It was the first time I was able to vote and I unfortunately fell for my dad's spiel of "You don't switch horses in the middle of the race." Race here meaning "war."
In the US, people don't eat horse meat, so old horses are made into dog food. There's a code for it in the ingredient list so the humans don't realize. Dogs don't care.
Horses moved from being a utility/livestock animal to a pet in the minds of most Westerners after automobiles replaced them for transportation and farmwork (counting tractors as automotives here). They're only even "pets" for upper-class folks most of the time, but business doesn't want to offend their sensibilities or some shit.
The same can be said of rabbits, people definitely don't eat as much rabbit anymore. It's just not a meat you buy at the grocery store, you have to hunt it. So now lots of non-rural places, at least in the States, they're seen as pets or pests. They can also carry a disease communicable to humans so with the overabundance of factory farming animals they aren't really desired as meat, most game meat isn't even eaten all that much outside rural areas anymore anyway.
Horse meat became illegal for human consumption in the US because of the amount of people trying to slip old race horses in for slaughter as a way to recoup the loss of a racehorse being too old to continue racing and what not. which led to food full of steroids and all sorts of other shit that isn't allowed in animals raised for human consumption. They found it easier to just ban horse meat than they did to try and create oversight.
Horse is tasty. Kind of like Bison tho where if you cook it wrong eating a shoe would be less difficult. You gotta add fat and go with the adage of 'low and slow'. Good flavor though.
I'm an American, but I travel often. Went to Iceland and had grilled horse steaks. They needed more seasonings than beef steak as the meat is very lean. Tasted good nonetheless.
Last time in Japan I had horse sashimi, don't recommend that one, as the same lack-of-flavor issue applies. It was interesting to try anyways.
Also the antibiotics they give horses have some really nasty interactions with the human body and when combined with a lot of meds give you an autoimmune disorder. This can be fixed by cooking the everloving shit out of the meat which humans find, to put it simply, unappetizing. Dogs don't give a flying fuck if you overcooked your meat into the driest toughest shit imaginable so it goes to them because if you blended meat into a fine paste then formed tiny balls and cooked them off again you can't sell that shit to humans.
True. In reality though, some of the same antibiotics are given to animals humans do eat! Not everybody follow the rules, and the rules aren't all that great to start with.
I know, right? I can never find horse meat with the people food, but they're just gonna stick it in pet food like some common ground cartilage meal? Where the fuck is MY horsemeat?!
Philippines and France are two off the top of my head. It MAY be illegal in PH now, I'm not sure. But that didn't stop it from being served when I was there.
The horse was also so crippled by alcoholism that he was unable to drink a beer with anyone. Inexplicably 25% of America decided this was the guy “they could have a beer with” and voted based on that metric??! Strange that.
Yes. We learned that regardless of whether we are in a race or not sometimes it is necessary to stop the horse, dismount, quietly lead the horse behind the shed, and shoot it for the safety of ourselves and all the other horses. Sadly, we can’t seem to get the horse to give up the gun and the metaphor is starting to fall apart.
there's a funny/sad SNL skit about this, what if Gore won the election...he's giving his state of the union speech, saying things like, "we've stopped global warming, now we have to worry about all the glaciers getting too big"
Trump didn't have a track record though, and some people thought "What's the worst that could happen?" With DeSantis we know exactly what kind of president he'd be.
Yes, but if Dems won all the time they couldn't have a boogieman and they'd be to blame for all the shit they want to give corporations and the rich. Even when they control everything they have some bad Dems like these two that vote against the party.
Same here. 6 months after the election my best friend was killed along with another Marine in Iraq. Would he still be alive had Kerry won? I don't know, I'd like to think maybe. But hindsight is 20/20 and I supported a lot of stupid shit back then.
Not really. FDR died in office and his VP took over. I guess yeah, the administration definitely did change, but not as much as switching parties would.
And FDR died less than a month before Nazi Germany surrendered and like four days before the Battle of Berlin started. And just under two weeks into the Battle of Okinawa. The war had already been decided at that point.
Lol my dad tried the same shit with me at the time; it was my first election that I could vote in as well. I laughed at him and said I looked forward to canceling out his vote. Even then I knew that the Iraq War was a bunch of BS and that Bush was a lying sack of shit. I had the mentality of, "Kerry may or may not be any better but at least it's not Bush".
Yeah, 2004 was a shitshow. Because of what happened then, I was never surprised by Trump's win in 2016.
I don't think it matters what side of the aisle you're on politically, but George W. Bush and Tony Blair were both reelected after every reasonable voter knew they and their governments lied to justify the illegal invasion of Iraq. They were not held accountable for their actions.
I’m so glad the up-and-coming generations are getting politically active at a younger age because my first election I voted in I didn’t know what I was doing either.
The swiftboat thing was utterly absurd, looking on from Europe. A guy who lead men in the Vietnam War, getting three (!) Purple Hearts for it, was portrayed as a weak coward, while his draft-dodging opponent was portrayed as a hero.
And he didn't draft dodge for noble and moral reasons, like being against the war or refusing to kill.
Honestly I wouldn't have issue with Trump or any American draft dodging Vietnam if they then didn't go on to be a chicken hawk and try to build a tough guy warrior brand. If you're going to be an authoritarian who advocates for war, at least walk the walk first.
I'm a combat veteran who also fought in a stupid, pointless war (Iraq).
I'd respect the hell out of anyone who said,
"I did not want to go to Vietnam. It seemed like a pointless waste of lives and unfortunately our government had draconian laws that would screw you for life if you stood up against the war and refused to be conscripted, like what the government did to Muhammad Ali. My family pulled some strings and I did not go. It does keep me up at night sometimes knowing some poor kid from the ghetto or the barrio or the trailer park went in my place and may have died. And as your president, I will think of that Unknown Soldier every time before I commit troops to combat."
I was working HVAC that year and guy I worked for would blast Rush Limbaugh in his truck all day. Dude was also a vet and I asked him about this very point. He thought it was funny that you could be a war hero and still be called a pussy.
Sometimes even Limbaugh would go too far and he'd change the station.
Well he has three daughters now and women aren't people anymore, they're baby incubators, so I'm sure that joke was hilarious.
He wasn't the worst president in history. At least two other Republicans were worse (Reagan, Trump)
Edit: see, the fun part was I said at least two other Republicans. They have made horrible presidents so many times that of course there would be more.
I'm with you on Jackson and Johnson but can you elaborate on
Wilson: Literally every single foreign policy entanglement America presently strains under and that it had strained under over the past over a hundred years now can be traced back to how this fucklenut conducted himself about WWI
Not saying I disagree or anything--I'm not super into US history so I don't know what you're referring to and I'm interested. I can sort of see how the League of Nations could be interpreted as the beginning of a new age of Western control over the world, but maybe you're thinking more specifically?
I don't know, he actually got a shit ton of people killed and also paved the path for ISIS to be formed who killed even more people. Trump's international damage is nowhere near close.
Trump normalized white supremacy for a lot of Americans. Let go it was already widespread but now it is officially considered 'normal' among Republicans. It will take some time to undo that.
I was on active duty training up to go to Iraq when that came out. I can't believe anyone took those assholes seriously for more than ten minutes when...
Not one of them said a peep while Kerry was in Congress for decades
When Kerry was involved in Vietnam Veterans Against the War, Nixon's goons looked into his service record and couldn't find any dirt. Fucking sleazier than Nixon.
Most of them never served with Kerry. They were either in other units hundreds of miles away, or in Vietnam at a different time.
It came down to like three out of the dozen or so actually served with Kerry.
One: Basically said he had no firsthand knowledge but another Swifty (who was conveniently dead) said so. Super weird how there was no casualties or boat losses on the "disastrous mission" this guy talked about.
Two: His version of another "Lt. Kerry disaster" was contradicted by about five other people. Including the trapped Army Green Berets they were sent in to rescue. "If Kerry was incompetent and fled the battle early...how on Earth am I standing here?"
Three: Claimed Kerry's Bronze Star was horseshit because there was no hostile fire on the mission. When it was pointed out that he had ALSO received a Bronze Star for valor under fire during that same patrol, he was asked if he would forfeit his own "bullshit" Bronze Star. He refused.
Like someone else mentioned...they didn't even release a statement or give a token appearance to protest Kerry being made Obama's Sec. of State.
At the time I thought it was insane that people would still support Bush after going into Iraq. It was pretty obvious to me, and should have been to anyone paying attention, that invading Iraq was nothing more than a pet project for Bush/Cheney. The reasoning for invading them was completely disingenuous. I thought it couldn't get much worse than Bush. I couldn't have been more wrong.
never forget the largest defense corporations (raytheon, lockheed, boeing, haliburton and the ones that bush and cheney were invested in) all increased their share prices by 1000% at some point during the wars.
they grifted the nation, murdered a million+, carted off TRILLIONS of middle class wealth, all while riding a wave of nationalism which eventually became maga.
Don't forget that the right really played up the social issues in 2004 too. It might be hard to remember, but people were a lot less comfortable with gay marriage back then. Bush might have got a lot of votes that weren't necessarily a referendum on the war, but from fear over rapid change. Even when Obama first ran in 2008, he wasn't openly supporting gay marriage yet. Biden actually came out in support of that ahead of him (though not by very long).
I felt like I was going crazy at the time. Why were heading to Iraq? WTF di that have to do with anything? But everyone else seemed to understand something I didn't, and at the time I was so hella busy that I could barely pay attention to the world around me outside my major.
Then I watched some report thing on how Bush/Cheney used a childish word association that planted in people's heads the idea that Iraq and Afghanistan were linked despite no real reason to think so, and I never underestimated American stupidity again. I don't think I realized before that people wanted to stick their head in the sand.
Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, etc...... should be in prison right now. How many needless deaths, how much ptsd, how many maimed soldiers? For what? Oil? revenge for Bush senior? It certainly wasn't because they hated us for our freedom. Not to mention the fucking "Patriot" Act.
having been there 03-04 I can say I didn't meet a single iraqi that was not happy we came in and removed saddam. The dude was unstable, physically harmful to his own people and would flip his decisions day to day on international policy.
He was just itching to go off again unless he was kept contained, and even then he just started locking the doors and not letting the UN in anymore, because he kept starting fights with his neighbors and escalating the warfare we were having to do checks. Whether it would be as bad as he had been capable before, probably not. But everyone was happy he was gone, foreign and domestic. Yeah "the lie" to go in was icing on the cake, the US wasn't the only one that was just a nudge away from stepping in. Iraq at the time had similarities to N korea without the Chinese protection.
What I was told the most was to stay out of their problems. Fix the roads we fucked up, get some schools and infrastructure running while we scoured the countryside, and even I feel we should have been on our way. Trying to make it a beacon of democracy was the bad play. Honestly, I feel if we had captured/killed BL much quicker in the war we wouldn't have had much leverage to stay, but probably would have found a reason.
How did any of the hundreds of thousands that died feel about our presence? Was Saddam a piece of shit? Yes. Was that our job to take care of? Are there plenty of other piece of shit dictators out there? Yes. Why didn't we oust them as well?
They had a hard decision to make and ultimately decided the fairest way to call the election was to determine which candidate's brother was the governor of Florida.
Don’t forget the NYTimes and Washington Post sitting on the illegal warantless wiretapping stories for one year until after the election. https://www.salon.com/2006/08/14/times_24/
Yeah and tbf 3 years removed from 9/11, the population was still overwhelmingly dead-set on blowing shit up on a global scale, and Bush was seen as the obv choice there
Hindsight being what it was, those were horrific mistakes but there were only a very select few calling for calm at the time
I told my work group at the time that I voted Democrat and they all made fun of me. 6 months later they were apologizing to me and wished they had done the same. Of course they are all probably still voting Republican today.
And don't forget the bonus points for being an incumbent. Very rarely does an incumbent running for re-election lose their re-election. So 2004 barely feels like it counts.
Well and the entire country was led to believe we were avenging 9/11. It was a weird time. Bush and Rudy seemed like they were great leaders. People look for leaders in scary times, it allows us to be fooled. Kind of like Cuomo during Covid.
And we were all feeling pretty fucking jingoistic.
Remember when the Dixie Chicks said “fuck George bush” and got full on, truly, actually cancelled? Like had to go into hiding because of the death threats cancelled?
We didn’t care who was being bombed in the Middle East at the time, we just wanted Arab-ish blood to be spilled. A really dark time for the American psyche looking back.
As a Liberal from Massachusetts… he IS an insufferable douche. He’s one of those guys you want as a Senator being an insufferable douche, but maybe not President
George, with advice from his staff, started that war as part of his 2004 campaign strategy.
You'll find that boomers (my peers) and the old folks (my parents generation) at that time had this residual belief that you shouldn't change Presidents during a war. I was surprised at how many times I heard that excuse for re-electing Bush from people during the 2004 Presidential campaign.
I think the logic is partly residual from Roosevelt's campaigns during WW2, and partly something to blame Vietnam on as that war raged through two to four Presidential terms, depending on what you consider the beginning of our involvement, and really did not end well.
The hilarious part (not really) is that Dubya's opponent was an actual decorated combat veteran and Navy officer, and the GOP smeared the shit out of his name by paying some asshat to write a book that claimed Kerry's war record in Vietnam was fabricated. Then, of course, that was regurgitated by Fox News and spread throughout media.
Good old, "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth." The GOP has employed lies, misinformation, and plain old fabricated character assassination in campaigning for quite some time now. That it keeps working is a real testament to the ignorance of their base of support.
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u/Zealousideal_Fuel_23 May 26 '23
2004 election was held during the 4 months that the Iraq War appeared to be going well.