vyelkin posted:

when mike bloomberg threatened to enter the 2016 race if bernie won the nomination and then actually did in 2020 just to throw away hundreds of millions of dollars on being publicly humiliated in front of the whole country in order to make the other candidates look good and get back in the news cycle

Inceltown posted:

Jon Stewart saying it would be hard to top the GWB administration for ridiculousness.

Inceltown posted:

Jon Stewart saying it would be hard to top the GWB administration for ridiculousness.

LastInLine posted:

I was literally just thinking of this stuff this morning when I remembered that one of the most impressive publics works projects of the 20th century is named after Hoover, who at the time of its construction was certainly in contention for being the worst president in living memory

MikeCrotch posted:

Speaking of funny poo poo: Paul Bremer firing the entire Iraqi army overnight

MikeCrotch posted:

Speaking of funny poo poo: Paul Bremer firing the entire Iraqi army overnight

Postwar posted:

By the time the western Allies abandoned their denazification efforts with the coming of the Cold War, it was clear that these had had a decidedly limited impact. In Bavaria about half the secondary schoolteachers had been fired by 1946, only to be back in their jobs two years later. In 1949 the newly-established Federal Republic ended all investigations of the past behaviour of civil servants and army officers. In Bavaria in 1951, 94 percent of judges and prosecutors, 77 percent of finance ministry employees and 60 percent of civil servants in the regional Agriculture Ministry were ex-Nazis. By 1952 one in three of Foreign Ministry officials in Bonn was a former member of the Nazi Party. Of the newly-constituted West German Diplomatic Corps, 43 percent were former SS men and another 17 percent had served in the SD or Gestapo. Hans Globke, Chancellor Adenauer’s chief aide throughout the 1950s, was the man who had been responsible for the official commentary on Hitler’s 1935 Nuremberg Laws. The chief of police in the Rhineland-Palatinate, Wilhelm Hauser, was the Obersturmführer responsible for wartime massacres in Byelorussia.

The same pattern held true outside the civil service. Universities and the legal profession were the least affected by denazification, despite their notorious sympathy for Hitler’s regime. Businessmen also got off lightly. Friedrich Flick, convicted as a war criminal in 1947, was released three years later by the Bonn authorities and restored to his former eminence as the leading shareholder in Daimler-Benz. Senior figures in the incriminated industrial combines of I.G. Farben and Krupp were all released early and re-entered public life little the worse for wear. By 1952 Fordwerke, the German branch of Ford Motor Company, had reassembled all its senior management from the Nazi years. Even the Nazi judges and concentration camp doctors convicted under American jurisdiction saw their sentences reduced or commuted (by the American administrator, John J McCloy).

Flavius Aetass posted:

the five-head that launched a thousand drones

Smirking_Serpent posted:

Animal-Mother posted:

The Pete staffer who pretends to be Nigerian on Twitter.

Filthy Hans posted:

It wasn't just the army, it was the entire Ba'ath Party. And they weren't simply fired, they were permanently blacklisted. Under the Hussein regime, anyone who wanted to be a civil servant had to be a member of the Ba'ath Party, so in effect Paul Bremer fired and blacklisted everyone in the military but also every teacher, mayor, public works laborer, hospital administrator etc. Overnight he permanently crippled every single public institution in Iraq. iirc this decision was never overturned during W.'s tenure.

Kevos Setzer posted:

one of the Iraqi exiles living in England that had team Bush convinced everything was going to be a cakewalk got airlifted into Iraq early on during the war. As soon as he landed he started trying to order everyone around like he ran the place, but the local Iraqis all went, "Nah, gently caress you."

Kevos Setzer posted:

Thousands of young men with military knowledge thrown out onto the streets. Thousands more people removed out of their jobs with no options available. The entire government infrastructure left barren.

"Hey, why does everyone hate us and why are these militias suddenly so competent?"

Funny thing I just remembered: I don't even remember the dude's name, but one of the Iraqi exiles living in England that had team Bush convinced everything was going to be a cakewalk got airlifted into Iraq early on during the war. As soon as he landed he started trying to order everyone around like he ran the place, but the local Iraqis all went, "Nah, gently caress you."