Iowa Republicans know for a fact that the Nazis, aka National Socialist Workers Party, were Commie Liberals just like Obummer and Hitlery.
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Just read Josh’s latest. He calls Carson “Chauncey Gardner-esque.”
!!!
Pitch perfect.
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The stuff nightmares are made of. Is that drool? [shudder]
Presidents Rick Santorum and Mike Huckabee both endorse Carson’s sure fire path to the Oval Office like they rode to victory in their respective campaigns that made them President.
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"I recently finished the book “No Better Friend” about a British POW and the remarkable dog he befriended. There was a great deal in the book about the horrific treatment of POW’s by the Japanese as well as their wholesale slaughter of Chinese and any other civilians they could find in the countries they invaded. It was a hard book to read as are other books that cover the inhuman treatment typical of the Japanese soldiers. American attention was mostly on the horrific crimes of the Nazi’s but the Japanese were every bit as bad if not worse. They refused to sign on to the Geneva conventions so felt no compunction to treat civilians, prisoners like human beings. Their corrupt government had prepared the Japanese citizens to fight to the last woman and child to protect their islands. By the end of the book the dropping of the bombs made a lot more sense. It seemed to be the only way to convince the leaders of Japan to surrender.
Huh?
Yet President Obama won Iowa, twice.
In fact he won in Iowa by a 5.81% margin in 2012 which was an even larger margin than his win in the state in 2008.
Exactly. Beat me to it. That was a real head-scratcher and what prompted my “huh?” comment to Sooner.
Granted I don’t think Sooner thinks this, but man, the disconnect of the people he is talking about is amazing.
I’d like to give Ben Carson and all the Republican voters in Iowa a map of the world. I’ll bet you $50 that less than a third of the group can correctly point to Germany on their first try.
If that turns out to be the fun I think it will, we’ll give all the Republican primary candidates a map of the world. I’ll give you $100 for every one who can point to Ukraine on the first try, if you give me $100 for every one who can’t. Same bet for Syria, and after that I’ll buy everyone dinner since those who bet on the Republicans will be broke.
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Well, they did pick a “winner” in W. Bush.
But yeah, they backed a loser in the GOP primary every other year going back to 1976.
That’s the way she and other evangelicals view Carson. They see him as having become successful all on his lonesome without any assistance
What a dumbfuck argument.
The dropping o the bombs in WWII was the correct decision.
Exactly.
steviedee111’s comment is untethered to reality, context or any grasp of just how divesting the war was using conventional bombing. The atomic bombing of two cities in Japan essentially cauterized and quickly ended the most devastating war in human history.
Finding, staggering into, whatever!
Well it is disputed in some quarters as to the range, but horrid is correct that half a million allied causalities alone was the generally accepted figure and that was on the low side of other estimates.
I doubt doubt that they may think that. But that level of blindness and ignorance of how Carson got in medical school, and he and his family taking public assistance to help him be successful is amazing. I hope you disabused them of this notion by gently pointing this out to them.
Impossible to school them. Whenever I try they start screaming about Hitlery. It’s beyond amusing.
Iowa republicans=knuckle dragging idiots
There are dozens of well researched books and papers by respected, impartial scholars that have reviewed reams of evidence and historical records regarding the atomic bombings. A great many of these vociferously dispute the commonly accepted narrative those acts ended the war with Japan. If what I write is unhinged I’m in the very good company of a great many historians and military experts having expressed the same sentiments. Guilty as charged.
The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey group, assigned by President Truman to study the air attacks on Japan, produced a report in July of 1946 that concluded (52-56):
Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey’s opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945 and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.
General (and later president) Dwight Eisenhower – then Supreme Commander of all Allied Forces, and the officer who created most of America’s WWII military plans for Europe and Japan – said:
The Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.
Newsweek, 11/11/63, Ike on Ike
Eisenhower also noted (pg. 380):
In [July] 1945… Secretary of War Stimson, visiting my headquarters in Germany, informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act. …the Secretary, upon giving me the news of the successful bomb test in New Mexico, and of the plan for using it, asked for my reaction, apparently expecting a vigorous assent.
During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of ‘face’. The Secretary was deeply perturbed by my attitude….
Admiral William Leahy – the highest ranking member of the U.S. military from 1942 until retiring in 1949, who was the first de facto Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and who was at the center of all major American military decisions in World War II – wrote (pg. 441):
It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons.
The lethal possibilities of atomic warfare in the future are frightening. My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.
General Douglas MacArthur agreed (pg. 65, 70-71):
MacArthur’s views about the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were starkly different from what the general public supposed …. When I asked General MacArthur about the decision to drop the bomb, I was surprised to learn he had not even been consulted. What, I asked, would his advice have been? He replied that he saw no military justification for the dropping of the bomb. The war might have ended weeks earlier, he said, if the United States had agreed, as it later did anyway, to the retention of the institution of the emperor.
Moreover (pg. 512):
The Potsdam declaration in July, demand[ed] that Japan surrender unconditionally or face ‘prompt and utter destruction.’ MacArthur was appalled. He knew that the Japanese would never renounce their emperor, and that without him an orderly transition to peace would be impossible anyhow, because his people would never submit to Allied occupation unless he ordered it. Ironically, when the surrender did come, it was conditional, and the condition was a continuation of the imperial reign. Had the General’s advice been followed, the resort to atomic weapons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki might have been unnecessary.
Similarly, Assistant Secretary of War John McLoy noted (pg. 500):
I have always felt that if, in our ultimatum to the Japanese government issued from Potsdam [in July 1945], we had referred to the retention of the emperor as a constitutional monarch and had made some reference to the reasonable accessibility of raw materials to the future Japanese government, it would have been accepted. Indeed, I believe that even in the form it was delivered, there was some disposition on the part of the Japanese to give it favorable consideration. When the war was over I arrived at this conclusion after talking with a number of Japanese officials who had been closely associated with the decision of the then Japanese government, to reject the ultimatum, as it was presented. I believe we missed the opportunity of effecting a Japanese surrender, completely satisfactory to us, without the necessity of dropping the bombs.
Under Secretary of the Navy Ralph Bird said:
I think that the Japanese were ready for peace, and they already had approached the Russians and, I think, the Swiss. And that suggestion of [giving] a warning [of the atomic bomb] was a face-saving proposition for them, and one that they could have readily accepted.
To assert my remarks are "untethered to reality" flies in the face of the very fact so many agree with me. Untethered indeed.
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Ok not a historian, however it is correct that the estimates bandied about in the press and some Pentagon circles were indeed 500,000 to 1,000,000. Perhaps I wasn’t clear - the disputed fact is whether we needed to drop the atomic bombs to avoid an invasion, not the estimated # of casualties which interestingly, Gen. Marshall(!) was extremely skeptical of.