'The Werd' Is Back to Full Form With Some Enthusiastically Infuriating Hell Fury For The Pentagon

By Emily Cutler | Late Night TV | October 27, 2016 |

By Emily Cutler | Late Night TV | October 27, 2016 |

Yesterday when I was covering how well Seth Meyers covers Trump, I might have gotten a little prematurely celebratory. The election hasn’t happened yet. And until the results are in and the Trump supporter riots have been quelled, we shouldn’t get complacent. It just feels nice to have a mini-victory that he is currently losing. It’s not over, but right now a racist, sexist, buffoon of a demagogue is being beaten. I’ll take that win.

I’ll take that win because more often than not we don’t get such a clear cut example of someone doing horrible things, and seemingly be punished for it. Instead we get this.

WHAT. THE. FUCK.

Do you see?! Do you see now why I wanted to enjoy an unquestionably terrible person get unquestionably beaten in the polls? That’s so easy compared to “In an attempt to recoup some of the extraordinary costs spent on two wars, one of which was wholly unnecessary, we’ve decided to go after average soldiers for their signing bonuses.”

There is no appropriate rage gif for that sentence.

The issue here is that we do have a clear problem (a $19 trillion debt, two hugely expensive wars neither of which was particularly careful about hanging on to receipts), and no clear answer (possible $12 billion in hundreds floating around the Middle East, tax increases on the rich, Curly’s gold maybe). And without a clear answer, we just have to go after a series of not-so-good-answers. We could, of course, attempt the aforementioned tax increase, but those aren’t usually politically viable. We could also try to reduce the military budget by not buying anymore unnecessary tanks, ships and planes, but that would eliminate the manufacturing jobs in certain Congressional districts. So Congress was having none of that. Or we could at least go after the military contractors who managed to lose between $31 and $60 billion due to fraud and general incompetency as of 2011. But contractors have contracts, and more importantly, fancy lawyers to defend those contractors.

You know who doesn’t have fancy lawyers to defend their contracts with the military? Your average enlisted soldier. Which means they and their $100 million in “undeserved” bonuses are somehow the ones to go after for the $4.8 trillion war tab.

Oh! There it is, guys! I found it!