exceeded those of the Korean War. And by mid-June, Vietnam had become the longest war in American history.

In the war at home, positions hardened on both sides, with some of the more vehement critics of the Vietnam policy putting us in the role of the Nazi aggressors of 1939.

Vietnam has not been World War II in either direction, and it has not been Korea either. It has been a long, messy, confusing and frustrating war. And however good the motives of our leaders, we found ourselves taking over more and more of the fighting burden in a land that lacked the kind of will, national unity or strongly principled and strongly supported government that were important in other nations to which we had committed our forces. The effect on Americans unaware of how or why or even when we had become so enmeshed was made the worse by the realization that this deepening involvement was draining off efforts to meet problems at home which were clear and urgent.

The war itself was difficult to understand or to follow, especially since individual battles and estimates of Vietcong casualties seemed to mean so little in the total time and progress of the war – whatever progress there might be.

What was plain and what may have been decisive with most Americans who became disaffected was that the war was not turning out as they had expected and that there was something wrong about what they had been told and had not been told.

With Americans on both sides of the war issue regarding themselves as moral crusaders, the war at home continued to escalate. It erupted in homes, in street conversations, at offices and at dinner parties. And, of course, it continued to burst forth on the campuses.

Some students burned their draft cards and Congress overreacted by passing stringent laws against destroying those cards, despite the fact that there were already on the books adequate penalties for possessors of draft cards who failed to carry the cards on their persons. Draft director General Lewis B. Hershey wanted to use the draft to punish draft-eligible dissenters who had deferments. And some superpatriotic Congressmen to whom dissent was disloyalty were willing to go further and forget the Bill of Rights to curb any opinion or any action they disapproved of.

As for the protestors, some of them expressed their devotion to freedom by howling down anyone who attempted to speak for the Administration's position on the war. In November 1966, at Harvard University – of all places – Secretary McNamara was almost mobbed when several hundred students surrounded his car and jeered, pushed and heckled. He climbed atop another car and offered to answer questions, but his efforts to be heard were in vain. Finally he stepped down from the car and, surrounded by police, made his way to a nearby building.

Antiwar demonstrations and acts of civil disobedience continued to spread across the country. While student outbreaks such as the one at Columbia University in May 1968 had other immediate causes, the war and the draft unquestionably contributed to the unrest and violence at this as well as other universities. And it could not be disregarded as a contributing factor in urban disorders.

The action at home was easier to follow than most of the action in Vietnam, where, as Washington Post correspondent Ward Just wrote in 1967 after eighteen months in the war zone:

quote:

No one can understand the shooting war in Vietnam because the correspondents have not devised a calculus for measuring it as a continuum. The military is worse, professing to find significance in the corpse count and mistaking valor for progress. The war is now reported by correspondents as Broadway is reviewed by drama critics. Each operation is a production of its own, unrelated to its predecessors. It is reviewed on its own merits, because there are no other standards of judgment.

Mr. Just quoted a young Marine officer who, after nearly a year in Vietnam, was asked what progress he saw. "We're sure kicking hell out of old Charlie," he said, "but old Charlie sometimes kicks hell out of us. I guess I don't see the progress because I'm too close to it."

The rest of us may not have seen the progress because we were too far from it. But it appeared constantly in the military reports, which never faltered or failed in describing bright prospects, no matter how many previous rosy reports were shot down by time and events. They constantly saw light at the end of the tunnel, however often that light turned out to be the glow of a will-o'-the-wisp.

As the war ground on, there was some slowdown in the optimistic predictions of the Secretaries of State and of Defense, who had earlier seen us about to round important corners and starting to bring troops home. But the military leaders pressed on with buoyant reports.

Some of the men who manned those mimeo machines and delivered those speeches should have received medals for optimism beyond the call of duty or the sound of reason. And bright reports were based on so many captured enemy documents that we got the impression the enemy must go into battle carrying full file pack.

General William C. Westmoreland had said in 1964, not long before the U.S. found it necessary to begin taking over the war from the flagging South Vietnamese Army, "It is inconceivable to me that the Vietcong could ever defeat the forces of South Vietnam."

When he left Vietnam in the spring of 1968 he said, "The enemy has been defeated at every turn," and "Our side is getting stronger, whereas the enemy is getting weaker." He felt that the renewed enemy attacks showed only desperation, and was confident that the enemy was receiving false reports of "exaggerated battlefield successes."

There seemed to be a consistent optimism that the enemy was overoptimistic.

Among military leaders there was an excuse for the delays in all the predicted results: the enemy somehow had not done what we anticipated, which was apparently dirty pool on the part of old Charlie and no fault of our strategists. This attitude prompted a prizefighter cartoon based on an old story told about Joe Louis. A reporter relayed to Louis a detailed round-by-round, blow-by-blow prefight account of what a contender claimed he was going to do to the champ, ending up with a vivid account of how he was going to score a knockout over Louis. Asked what he thought about all this, the champ said, "Well, you know, while he's doin' all that, I ain't gonna be reading a book."

Some of our military planners forgot that the enemy was not going to be reading a book – or was reading an awfully good book on tactics and strategy.

Another reason given for failure to achieve decisive results was that our military men were not unleashed to go all out, or could use more men, more bombs, more bombing targets, more of everything. As Parade correspondent Fred Blumenthal mused, it would almost be worth having a war someday if it turned up one general who would say, "Okay, fellow, you've given me all the men, planes, ships, guns, bombs and supplies I need; if we don't win now, it's just my fault." Surely that would be a general to whom statues should be erected.

All this is not to minimize the problems of military leaders carrying on a most baffling and difficult war in which results could not be measured in terms of firepower or conventional maneuver. But the requests for more men kept coming, along with the statements of progress. And a climax came with the surprising enemy Tet offensive at the end of January 1968, following a year in which the war had cost more than eleven thousand American lives.

High-ranking American officers were furious that this offensive should be interpreted as an enemy success, because, they claimed, the enemy had not succeeded in his real aims. It was, according to this line of reasoning, a triumph for us. And our generals, with over half a million Americans already in Vietnam, again asked for more men.

Two months after the Tet drive, President Johnson, on March 31, 1968, made his famous speech in which he de-escalated the American war in Vietnam, called again for negotiations and removed himself from consideration for another term in office. To President Johnson, as to so many other Americans, this was a war in which, as the fighting dragged on, things kept turning out to be not what they seemed.

If there is one thing that sticks in the mind as summing up the feeling of what has been particularly and peculiarly wrong about this war, it is the Alice-in-Wonderland statement made by an American officer after the flattening of a South Vietnamese town where some Vietcong might have been dug in. He said, "It became necessary to destroy the town to save it."

Apple Pie Hubbub posted: