America Worst

Long before Orange Foolius and his gang of GQP nitwits adopted it, the slogan "America First" was the boast of another gang of fascist-fluffing traitors.

That would be Charles "Lucky Lindy" Lindbergh and the original, isolationist version.

The Wiki entry at the link cited claims that most of the Forties Firsters were genuine isolationists who didn't want the nation to get involved in "foreign wars".

That's fine. I'm all for not getting involved in other people's wars, or wars, period, if it comes to that.

On the other hand, there are some people who have some ideas or goals rotten enough that only killing enough of them will stop them, and those people will force wars on you whether that's a good idea or not.

The bulk of the original Firsters recognized that; the outfit killed itself on December 11, 1941 when it became brutally obvious who those really rotten people were. 

That brings us to the ongoing war in Ukraine.

I'm not going to make a case for war. Or that war. Or for Americans to fight, kill, and die in that, or any war not forced upon us.

If I was going to make that argument I'd be learning Ukrainian on my way to volunteer to run a battery fire direction center for Сухопу́тні військá Збрóйних сил Украї́ни. 

I'm not, and so I refuse to be a hypocrite and cheer for other people's sons and daughters to go and fight.

But.

There doesn't seem to be any gray area on which side as Americans we should be fighting for if it comes to fighting, and it sure as fuck isn't Vlad Putin and his gang. My compa the Rude Pundit pretty much sums it up:

"Here's the thing: I've been watching the United States fund bullshit fascists and totalitarians my entire fucking life. In Latin America, in Africa, in the Middle East, this country has provided arms and money to the worst goddamn people and the most worthless causes. We've funded mercenaries and weapons manufacturers. We've funded crazed terrorists by calling them "insurgents" and funded evil militaries crushing freedom-fighting insurgents. 

What Zelensky did was say to us, to we who live in this goddamned ludicrously powerful country in this goddamned ludicrously debased age, that we're supposed to represent some fucking ideals to the rest of the world. Look, Zelensky said, your mythology is based on real shit that happened, real battles with real lives and real consequences. Now we have this battle against this enemy. The consequences for failure would be genocide and expanded aggression by the lunatic Putin. For the US to walk away would be shameful. It would make us an accessory to mass murder, even more than we usually are."

Yes. Ohhellyes.

We now have the same choice that We the People faced in 1939. Do we help out the dictator whose people will - who are - cheerfully butchering anyone in their conquests they can catch? Or do we help the people fighting those sonsofbitches?

It's not really a hard choice.

The Ukrainians don't have to be great. And they aren't; there's a lot of post-Soviet fuckery there.

But they sure as Hell are better than the actual Putin-led post-Soviets.

And that brings me to the Latter-Day America Firsters.

That's a couple of them there; January 6th traitors; Matt Gaetz and Lauren "I luv gunz" Boebert during the speech that the ;leader of Ukraine gave to the joint session of Congress. The Wordle of that day must have been a real toughie; both the little rascals are still glued to their phones during the applause lines. 

But that's just another day at the shop for the New Firsters. It's part of their job as the Putin Wing of the GQP, to stan for a criminal fascist.

Well, hell; if you're gonna rep for Donald Trump, how is Putin a stretch?

Look. There's no such thing as a "good war". I can certainly understand being on the fence about, say, the war in Yemen. There's a lot of bad and no real good options there. Most wars are a choice between worse and even worse.

But here?

Fuck that noise.

We shipped millions of tanks and trucks to that rotten bastard Stalin to beat that rotten-er bastard, Hitler because it was in our national interest.

To send arms and ammo to Zelensky - who is not anywhere near as rotten as Stalin - to beat that rotten bastard Putin is a no-brainer.

Unless you're a MAGAt-loving, QAnon-huffing, Putin-fluffing GOP shitweasel.

Like these two and the other Firsters, the Cosplay Mossy Oak Militia (thanks, Jim Wright!) and all the other Putin Fanbois?

You know how I keep saying these people are traitors?

Well, if you were an original Firster and you still had your Adolf poster up on the wall on December 12?

Yeah. You were a traitor.

Who's gonna tell these people about that?

Their domestic policies, such as they are, are enough to make me loathe them. But to prefer a brutal foreign dictator over a flawed but still-better polity that dictator is invading?

The new Firsters are...what their Adolf-loving predecessors were. 

I'll let the Rude One see me out here:

"That's why the conservatives who dangle from Putin's taint hair went crazy. It's because they say constantly that the United States is the greatest country in the history of everything. They say all the time that we are something special. And we're saying, and Zelensky is imploring, that we fucking well act like it once in a while. Sometimes even a superpower has to put the fuck up or shut the fuck up."