I knew and worked with each of these men. Unfortunately, not all of them are still with us.
Just about everyone at the CIA volunteered to go to Afghanistan immediately after 9/11. But these were the few who laid the groundwork to push out Al Qaeda from the country. Tune in tomorrow morning to John Kiriakou’s Briefing Room on YouTube for more on team JAWBREAKER.
Rhaenyra made the most perfect deal to Laenor and nobody talks about it.
The "goose vs duck" choice.
Marry me publicly.
You gets to live your life. I get heirs with Velaryon blood.
Both houses stay strong. The realm stays united behind Viserys' chosen heir.
That deal could've prevented the Dance.
Think about it:
*1. Her claim gets ironclad. Strong boys with Velaryon looks, a Targaryen name. No more "bastard" rumors sticking. The lords who swore to her in 105 AC have zero reason to doubt.
*2. The Velaryons stay 100% hers.
Corlys and Rhaenys have no reason to hedge bets. Driftmark, the fleet & their political weight all stay behind Rhaenyra.
*3. The Hightowers lose their main talking point "The children aren’t trueborn." Boom. Gone. War justification gone too.
All Laenor had to do was try & hit it once in two years. Give her 1-2 heirs just to secure the line. Then go back to Ser Qarl.
One awkward royal duty. Two years.
And maybe Westeros doesn’t burn for the next 20.
Instead we got war, dragons dying, and 2 sides tearing the realm apart... all because Laenor refused to make a simple sacrifice.
Was Rhaenyra too ahead of her time, or was the deal doomed from the start?
Nah, he was a bloodthirsty war mongerer, a shill for corporations and Israel who had him compromised because of his closeted homosexuality. The nation is better off without him
RIP Lindsay Graham
The internet will do what it always does: flatten a complicated human being into a villain, a meme, or a collection of his worst clips.
I understand why people disliked him. I disagreed with him plenty. But the man spent more than three decades in Congress and 33 years serving in the Air Force, Air National Guard, and Air Force Reserve.
He deserves a more honest accounting than “sycophant” or “warmonger.”
Graham was a serious public servant.
He came from a working class family in South Carolina, lost both parents while he was young, helped raise his younger sister, and became the first person in his family to attend college.
He served as a military lawyer, retired as a colonel, spent eight years in the House, and more than two decades in the Senate.
That does not make him correct. It does establish that his life was fundamentally organized around public service.
For much of his career, Graham was also the kind of senator people now claim they want. He was clearly conservative, but willing to work with Democrats.
He helped negotiate the Gang of 14 compromise on judicial nominations. He supported comprehensive immigration reform through the Gang of Eight. He repeatedly worked with Dick Durbin on the DREAM Act. He voted to confirm Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan because he believed a qualified president’s nominees generally deserved confirmation.
He took real political risk to solve problems. That matters.
He was also one of the Senate’s most engaged foreign policy voices. He understood alliances, knew foreign leaders, traveled to war zones, supported NATO, defended Ukraine, and believed America had obligations beyond its own borders.
His final public work involved meeting with President Zelenskyy in Kyiv and advancing bipartisan sanctions against Russia.
You can disagree with his worldview. I often did. But he treated foreign policy as a serious responsibility. Q
His shortcomings were also real.
Graham was too interventionist. His default answer to foreign policy failure was often more force, more troops, more sanctions, or more American involvement. He understood the costs of weakness better than he understood the costs of overreach.
His transformation from fierce Trump critic to loyal Trump ally badly damaged his credibility.
The charitable explanation is that he chose access and influence over irrelevance. The less charitable explanation is that he adapted to wherever Republican power moved.
Both are probably true.
Lindsey Graham was not a saint. He was inconsistent, overly hawkish, and sometimes far too willing to trade institutional credibility for political influence.
But he was not useless, stupid, or evil either.
He served his country for most of his adult life. He knew the Senate. He worked across the aisle. He attempted to solve immigration when both parties preferred weaponizing it.
He defended alliances when isolationism became fashionable. He remained engaged with the world until his final days.
My honest verdict is that Lindsey Graham was a flawed but net positive public servant.
A genuine institutionalist who became less institutional over time.
A knowledgeable foreign policy senator whose appetite for intervention often exceeded his strategic caution.
A conservative partisan who still understood that governing requires negotiation.
Criticize him honestly. He earned plenty of it.
But a country that cannot distinguish between a flawed public servant and a worthless one eventually stops producing public servants at all.
I write this to pay respect. Social media has created too many vile content creators who only see the bad. Want clicks. Let the man rest in peace and be honest about it. Hyperbole is just silly.
False. Washington and the continental army fought very little battle wise after the winter of valley forge/von Steuben training. And the one major battle they fought, Monmouth, was more of a draw than an outright victory. The war was won in the south woth guerilla tactics
The war was not won because we had irregulars and militias shooting behind trees, early on the continental army suffered numerous defeats. We won because Von Steuben and Washington turned the Continental Army into a disciplined fighting force that could stay organized and...
@FreeThrowEmo Yall, I appreciate the invite. Unfortunately I'll be at the racetrack trying to get another win that night.
What's on the playlist? My favs are:
Same Drugs
Kim Tastie
Two Beers In
Yall have a great show and I'll try to catch one down the road!
1. Every person with a job should have money in the stock market. We all start somewhere. I had a negative net worth at 32, two kids and was making $45k a year. 2. If you are able bodied and don’t have a job, that’s on you. Stop whining and start working.
The S&P 500 just hit an all time record high of 7200. Congrats to all of you who buy and hold, stocks are up over 2000 points since last April when the “experts” told you the economy was collapsing.
Dan Bongino tells Sean Hannity he will never be the same after serving as FBI Deputy Director.
He admits he’s terrified about the possibility of a weaponized FBI coming for him after Democrats regain power.
BONGINO: “I will never be the same and I’m being as serious as a stroke right now.”
“I’m really...I’m scared man. I know what I did and I’m proud of my work.”
“And I’m proud of what me and Kash accomplished in the past year, beyond proud.”
“I know what we did, I know what’s coming, I know what I started...but don’t think for a second that I don’t think everyday...that they’re going to come for me.”
We’re very lucky the shooter waited to storm the dinner until after everyone was seated inside. There was no requirement to go through metal detectors to enter the hotel last night or to attend any of the parties before the dinner in the hotel. He could have killed a ton of people, including cabinet members, if he’d attacked an hour earlier.
I’m officially convinced. It was a hoax. The Trump Administration recruited a leftist Kamala Harris voting Trump hater to participate in a staged assassination that would include the shooter getting shot at and then locked in federal prison for the rest of his life. The Kamala Harris voter agreed to this plan, that works against his political and personal interests, because he’s just like a really generous guy. Meanwhile the Trump Administration, despite dastardly planning multiple assassination hoaxes, decided to keep their patsy alive and a permanent liability to them, rather than just killing him like they could have easily done. They did this because they also are really strangely generous in a very odd and specific way. So in summary we have a plot where all parties involved are working against their own interests with no real discernible benefit to any of them. There is no evidence of this plan and it doesn’t even make any intuitive sense and the motives for everyone are unclear if not insane, but still I believe it because I’m a very smart person.
Laughing at all you morons who whined about “war crimes” who didn’t realize that threatening to commit nuclear genocide was just a sick ass negotiating tactic even though it gained us nothing, and revealed us to be a nation of godless cowards. Y’all have TDS or something.
Toodles!
I’m frequently disappointed in politicians but Tom Massie defied the odds in my unfortunate experiences with him, as he surpassed my lowest expectations.
This zero pretends to be a principled defender of liberty but, in the real world, he supports third-world tyranny.
Here are the receipts from a phone call I had with this zero offering him a briefing on multiple investigations he was inserting himself into by publicly commenting on them. Rather than affording the subjects of the cases their constitutional Right to due process, Massie chose to waive off the briefing and litigate it on X for clicks. Notice I tried to call him back but he wasn’t interested in facts.
It’s also of note that I never heard a single word from Massie during the process we engaged in to release the Epstein case docs. This process played out in media everywhere and yet Massie never reached out. Not once. It’s almost as if he wants to be a moron. As if ignorance is bliss for him. I’m horrified I once believed this guy was authentic.
For fucks sakes people, they are all in the files, that’s why no one is being brought down over it. Democrats can’t bring trump down over the files because they would have to bring down their own, the same way trump can’t go after democrats for it.
I’m done with the whole “Trump is a pedo because he’s in the files” nonsense. It’s over for me. Common sense tells me that if he was involved with Epstein, we would have known about it years ago. Think about it. The tried to incarcerate him, slander him, fleece him of his finances, kill him… So if he was involved with Epstien’s crimes, they would have definitely used this. Now all they have is AI generated images that people keep circling around, and an accusation that lacked any proof or merit from a victim they can’t even find or are even sure she is who she says she is. So with that, I can breathe knowing the person I elected is not a monster who hurt children. My beef with Trump is the fact that there are no prosecutions of those involved. I won’t let that go. Ever.
No one cares what you have to say eyepatch John McCain. The people voted you out. Go get your back blown out with your fellow closeted shill buddy Lindsey graham.
Tucker likes to have friendly conversations with bad people. When he realizes that he’s talking to Iranian intelligence officials that we already collect on, he pretends to be a victim of “spying.” He’s an idiot, and he thinks you’re an idiot too.
You always need a warrant to “wire tap” any American citizen. Full stop.
But if you’re communicating with a criminal and that criminal’s phone is tapped (because a judge authorized it), then your conversation is now part of that investigation. If the police also want to tap *your* phone, they would need a warrant.
FISA is no different.
Tucker knows all this but his favorite grift is to play the victim. I’m surprised he hasn’t blamed the Jews yet. Give it time.
Like everyone, I am heartbroken to hear of another fallen service member as a result of Operation Epic Fury, which was designed to end the Iranian regime’s reign of terror on the world. Just as with the other fallen, these brave Americans paid the ultimate sacrifice to take down one of the most barbaric regimes in the world.
This is a reminder of the steep cost of freedom and being able to live without fear. May God keep all the fallen close and heal the wounded.
*mouth full of big arch*
"So anyways, like I was saying. Trump says the war will be over in a matter of days, and even if it's not, they had nukes and were going to attack america, and even if thats not true, we had to do it because they were gonna genocide the jews"
*takes a drink of diet coke*
"And anyways, they have been killing 6 million Americans a year since 1979. That fat cat dude in the cowboy hat on twitter told me and he's always been right. He has a direct line to Trump"
*stuffs face full of fries*
"There won't be any boots on the ground. That Larry Loomer Transguy told me. Trump is too smart for that. MAGA is a movement of smart people who were fed up with the Democrats lying"
*shoves an entire McDonald's apple pie up ass*
"You just gotta trust the plan. Its all 5D chess bro. We can't be concerned with mass immigration and child sex changes right now. We have to take out Iran. They hate us for our freedoms"