@peachcreek

here at home.

At least in recent decades, American presidents who took military action have been driven by the desire to promote freedom and democracy

link
I had to double check I wasn't reading The Onion.

@snoopydawg @snoopydawg ... happened just about 30 years after the "Revolutionary victory", and most of the "revolutionary" slaveholders who lead it were still in power. Basically started as a war of conquest -- the U.S. monied interests decided that it would be a really great idea to invade Canada (resources, you know), and take it over from the Brits (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_1812 -- refer especially to the sentence "The British government ... believed it to have been an opportunistic ploy by President Madison to annex Canada while Britain was fighting a ruinous war with France"). Didn't work out so well -- the monied interests got their asses kicked (DC and much of the East Coast burned to the ground; every attempt to capture Canada turned back w/big losses, etc.). Jackson's "victory" at New Orleans was an afterthought, and occurred after a peace treaty already had been signed, which ensured that the U.S. would never again attempt to capture Canada (oh, except that the U.S. DID again try to capture Canada, in the 1850s). Oh, well --

this country is the greatest purveyor of violence
Since 1945 our country has killed over 1.3 billion people and spent $42 trillion on wars that go against the Nuremberg law which states that the ultimate war crime is invading another country that hasn't threatened it. Just imagine what that money could have been spent on here at home.
This country started with genocide of the Native Americans and since the Monroe doctrine was signed has invaded countless countries and killed over a billion people not to defend our country but to make sure that the corporations can steal other country's resources. Smedley Butler told us that he had spent 33 years providing muscle for the corporations.
https://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/warisaracket.html
I looked at the list of war crimes that this country has committed and this one was left off the list.
After the Iraqi army left Kuwait our military killed tens of thousands Iraqi troops on the Highway of Death.

The indiscriminate bombing of tens of thousands of Iraqi troops and civilians retreating from Kuwait is one of the most heinous war crimes in history.
I want to give testimony on what are called the “highways of death.” These are the two Kuwaiti roadways, littered with remains of 2,000 mangled Iraqi military vehicles, and the charred and dismembered bodies of tens of thousands of Iraqi soldiers, who were withdrawing from Kuwait on February 26th and 27th 1991 in compliance with UN resolutions.
US planes trapped the long convoys by disabling vehicles in the front, and at the rear, and then pounded the resulting traffic jams for hours. “It was like shooting fish in a barrel,” said one US pilot. The horror is still there to see.

“Even in Vietnam I didn’t see anything like this. It’s pathetic,” said Major Bob Nugent, an Army intelligence officer. This one-sided carnage, this racist mass murder of Arab people, occurred while White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater promised that the US and its coalition partners would not attack Iraqi forces leaving Kuwait. This is surely one of the most heinous war crimes in contemporary history.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/twenty-five-years-ago-the-1991-iraq-gulf-wa...
I can not fathom how any person could callously do this to helpless human beings. I just can't.
People are upset with Trump for the failed mission in Yemen because an American soldier lost his life and a $75 million helicopter had to be destroyed.
Some people are upset with the number of civilians who were killed but mostly they want to blame Trump for his incompetence because he approved the mission during dinner and wasn't in the situation room when it went down like Obama and Hillary were when the OBL mission was happening.

This photo looks staged to me because I'm pretty sure that the situation room is much larger than the room in this picture. Maybe I have watched too much television and seen other situation rooms?
And I see that many people on DK are upset with the Yemen government because they have said that our military isn't welcome to use the air base anymore because of the number of civilians that were killed during the raid that we are being told was essential because we got great intelligence of future terrorists' threats against our country.
I have been surprised by a number of issues that the people on that website were okay with, but I never thought that some people there would be upset about the military not being able to drop bombs on innocent people. I wonder if they know that Obama dropped over 26,000 bombs last year or 72 a day? I guess that it's okay because using drones is better than risking American troop's lives. That was what I have been told a few times when I commented about that.
Has there been a time when this country wasn't a rogue country?

@Alligator Ed The great Hunter S. Thompson rightfully savaged him and the cult of the phony American he-man, rugged individualist white male, bigoted and racist Libertarian he spawned and cultivated.

This country is so basically rotten that a vicious, bigoted pig like John Wayne is a great national hero. Thomas Jefferson would have been horrified by a monster like Wayne - and Wayne, given a shot across the time-span, would be proud to pistol-whip a "radical punk" like Jefferson.

John Wayne is a final, rotten symbol of everything that went wrong with the American Dream - he is our Frankenstein monster, a hero to millions. Wayne is the ultimate & perhaps final "American." He beats the mortal shit out of anything he can't understand. The brainwaves of "The Duke" are like those of the Hammerhead Shark - a beast so stupid and irrationally vicious that scientists have abandoned all hope of dealing with it, except as an unexplainable "throwback." The Hammerhead, they say is no different today than he was in One Million B.C. He is a ruthless, stupid beast with only one instinct - to attack, to hurt & cripple & kill.

There is no evidence in modern science that the Hammerhead Shark had any ancestors - and no descendants, either. But science is at least half-wrong on this count. Like many another species, the Hammerhead survived by moving to a new habitat. The most advanced of them came out of the sea and learned to walk on land. They learned to speak American - despite their tiny brains - and a few of them moved to Hollywood, where they found themselves much in demand as extras & even as heroes in hundreds of "cowboy" films.

The New Hammerhead was a perfect cowboy. He was vicious & stupid & ignorant of everything except his own fears and appetites. He beat the mortal shit out of anything that made him uneasy, for any reason at all. The Hammerhead was a perfect warrior. He defended the flag. Any flag. He learned to understand words like "orders" and "patriotism," but the secret of his success was an ancient taste for blood. He thrived on action. But he was brainless; he had to be aimed.

The Hammerhead was the one you hired when you wanted to kill Indians. He was also available to whip Niggers. And then to hang Wobblies. He was given a badge and a club, and by 1960 - or maybe even 1860 - the Hammerhead Ethic WAS the American Dream.

The press created a whole pantheon of Hammerhead Heroes: J. Edgar Hoover, John Dillinger, Audie Murphy, Joe McCarthy, Ira Hayes, Lyndon Johnson, Juan Corona . . . but the king-bitch stud of them all was "The Duke," John Wayne, a cowboy movie actor whose one real talent was an almost preternatural genius for brainless violence. The Duke wasn't satisfied with just killing people, he beat them into bloody, screaming hamburger.

Which made him Nubmer One at the box office - the ultimate Hammerhead, a total American Hero. Thomas Jefferson was a useless artifact at this point, and even Horatio Alger was little less than a convenient myth. By 1960 John Wayne was more American than Studebaker, he had the whole Dream in his fists.

Man, I miss that guy. As good as Taibbi is and as much as he resembles the Great King Gonzo, no one writes with the ferocious and hilarious righteousness, flair, vigor and incisiveness of which he was capable.

that being that the U.S. of A. is not "exceptional". Of course we are and if you persist in asserting otherwise, we shall need to label you as a terrorist for peacefully opposing our government's legitimate campaign of mayhem, torture and murder. You must realize that we HAVE TO fly those planes and sail those carriers because...well, somebody's got to do it. Besides, think about all those business opportunities we'll be missing out on by not destroying other countries. Of course, if you're not in the upper .02%, you won't get any swag. But why be selfish about this? Really, where is John Fucking Wayne when we need him to wipe out them injuns at Standing Rock? So lets ban all Muslims and others living in the seven countries rightfully marked for destruction so that there will be more fish in the barrel, so to speak. If you keep up this brazen truth-telling, I may be compelled to report you to the Ministry of Approved Information. That re-education process might give you second thoughts before publishing scurrilous truths--for which we have numerous Alternative Facts to combat your misguided beliefs.

And SnoopyDawg, don't be so smug with your "facts" and statistics. You are a dupe and co-conspirator in this plot to discredit the America-is-Exceptional premise upon which our great nation was founded.

Consider yourselves chastised and sin no more, or...

@Big Al @Big Al

We c99percenters are a minor subset of the Disunited Constituencies of America. What's the mysterious glue that binds all these constituencies together? What makes Americans think they are all part of the same entity, even though they might disagree about almost everything, and often hate one another's guts?

waiting for the next president. Or waiting for some politician to come along and save us. It seems like that's the same thing playing out everywhere, everyone is waiting for that right politician or political party to change things.
That's not going to happen, we're going to have to save ourselves.

@edg

I presume that was just correcting the quote?

Identifying criminal behaviour in politicians is never helpful. Instead, we must move on, always looking to the far horizon, never looking back, '...Because he knows, a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread.'

Always best to just wait for whatever it does, with no divisive, double-plus ungood, non-pragmatic criticism or attempt to save oneself. Worked so far, hasn't it? Look where we are now? And what a lovely slide down that abyss with the whole world united in this descent - ain't it fun?

calling the US any country a rogue state is the wrong way to go about changing American their behaviour