re: #131 CuriousLurker

I’m effing confused. If this Newsweek profile is to be believed, Sirota is nothing but a yappy little ankle-biting progressive political operative who makes money by sliming people and creating distractions.

But wait—wasn’t his pal Greenwald just bitching about AIPAC this morning? Weird, because Sirota’s own book describes how he worked for them back in the ’90s when he moved to D.C. (Naturally, he claims things were different then—it not yet the neoconservative war-mongering organization that the Bush administration turned it into. //)

WTF? These people are all so full of shit. I don’t believe for a second that any of these dudebros give a damn about privacy, or Snowden, or dead Muslims kids, or anything beyond their own bank accounts and massive egos.

>*Ka-ching!* Hey Eddie, has it dawned on you yet that your pals are nothing but a bunch well-educated of carnival barkers who’ll drop you the instant you cease being profitable to them in one way or another?

He wrote this about Vietnam veterans.

Legend of spat-upon veterans is merely a myth of war

Out of all the status-quo-sustaining fables we create out of military history, few are as enduring as Vietnam War myths. Desperate to cobble a pro-war cautionary tale out of a blood-soaked tragedy, we keep reimagining the loss in Southeast Asia not as a policy failure but as the product of an America that dishonored returning troops.

Incessantly echoed by Hollywood and Washington since the concurrent successes of the Rambo and Reagan franchises, this legend was the central theme of President Barack Obama’s Memorial Day speech kicking off the government’s commemoration of the Vietnam conflict.

“You were often blamed for a war you didn’t start, when you should have been commended for serving your country with valor,” he told veterans. “You came home and sometimes were denigrated, when you should have been celebrated. It was a national shame, a disgrace that should have never happened.”

It’s undeniable that chronic underfunding of the Veterans Administration unduly harmed Vietnam-era soldiers. However, that lamentable failure was not what Obama was referring to. As the president who escalated the Vietnam-esque war in Afghanistan, he was making a larger argument. Deliberately parroting Rambo’s claim about “a quiet war against all the soldiers returning,” he was asserting that America as a whole spat on soldiers when they came home — even though there’s no proof that this happened on any mass scale.

[…]

It’s a dudebro meme that predates dudebros. I encountered it over ten years ago. It’s important to them to prove that no vet was ever spat on to maintain the holy position of anti-war warrior.

Sirota claims it’s a meme created to shut down anti-war protestors of a later generation.

Every lament of the dudebros seems to be centered on somebody’s trying to shut me down!!!!!