Tonight's guests include:
Col. Jack Jacobs, Vietnam veteran, Medal of Honor recipient and MSNBC military analyst
Steve Schmidt, former senior strategist for the McCain-Palin campaign, and MSNBC contributor
And here's executive producer Bill Wolff with a preview of tonight's show:
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January 8 is also Stephen Hawking's birthday (different year than Elvis)
I feel like "number one" everyday. Quite often receive the one-finger salute. No song tonight just a dance.
Let me tell you a story that a friend once told me whom WAS there.
In Nam there once a Gun-Ho commander that choppered into the middle a rice patty to demand his American troops attack the bad folk hiding in the woods behind him. As he screamed charge to his nineteen year old US soldiers, a sniper in the woods " took him out ". The entire American grunt force cheered and then turned away.
You were not there. You have no idea how bad it was.
Quietly, and in private Viet Nam vets have told me their stories. For an instance, toddlers were handed hand grenades that had had the pins pulled. They were told to squeeze tight and carry it across the road to the nice man. The only choice was to shoot the child. Yes. Yes. Yes. I have quietly collected stories from the second world war and stories from the Korean War. Any one that engaged in hand to hand combat and survived had nightmares for the rest of their lives. It is not compilcated. They suffered (and do suffer) for the rest of their lives. Your story is not atypical. The last number I had ws that there were over 250 admitted fraggings in the Viet Nam war. Either of us may guess at how many were not reported.
I find it funny that the ones that most wish someone to be sent away for life in prison, or worse, have not even set an hour in jail themselves. So easy it is to go to War when you are not the ones to go. So let us now kill the American government with the debt ceiling crisis. I will not be going personally, of course.
I just watched the segment on Hegel in today's show. I was shocked to see the estimate on the number of rapes or sexual assaults, including those not reported is about 19,000. It made me wonder how many women serve in the military, a quick search finds a a DOD citation that says there are 214,000 women serving. If these numbers are correct, then about 1 in 11 women in the military are raped!
Somebody please tell me my math is wrong. And if it's not, somebody please tell me what the military is doing about this.
BC,
What makes you think the sexual assaults are only happening to woman?
If what I hear, see and read about Our military leadership is correct. They are mostly of the Republican Party. A party very clear on their view of rape.
James P you are right. As Washington rocks back and forth from one party to another the composition of the military rocks with it. When the democrats come in the republicans in the military retire out. When the republicans come in the democrats retire out. When Obama came in there were no democratic generals. So the blame for rape falls on republican generals.
Notice how closely this parallels the problems of the Roman Catholic church. Notice how little democracy we have. In the 1990s seventy percent of people polled wanted the federal government to address national health. Notice that the 30% won.
We need to review and admit the level of complicity that the right political wing in the United States needs to shoulder in the mass killings that have become more frequent. The republicans have been guilty from at least three angles. The first is the giant change in the way government sees mental illness. The next involves "gun control" whatever that may be. The last involves the "safety net".
Starting with mental illness, the republicans put in right wing judges that allowed mental patients legal rights that they had not had before. They knew that if given the opportunity the mental patients would "walk free". They were allowed to "walk free" if they would just promise to take their medications. Lets start with something very simple. In most cases they were too "crazy" to take medications. If they took medications regularly they were never commited in the first place. This was a republican thing. As governor Ronald Reagan did it. He took the freed up money to do the things his moneyed constituency wanted. The poor dementeds could spend the rest of their nights on the streets. Needless to say the streets were not only less safe but they were more likely to be filled with beggars. The rich moved to their gated communities.
We have understood that the weapons of war need not be in the hands of the general populus. The AR15 (Bushmaster) used in Connecticut was the standard issue military weapon in Viet Nam. Actually need we say more. Assault rifles and the giant clips were first made illegal under Bill Clinton. Then the REPUBLICAN congress in 2003 allowed the law to expire over the vociferous complaints of the democratic minority. Hunters do not use and do not need these weapons. I have hunted some all of my life and have had no urge to own an AR15.
The republicans have intentionally kept the United States in a mild depression. It is what they want. It makes the populance docile. It has allowed them to destroy unions. It has allowed them to divert the increases in productivity into their own pockets. The bad economy hits the young unfairly. Notice the age level of all of the perpatrators of these mass killings. In most cases these were young people that were either out of work or perhaps have never even had full and satisfying employment. Sometimes republicans carelessly tell the truth. Rupert Murdoch was delighted with the depression. He said that it would give him the opportunity to pick up bargains.
Its a given fact that not all craziness can be stopped. Fifty years ago we did institutionalize the craziest of our fellow men. The reason was simple. They were dangerous. The answer is "they still are".
The republican party opened the doors of our mental hospitals. They made weapons of war publically available. They screwed up the economy to their own profit and consequently the weakest of us succumbed to madness.
Worse yet we live in an era where "good men do nothing". That, of course, is not entirely their fault. They do have to be educated enough to see through all of the professionally created lies created to keep the power of the people that have it right now. The last time I had numbers on this the right wing spent 1,000,000 dollars a day on right wing think tanks to create their propaganda.
Dear Ms. Maddow,
I saw the segment with Col. Jacobs on your show of 8th January – Col Jacobs said (correctly, I believe) that there would have been rioting in the streets if the draft had applied to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
No doubt you have made the connection to the Framers of the Constitution and the thoughts that made them craft the militia provisions in the Constitution and the 2nd Amendment: In an era when princes relied on professional (often mercenary) troops, the Founding Fathers decided to rely on non-professional troops raised and organised from the population, the militia (hence the 2nd Amendment: the States couldn’t save money by simply not having a militia).
There were many reasons for eschewing a standing army, but part of the thinking was that if you have to use your voters for your cannon fodder, it is far more difficult for a government to start foreign military adventures, more difficult to start wars of aggression, and more difficult to create external crises that could be exploited as “national emergency” for the benefit of the ones in power.