Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for November 23, 2010

Of course they ordered it online because the local overseas exchanges won’t carry it because it is too controversial. Not that the overseas exchanges ever exhibit much common sense.

Yeah, yeah you soldier boys have your little FPS game, when Cata comes out you won’t see me till the flowers starting blooming again.

For those of you who weren’t around, I’d just like to emphasize that the Cold War was a war, and we did win it.

In my day, the prizes were Nikon Cameras and gargantuan Sansui reseivers.

Clark, the fact that you are typing in English says otherwise, although perhaps that is indeed what you’re disappointed about.

I would think that we could all agree that it was better to win that war by shedding dollars, not blood. The word Win should be in capitals, and every president from Roosevelt to Reagan should take credit for it.

WEEKEND? When I was in the sandtrap all I got was Friday mornings off! Then it was back to work. Most days were 12 hour shifts.

the pathos of the young, young, young troops hungry for the nice, safe fantasy war on the screen. it’s heartbreaking. yer killin me gt.

12 hour shifts, and you bleeep well better be ready for extra duty if something goes down.

Only 12? You got off easy. Many are 18 with no days off…. until that all too short leave back home.

nannybot bleeeped dog-adam-robert-nancy. Cannot bleeeping believe it.

I like the “Who’s this Castro dude?” “Kids” in my husband’s college English class don’t know who Pete Seeger is. And one young woman in his class is pregnant by a husband in the service who has been “deployed” twice and she’s so proud of it….

who’s Pete Seeger?

….and sgtsaunders, be careful around helicopters. you might get a head of yourself!

Bring It On, take two:

the pin-ball alleys are where the recruiters find new cannonfodder….nothing says “manhood” like an assault weapon…..boys will be boys, and many of these boys will be cut down before they get to Men.

remembering that GWBushJr. quote to the press corp while teeing off at Kennebunkport, Maine, refering to a suicide bombing in Israel:

“I call upon all nations to do everything they can to stop these terrorist killers. Thank you. Now watch this drive.”

nighthawks, you’re kidding, right? Peter Seeger is a folk singer who used to sing in the 40s and 50s with The Weavers. He’s an icon of American music, winner of several Grammys, in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and is still at 91, a vital and active performer. He’s also an environmental activist, one of the people responsible for getting the Hudson River cleaned up. I met him last year at a conference, and he’s just a delightful man.

^They ran out of money. See Charlie Wilson’s War.

sandfan: yeah, we won the Cold War, and from the standpoint of the Military-Industrial Complex, that’s the biggest mistake we made. The subsequent “hot” wars haven’t been nearly as profitable. Seriously. The Cold War was a golden age for defense contractors: you were building incredibly complicated, incredibly costly stuff, most of the contracts were “cost-plus,” which meant the more you spent (or wasted), the more you made, and best of all, the stuff didn’t even have to work! There was no way something like the “Star Wars” system could be tested in a real combat situation (what with the test ban treaty and all), and anyway the reality of nuclear war was that if your expensive system didn’t work, there wouldn’t be a Congress left to investigate you after war’s end anyway. From the standpoint of boondoggle, it was heaven. A “hot” war, where money that should be going to shareholders and executives must instead be thrown away on feeding, housing and healing soldiers, and where there’s a real risk that you’ll do something and it won’t work, is nowhere near as nice. That’s probably the reason behind the whole flap over Georgia (the one in Europe) a couple years back–an obvious attempt to re-start the Cold War.

These young soldiers, when they hear old-timers like us discuss Castro and Russia and the Cold War, are likely to think our lingering paranoia is a sign of ODD (“oppositional defiant disorder”).

What used to be called “the Cold War mentality” has been given that new label by the American Psychiatric Association, in the latest edition of their Diagnostic and Statistic Manual of Mental Disorders (the notorious DSM). See this article at

http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/people-who-resist-authority-stand-privacy-cou

Very interesting, palin. But let’s not forget that this is the same APA that for decades labled homosexuality as a mental disorder in that same DSM.

According to the article, anyone who “questions authority is now considered mentally ill”. Could you imagine Glen Beck, Bill Maher, Rush Limbaugh, and Barack Obama sharing a room in the same psych ward?

The cold war was never won. Look at the headlines for today. N. Korea is gradually warming things up. Didn’t President Eisenhower end that war long ago? Senator Voinovich assured me that N. Korea posed no threat to anyone.

If you consider winning a war being the real end to hostilities, Vietnam was won – although who knows who won it. The Vietnamese got their own country, they got rid of the French and the Americans, and the Chinese leave them alone. We got the right to bring our bodies home, when we can find them.

Although maybe when it comes to WW2, the Allies won the war but the Axis won the peace, because Germany, Italy, and Japan have all been better off in the generations following than they were before. We won the right to invest American money in those countries, and we won the right to have Germany and Japan beat the pants off us in the international marketplace in the end. And they all have better health care for all residents than we do.

How can anyone claim to have won Korea when all that resulted was the DMZ, a standoff, and North Korea filled with people who have been brutalized for 60 years?

World War I’s victory led so directly to World War II that you might as well consider them one way. Nobody won WWI.

Anyone who thinks the North won the Civil War has been living in a dream world. Here’s what the south got: it got rid of the northern occupation, it got lots of military bases built nearby and has had federal dollars pouring in ever since, it continued to have the right to treat the former slaves like, well, slaves. The North got the right to foot the bill, which it’s been doing for 140 years. This is victory?

Well, maybe federal troops won the Blackhawk War and other Indian Wars. That was good: the US won the right to brutalize, in an ongoing mode, the hundreds of thousands whose people were here before Europeans – and confiscate all they owned. Now that was a victory that all the Euro-Americans benefited from! We can be so proud of it.

“The DFAC’s deserted today! What strange fresh h3ll must they be serving today?”

On the bright side, it looks like these two have become Bravo Foxtrot Foxtrots again.

Good thing, too. They may be “minding the store” by themselves for a while.

Does anyone remember when Space Invaders was considered to be highly addictive?

Jeeze, people, it’s only a comic strip even if it has a political slant. Do we need diatribes in the guise of history lessons from a bunch of question marks?

Just a note folks - the Korean “Police Action” never ended. They signed a “Truce” at the 38th Parallel, which just means that both sides agreed to stop shooting. As strange as it may seem, either side could decide to break that “Truce”, start shooting again, and it would still be the same war.

The gameboard mentality keeps us at war. “You’re with us, or against us.” As the USSR disintegrated, evidence surfaced showing the Russians were bluff to keep up, with very little in the way of real intentions to invade anybody after WWII.

But the testosterone fueled need to have a BIG enemy, so that one can be a BIG hero, keeps the military industrial complex churning out profits year after year, gives the politicians a bogeyman to scare people into supporting insane expenditures for bigger and bigger defense systems, and siphons off cash into black holes so that the privately owned fractional reserve money creation machine can pump money/credit out out at a high rate in a volatile economic environment —which only benefits the big players.

Hell yeah, the Giants Won, fbjsr.

DFac? What happened to the time honored term of mess hall?

We won the Cold War? Go try out your English language in Moscow and see how far it gets you.

Nobody won the Cold War; the USSR just lost sooner than we did.

count, it became a DFac when its operation was taken over by civilians and contract personnel instead of military folks. Still gotta have a military cook or two to supervise, but those contractors don’t get government bennies.