TLIAW: Our Long National Nightmare

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DrWalpurgis

DrWalpurgis

The time-delay on regional realignment thanks to the Democrats nominating Southerners repeatedly has given us some horrible maps. Good work.

Do like the touch of switching around the region that gets tech development leading to an ongoing political throughline. I'm sure treating the militias with kid gloves won't cause any problems for anyone ever.
 

TGW

Huh! Was only thinking about Charlie Wilson's War a few days back!

Walter Mengden?! Mike Martin?! Ye gods.

Well, Haiti is a good start, at the very least. Though the Philippines going up in smoke is, er, not terrific! But fair play to him, Charlie Wilson, er, 'Charlie Wilsoning' his way into drawing the Cold War to a close makes a lot of sense. I appreciate that at the very least things are not all around awful for many of the other countries though, it must be said, could do with a little less antisemetic conspiracy theories in Russia, thanks.

And terrific, more domestic terrorism, hooray. Suppose this is the price you pay for getting someone whose main claim to fame has been benefitting Texas and trying to help the rest of the world, he's got little idea of how to deal with threats on his doorstep. Though I did scoff at Lieberman as a supreme court justice (In ideological terms, not in your choice of him) I suppose he couldn't do absolutely awful in the role, eh?

The arrogance of the man to not campaign! What a bloody mess. Fun to see Stevens get taken down for corruption seven or so years ahead of time. Honestly, Charlie Wilson going out with one mad rush of debauchery doesn't surprise me in the least....which brings us back to another Republican president. Oh god, who'd these idiots end up picking?
 
Oliver North (Republican)
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    Enigma-Conundrum

    Oliver North (Republican)
    March 3rd, 2002 - January 20th, 2009
    ys2dUzW.jpg

    Pictured: Oliver North saluting while speaking at the American Legion's national convention in 2008. Even for a military leader, North was perhaps the most openly militaristic president in living memory, so much so that Gore Vidal famously compared North to Marshal Pétain from his home in Italy.​

    Pugilistic is perhaps the best word to describe Oliver North. Not just because he thrashed future Secretary of State Jim Webb in a championship boxing match during his days at the Naval Academy, but because his personal philosophy always seemed to revolve around getting the last punch in. Commissioned to the Marine Corps in 1968, North came back from Vietnam a decorated platoon commander. From there, a career as an instructor at the Marine Basic School and a handful of training jobs eventually gave way to North seeking command education. As he graduated from the Navy War College, American troops shipped out to South Iran, and North was given a senior role in the conflict. Proving his mettle in Khuzestan was enough to catch the eye of his superiors, and soon enough North had earned his stars. By 1991, General North was the face of American operations in Lebanon. Though his role in covering up Israeli-American war crimes would come to light in the years after his presidency, returning from Lebanon Oliver North was a military hero, and in 1994 he advanced to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He and Charlie Wilson grated on each other personally due to North’s belief Wilson was an unserious playboy and Wilson’s belief that North had “an entire oak tree shoved up his ass,” so much so that a retired North became something of a media fixture following his departure from the Joint Chiefs in 1998. Seeing this, Rick Lazio knew that North would be the best way to shore up his right flank without having to take on “some Bible-thumper nut.” Though those comments came to light and irritated Morality Voters out of showing up, North remained a popular choice with conservatives. The election went to Congress and it was hard to see a path that didn’t see Oliver North’s election, even as the presidency itself was far murkier. Almost as soon as he was sworn in, North began planning his campaign for 2004, seeing the split executive as a perfect opportunity to become the face of the conservative opposition.

    Then there was a change of plans. Charlie Wilson was dead, and North had taken office ahead of schedule. He was immediately faced with a legitimacy crisis. Republicans had total control of the government, but yet they were unelected. Liberals were quick to sound the alarm, referring to North as an invalid president at virtually every chance. A suggestion for an amendment to overhaul the electoral college to make the entire ticket a House-only vote stalled out as Republicans blatantly refused to cast doubt on how their president ascended. Right-of-center voices were quick to point to the Lazio-North ticket’s popular vote and electoral college pluralities in the last election and how Wilson was arguably less democratically legitimate, but the fact remained that the government had changed hands for no reason other than a glorified overdose. The belief that North was involved in his predecessor’s death in some way persists to this day, with conspiracy theorists flaunting alternative reads on the official documentation surrounding Wilson’s death and claiming that North engineered the entire thing. Though this was, like most lingering conspiracies, a dubious claim at best, North was still dogged by claims that he was an illegitimate president.

    As if this would stop Oliver North, even if he could no longer have a smooth transition. He immediately cleaned house, demanding every single cabinet secretary’s resignation on his desk so he could decide which to accept - the answer was all of them save Bobby Ray Inman at Defense. Staffing a new administration was hardly a problem, as the bloc of conservative activists who staffed the Schlafly administration had latched onto North the second he lifted his hand from the Bible, complete with lists of names and detailed policy papers. After brief deliberation and a glowing congressional hearing, Representative Luis Fortuño became the first Hispanic person to serve as Vice President, a choice that mollified Democrats due to his centrism and won over Republicans due to the perceived opportunity for an electoral breakthrough. Conservative cries to reshape the government in its entirety given the opportunity largely fell flat, though North still pursued a round of middle-class tax cuts as a booster and a way to calm right-wing agitators. With elections mere months away, rocking the boat was hardly a wise move, and in his eyes a Republican midterm would legitimize his ability to act. So the world turned. Americans had hardly anything to worry about, after all, being in the midst of one of the longest boom economies in recent memory and at peace internationally meant it all seemed carefree. It seems a laughable thing to say now, but some even proclaimed that the ideological conflict was at an end, the world marching towards liberal democratization instead of its bipolar status quo. South Africa turned over to majority rule, even if the process was more fractious than initially expected. Arnold Schwarzenegger went on a controversial trip to Moscow, meeting with his President Vlasov, a longtime bodybuilding idol of his, and seeing the reforms that made the new USSR. Germany held its first post-reunification elections, with the results seemingly serving as a commendation for Theo Waigel’s efforts. For that one long summer, the world seemed at relative peace.

    Arguably one man, more than anyone, was responsible for the end of the Cold War’s brief intermission. Robert Hanssen was a career FBI agent, working his way up the post-Hoover greasy pole to become Deputy Director of the FBI. More importantly, he was a longtime Soviet asset. He had been passing documents to the KGB since the 1980s, and as a new broom swept through the KGB, Hanssen was discreetly cast aside in Vlasov’s charm offensive approach towards the United States. KGB dissidents who genuinely believed in the cause were disappointed too, and as they fled to a new master he went with them to China, as Mao Yuanxin wished to assert himself as the leader of global communism. Hanssen remained undetected for a number of years, using his prominence as effective cover to steal documents and leak sensitive information. Eventually, though, Hanssen’s spending habits well outside his means aroused suspicion, and an unsolved case where an American asset was caught despite the supposed mole having no access to the relevant information was linked to him. The number two man at the FBI being a secret communist agent seemed like a story Tom Clancy would write, but Hanssen confessed upon his arrest, hoping to evade the death penalty. To say the public was outraged is an understatement. Hearing that one of the top officials in law enforcement was spying for the pre-eminent communist nation was genuinely horrifying to them. The end of the Cold War seemed like a pipe dream, especially as conservative and liberal politicians alike began to ask just how far this infiltration went and why such a man hadn’t been caught for nearly twenty years of espionage.

    The immediate mood shift - condemned as the Third Red Scare years after the fact - was something remarkable to observers. Hanssen’s trial dominated the news media, complete with genuine joy when he was sentenced to death. President North’s rage was palpable; in his first televised address after Hanssen was arrested he seemed just as furious as any concerned citizen, announcing a special investigation by the Department of Justice into rooting out such traitors. The downright McCarthyist tone only aroused concern from the far fringes of American society in the moment; the fact that the Soviet Union had instated multi-candidate elections and replaced Socialist with Sovereign in its name seemed unimportant amidst all of the fervor as well. Congressional hearings on communist infiltration recalling prior incidents, including those the Hanssen case used as scapegoats, drew massive public attention and only further drove the temperature up. North signed reactive bills widening the government’s surveillance power, giving his administration broad power to warrantlessly investigate and prosecute Americans. Fevered link posts spread like wildfire accusing any number of prominent people of communist sympathies, with harassment campaigns egged on by emboldened conservative media figures like America Today’s Andrew Breitbart attacking anyone expressing supposedly unpatriotic opinions. The impending midterms, once seen as anyone’s game, turned to a modest Republican victory as Americans rallied around North’s steady hand and promises of national security. Some critics called North on his abuse of Americans’ fears to grant himself perceived near-dictatorial powers, but in the moment the public put them in the same boat as Robert Hanssen.

    Nearly a continent away, the spectre of communism reared its head once more. Colombia’s two-party system buckled under the assassination of president-elect Luis Carlos Galán on cartel orders in 1990, and under the threat of a new Violencia the military intervened. Now under the outright rule of the swashbuckling General Harold Bedoya Pizarro, Colombia went to war with the cartels and militias alike. Bedoya, an American ally since his time as a student of the School of the Americas, quickly built a partnership, with word of human rights abuses by his regime treated as only rumors or justifiably harsh measures in putting down the communists and continental drug trade. But the abuses were all too real, and it served as the best recruiting tool for the M-19s and FARC alike. Both organizations swelled in numbers, receiving massive aid from China and Cuba as both seeked to assert themselves as the leaders of the communist world as the Soviet Union withdrew from such matters. By the time Pablo Escobar hung for Galán’s death, the left-wing militias had control of over half of the country, and even as the junta redoubled its efforts the revolutionaries seemed more sympathetic to the average Colombian than the butcher Bedoya. The civil war continued, but in November 2002 Bogotá fell, with Bedoya’s plane crashing over the ocean as he sought to flee the country. As the populace celebrated and the militias sought to make a new democratic government, FARC stepped forwards. An attack on the new inauguration killed Carlos Pizarro Leongómez along with every M-19 member of the incoming government. A brief conflict between the once-allies ended as a better-manned, better-equipped FARC crushed the M-19s by the beginning of 2003, upon which Alfonso Cano proclaimed the Bolivarian Socialist Republic of Colombia.

    If the idea of a Soviet spy had sent America back to the 1950s, the idea of a “second Cuba” was truly too much to bear. As soon as the day after FARC took power, later-revealed transcripts of White House conversations revealed an immediate desire on the part of North and his Vulcans - as the press had dubbed the fleet of hawkish conservative academics surrounding him - to install a more friendly regime in such a strategically crucial place. So North’s people took to the press. On every morning and evening news program in America, telegenic White House staffers and congressional allies railed against the continuing spread of communism, calling the very idea of the end of the Cold War the height of naivete because clearly the reds didn’t get the memo. The only way to end the Cold War was to truly beat them, to tear down communism. Conveniently, it was right around then that a senior Colombian government defector alleged that Cano’s Bolivarian references were pointing to his plans to paint the entire Patria Grande red. It’s unknown whether the defector - who happened to be a senior member of Bedoya’s security state and never a confidante of Cano - had his claims taken seriously by US intelligence amid the tension or if the government simply saw an opportunity. Anonymous sources allege that North had asked Alan Keyes of the Department of Intelligence to “find me a reason” to intervene, but those have been vehemently denied. Regardless of the veracity of the claims against Cano, they became the load-bearing justification for a hard line on Colombia. North spoke of protecting our Latin American allies from communist subversion to raucous applause in his first State of the Union. RNC focus group after focus group found that a plurality of Americans supported overthrowing Cano, that the communists had gotten too bold. All it seemed it would take was a shove.

    The shove came later that year, when a Braniff International flight bound for Buenos Aires was shot down over the Colombian Andes. Colombian forces had seemingly confused the plane for an American fighter, but regardless the rationale America was apoplectic. Not only was there a communist dictatorship on their borders, 287 Americans had died because that dictatorship was taking shots at American commercial planes! North responded by giving them the fighters they had supposedly seen, aggressively patrolling Colombian waters and airspace. A skirmish along the Guajira Peninsula turned into a shooting match, damaging an American destroyer and destroying two Colombian patrol ships. North pushed for a formal declaration of war, which would cost him later, but in the moment it seemed all too justified. A line needed to be drawn in the sand, and in a speech in front of an aghast United Nations North’s proclamation that America would defend the hemisphere from communist invasion did just that.

    The world was decidedly less enthused about invading Colombia than the United States. While in years past American allies would earnestly follow along in such a conflict, plenty of other countries enjoyed the relative stability a world without a Cold War provided and had no desire to go back. This, surprisingly, included the Soviet Union, whose transition to a post-communist government seemed more permanent just hearing how noncommittal their support for Colombia truly was. In fact, it would be China who rallied opposition, in a sign of their growing influence in the second world. Secretary-General Sally Mugabe railed against the invasion as flatly illegal in no uncertain terms even as the US vetoed any resolutions to that effect. But international opposition only got those opponents branded as weak-willed. A particularly impassioned speech to the OAS against the intervention by Canadian Prime Minister Lloyd Axworthy was met with cheers, causing a Republican congressman to lobby to get poutine banned from the Capitol menu. Administration-aligned media sources monstered opponents, treating the president as a hyper-patriotic military leader on par with Washington and Eisenhower and his war as recapturing lost ground. And as the first American troops entered Colombia, it was clear that they weren’t quite asking international permission.

    As North’s Vulcans carried out their plan to set South American dominoes upright and American troops smashed through Colombian forces on the road to Bogotá, their leader faced the American people. While the swell of anti-communist fervor on the right created legions of energized supporters and swing voters had an overall favorable view of both the war and North for taking the fight to the communists, liberals and leftists were more divided. Plenty of Democrats, overall interventionists themselves and seeing the support for the war, had voted to authorize the war. The towering figure in the Democratic race and eventual nominee over limited opposition, Wilson’s chosen Vice President James Slattery, had chosen a neutral ground in supporting the war but criticizing its implementation. This seemed to mollify most left of center voters, but large swaths of voters were furious the government cared more about Colombia's government than American workers, or they were young enough to not remember a time before Charlie Wilson crossed the Berlin Wall. These activists and left-wing organizers from the Hoffa campaign had pulled together with Senator Nader’s office in 2003 to found the People Power Party, intended as a catch-all for the disgruntled left. Initially, it didn’t seem that James P. Hoffa himself fully intended to seek the presidency a second time, but then after a half dozen formerly-Democratic representatives flipped parties, Hoffa's ego got the better of him and decided People Power was better off with him at its helm. Despite the second three-way race in as many years, the campaign was surprisingly straightforward. The fall of Bogotá that March briefly made it seem as if North was running away with it, but the environment remained too polarized to avoid simple reversion to the mean. North rallied voters around the flag, tying himself to military fortunes in such a way that only a president with such a service background could get away with. Ignoring his opponents - apart from a stern condemnation of Hoffa as a fellow traveler following the latter's particularly vitriolic Labor Day speech - and running a deceptively simple national security platform seemed to pay dividends, even if the focus on work, family, and fatherland by any other name was still too Vichy for many. Attacks from Slattery on the growth in government surveillance power and the Chicago Consensus’ economic house of cards were Cassandra-like, but being right in hindsight doesn’t win elections.

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    The 2004 Presidential Election, as found on the Digicyclopedia. North is seen in blue, Slattery in green, and Stern in red. North ultimately received 297 Electoral Votes while Slattery received 193 Electoral Votes and Hoffa received 56 Electoral Votes.

    North’s re-election reflected the division in America. The renewed war against communism had deeply split Americans - North had only barely cleared the threshold for an electoral college majority despite a significant popular vote margin over Slattery. While keen psephological eyes noticed that this was a mirage born out of the intensely regional nature of the People Power vote, even awarding every single Hoffa vote to Slattery only grants the united left-wing ticket a narrow popular vote victory. The electorate was ultimately divided nearly 50-50, and polling reflected similarly even splits on the efforts against communism. The media environment thrived on the conflict, with America Today raging against a broad swath of liberal causes as different heads of a red hydra and the “mockumentary” comedic stylings of shows like Al Franken’s Common Sense provided a decidedly progressive slant on issues facing Americans between laughs.

    As Americans grew apart in their own information bubbles, the real information reaching the White House was bleak. Bogotá had fallen and the FARC forces removed from major cities, but FARC had just spent the better part of the past thirty years fighting guerrilla wars in the jungle. Many of their troops were well trained for irregular combat against an entrenched force. So even as the American-established government fought with American aid, they simply didn’t have the resources to fend off militias in the sprawling jungles. Patrols were routinely ambushed and towns out in the countryside were frequently raided, with the BSRC controlling half the country even if the main population centers had fallen out of their grasp in the initial invasion. Judgements within the Pentagon were grim, with a report from William Van Cleave’s office presented to North himself outlining a significant manpower increase for “total war” to win control of the Colombian countryside.

    This proposal would come back to hound the administration. North’s grand domestic policy scheme had been unveiled within months of the beginning of his second term. The bill was, in effect, encouraged national service between the ages of 18 and 20. This could take many forms, from the park service to even health work, though military training was highly encouraged as the primary option and by far the easiest to become involved with. Though many in the administration, including the president himself, wished for it to be mandatory, worries about getting it past any members of the Supreme Court in that form won out. Instead, a complex network of carrots and sticks were designed with the end result of forcing universities to not admit the vast majority of students without one year of service in some capacity, and with a handful of religious and disability-based exemptions. Even in the supposedly watered-down form, the administration underestimated the public opposition to such a measure. The program was uniquely unpopular - it was far too costly for budget-balancing moderates both Democratic and Republican, too draconian for many left-wingers, and as a bonus various universities banded together to announce their intent to sue should the law pass. Then the Van Cleave report landed on the desk of the New York Times, and all hell broke loose as its callous talk of “tapping into the domestic manpower supply” - perfectly natural to the Vulcans, but jarringly dehumanizing to those outside of the interventionist conservative bubble - reframed the service bill as an attempt at sneaking the draft by the American people. Protests filled the streets asking North the questions their parents once asked LBJ, and congressional conservatives ran from their own platform to save their own skins. Soon enough, the war itself saw majority opposition to its continuation for the first time.

    The ongoing war had costs across the continent as well. While Colombian revolutionaries were defeated, opposition to the US invasion of a sovereign state ran high across the continent and was the straw that broke the camel’s back to many already feeling the brunt of privatization schemes under the Chicago Consensus. In Peru, a failed putsch by Colonel Antauro Humala over a laundry list of demands aimed at the Americans and the government on behalf of indigenous Peruvians turned into his genuine election as president of the nation with promises to reshape Peru, even as domestic figures sounded the alarm on his tightening grip. The Bolivian government’s efforts to quash the cocaine trade melded with broader fury at imperialism and economic disparities to create something entirely new among Aymara farmers, sparking a wave of protests and demands for constitutional reform. Even Argentina shook the grip of the old political order as the captain of a two-time World Cup winning Argentine team Diego Maradona rode his own fame and a wave of working-class dissent to the presidency, promising radical reform for the people. The face of the western hemisphere was changing.

    Briefly, international sympathy would return to America. On August 23rd, 2005, a storm formed over the Atlantic, where it quickly gathered steam and grazed the tip of Florida. In the warm gulf waters, it quickly built up to become Hurricane Kyle. Now a category five, Kyle slammed into the Gulf Coast. Anywhere else, Kyle would have been a devastating storm. But hitting New Orleans made it a catastrophe. New Orleans had been one of the pilot sites of the 1980s nuclear investment program, and the resultant Earl K. Long Nuclear Plant may have been well-built, but the force of a category five hurricane slamming into it severely damaged the plant and began a meltdown. Attempted evacuation by a quick-moving administration due to radioactive contamination were delayed by the flooding and the storm, hampering rescue efforts in flooded New Orleans amidst concerns about contamination in the air and water from one of the single worst nuclear disasters recorded. Cleanup efforts dominated the news cycle for days on end, relief funding saw international support as disagreements took a backseat to humanitarian work, and even former President Edwards earned bipartisan accolades for his work to bring aid to his home state.

    Two days before Oliver North’s State of the Union address in 2006, Colombia was rocked by hundreds of casualties in a string of FARC bombings across its major cities. Worse still for American forces and the Colombian government, FARC activity reached a level not seen since Bedoya’s death as they surged through the countryside. In response, North’s planned address changed. Instead of talking vaguely to remaining vigilant against America’s enemies, North instead directly called for a surge of new troops to Colombia to combat the wave of communist terrorism. Where previous militarism had largely been met with stoic Democratic silence and cheering from the Republican bench, jeering ensued at the proposal from Democrats. As they then argued to the press, the war had become a quagmire, and sending more men to fight would only lead to more American deaths in a war that had lost its point a long time ago. Even so, with Republicans in firm control of all branches of government, a surge was authorized quickly and enacted by North. More aggressive Colombian-American missions to smoke out FARC bases turned into bloodbaths with little land gained. Insistence by conservative news outlets that staying the course would win the war seemed to fall on deaf ears as Americans finally became fed up with their government’s lies.

    Or so it seemed. The midterms yielded all of a one seat majority for the Democrats in the Senate. Electoral autopsy theories varied, but the simple truth was that a combination of gerrymandered House districts in high-yield states and effective turnout had stymied a backlash to the Republicans. No matter the case, Democrats had the ability to halt North’s goals. Senatorial hearings about war conduct from Pentagon officials became media spectacles as they attacked the administration for having no exit strategy and no plan beyond throwing more bodies and money into the mix. News coverage shifted from tacitly pro-war fear of retribution by the red-scaring administration to coverage of opposition hearings. After William Van Cleave himself sat down in front of the committee and was needled about his eponymous report by Senator Stephen Rapp, middle opinion finally began to shift as North and his supporters were left alone in defense of their own clearly-visible poor planning. Providing a timeline for withdrawal helped North’s image with the broader populace some, but even forcing the pugilistic president to accede to someone else’s demands instead of letting him control the conversation was a staggering shift.

    As America struggled with itself, Europe was facing its own crisis. In Yugoslavia on June 15th, 2007, General Ratko Mladic launched a coup against the reformist pro-European President Srđa Popović and proclaimed a state of emergency, forcing Popović to flee to Austria. At a stroke, the pro-European agenda was gone, but so were the plurinational reforms that were the foundation of Popović’s shock victory. Protests swelled in the streets from Zagreb to Pristina as a ruthless crackdown began against non-Serbians. Serbian units under Mladic’s command began suppressing the “nationalist traitors” at any cost, and Yugoslavia burned. When Popović made an appeal as the rightly elected leader of Yugoslavia to help save his country, the European Federation listened. Under the auspices of the “Big Three” nations of the Federation’s leadership - Britain’s Paddy Ashdown, France’s Alain Juppé, and Germany’s Matthias Platzeck - a humanitarian mission was born. The goal was simple - strike quickly and hit hard, bring Mladic down, and stop the situation from devolving into genocide. NATO assent came quickly, even as the US committed limited resources to the mission. When brought before the United Nations, it was passed with only an abstention by the Soviet Union - who saw the coup as unfortunate, yet Mladic’s continued rule would ensure that the west would not gain Yugoslavia in the “New Great Game” Yury Vlasov had spoken of in the same breath that he sweet-talked Americans with shared faith - and the peacekeeping mission entered Yugoslavia. Within months, Belgrade had fallen to coalition forces, and Mladic and his cohorts were carted off to The Hague to face the consequences of the thousands killed on their orders. Though coalition troops would have to remain behind while military reforms ensured that nothing like Mladic’s band of officers could ever form in Yugoslavia again - in no small part contributing to Ashdown’s defeat at the next election - in the short term genocide had been prevented, but a sign of the new world had come.

    While the Colombian War remained ongoing - American liberals had looked to Yugoslavia and compared the swift, successful intervention to their own muddled five-year war - something had changed for its champion. The North administration, for all the drama and feverish support surrounding its push back to the Cold War, had never truly had control over the fury it weaponized. The desire to beat communism once and for all had consumed the nation wholly. Americans who were given McCarthyist reasons to be angry at each other on a daily basis to justify North’s draconian clampdown and his war had no way to turn their hatred off. Then, as North took beatings from the left on his war and bent to the pressure, something changed. Right-wing figures both in and out of Congress began denouncing the half-measures from the very administration they had wholeheartedly backed. Conservative media began to criticize the withdrawal schedule, realizing they only served to gain more dedicated viewers if they kept the fight going to the beat of their own drum. The party base had gone from loving Oliver North as a soldier in their crusade to seeing him as impure, as a politician unwilling to stand up for what mattered. Oliver North had broken their hearts. When it came time for North’s successor to be elected, all of the power of conventional politics and pushing for his man could not close Pandora's Box.
     
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    • Herucalmo

    Not that this should be in any way surprising in a war between the FARC, the great narco-rebels themselves, and Ollie North-backed caudillos running with the same juice as the our friendly warlords in OTL's Iraq and Afghanistan, but my god the drugs these boys are bringing back stateside along with their PTSD and missing limbs probably don't even have names in the English language.

    It would be very on brand for the GOP to cause and then run on fighting a second drug war as like ATL's Opioid epidemic and Fentanyl hysteria.
     

    Catalunya

    chestanewmitz said:
    Blessed.
    Maradona-led south american integration against the mad gorilla to the north.
    Click to expand...
    I’m all for left-wing regimes in Latin America, but Maradona is just about the worst person possible to lead one, especially if his management skills in his years as manager of the Argentinian national team are anything to go by.
     

    chestanewmitz

    Banned
    Catalunya said:
    I’m all for left-wing regimes in Latin America, but Maradona is just about the worst person possible to lead one, especially if his management skills in his years as manager of the Argentinian national team are anything to go by.
    Click to expand...
    A two wc winning diego is not the diego we know.
    Seems he never gets his act dirty here, not to mention he was clearly already feeling the drain bamage by his squad managing days.
     
    DrWalpurgis

    DrWalpurgis

    Enigma-Conundrum said:
    Even Argentina shook the grip of the old political order as the captain of a two-time World Cup winning Argentine team Diego Maradona rode his own fame and a wave of working-class dissent to the presidency, promising radical reform for the people.
    Click to expand...

    [Insert lazy hand-of-G_d joke here]

    This was a great update--it looks like things are really about to start sliding in all directions, now.
     

    andry2806

    chestanewmitz said:
    A two wc winning diego is not the diego we know.
    Seems he never gets his act dirty here, not to mention he was clearly already feeling the drain bamage by his squad managing days.
    Click to expand...
    I mean, if we have to be fair all that it would have taken to have a two WC winning Maradona was 1990 World Cup final going different, and it was already an equilibrated match. Have the ref give the penalty on Calderon and not give the IOTL one on Voller and here you have Diego lifting the Tercera.
     
    Corey Stewart (Republican)
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    • Enigma-Conundrum

    Enigma-Conundrum

    Corey Stewart (Republican)
    January 20th, 2009 - January 20th, 2013
    Ju8j9EZ.png

    Pictured: Then-Governor Corey Stewart debating Minneapolis Mayor Tim Kaine during the 2006 gubernatorial election. Stewart rather infamously said he “feels sorry for [Kaine’s] wife” during the debate, implying that the Democrat was impotent due to his liberal views and qualified opposition to the Colombian War. ​

    At last, the final victory of the radical right was at hand! Unfortunately, this also meant the final victory of the radical right was at hand.

    Corey Stewart’s political career had always been inextricably tied to extreme conservatism. He was a native son of Duluth, and when the Great Lakes were torn asunder by deindustrialization, he was a law student in Minneapolis. But Stewart realized something - his people were angry, and they wanted someone to blame for their jobs disappearing. It was there, working on the Schlafly campaign in Minnesota in 1992, that Stewart had his epiphany - her attempts to send America back to the 1950s, as the infamously bad Nader ad had put it, felt like a remedy to a changing economy. It was control over one piece of their lifestyle where they had none over another.

    Realizing this, Stewart ran for the house in the traditionally-Democratic Iron Range district against Jim Oberstar. In 1996, this hardly worked, as Stewart was too tied to Mike Martin in his focus on cultural schisms. Two years later, amidst a Republican wave and a Democratic administration that had seemed to barely care at all about the very things they attacked Schlafly for, the young lawyer became a young congressman. Establishing a reputation as a conservative hardliner in the House, Stewart picked at such divides with almost surgical precision. Attacking Democrats over immigration, leading the charge to ban Social Security funds for abortion, and fighting hard against ill-fated gun reform, Stewart was a mainstay of the radical right. Deciding on entering into a tight race for Minnesota’s governorship in 2002, Stewart knew he was the underdog against Ted Mondale. Then Ollie North took charge, Robert Hanssen was arrested, and Stewart swung into the anti-communist backlash with great gusto. Talk of making Minnesota the “freest state in America” worked on an angry electorate, and by less than one percent Representative Stewart became Governor Stewart, and the right-wing machine took note.

    Campaigning with Martin also led to a chance meeting. Martin’s campaign manager, the South Carolinian firebrand Lee Atwater, had become somewhat disgraced in his own party after the battle of the Texans put Wilson in the White House. But, during a campaign event, he met candidate Stewart, and saw something in the firebrand. A politically-homeless Atwater had found his ticket back to the top of the party. Governor Stewart hadn’t been in office for long before Atwater requested a meeting with a proposal in mind. Stewart himself had an ego, that much was clear, and Atwater’s long-term plan had a clear goal of getting him to the top. So it was that Stewart had found his bag man, and Atwater’s plan was fairly simple: Stewart would go on the news quite a lot. Conservative media had become its own bubble, and going on at all times of the day - not just the coveted evening news roundtable formats that North’s spokesmen and the rare liberals who felt they had a chance to get a shot in went on, but constantly. That way, he could reach the true believers unfiltered and build up a base where he was well-liked, with the ideological red meat of daytime opinion programs buttressing his arguments instead of the veneer of journalistic ethics played during the traditional news slots. While careful to toe the North line on foreign policy, Governor Stewart touted his own successes in dramatically shifting Minnesota to the right and added his voice to the cacophony.

    Then came the race for North’s succession. The party establishment, at their president’s behest, largely backed Vice President Fortuño, keeping party heavyweights out of his way. However, Fortuño’s focus on staying the course failed to excite, as well as a modest pro-business economic agenda. In contrast, Stewart, still the underdog, ran unabashedly to the right. He trumpeted about his laws designed to hunt down communist spies - because Minnesota is the natural target of any espionage - and his victories in pushing a litany of conservative grievances through. Everything from immigration enforcement to loosening gun laws to abortion restrictions were on the books because of him, and he made sure the nation knew he would fight just as hard for this nationally if elected. Prominent endorsements rolled in, from fellow right-wing elected officials to even a major boost by Franklin Graham that shored up the Morality vote for Stewart. But the fault line wouldn’t be on religion or even on belief, but rather immigration. Fortuño, the first Puerto Rican to be elected on a national ticket, was clear about how his background shaped his views. Atwater had an idea for how this could truly start splitting the Republican electorate. A series of push polling calls in Iowa asked listeners if they would be more or less likely to vote for Luis Fortuño if they knew he was the son of an illegal immigrant. While these calls were both completely untrue and roundly condemned, Stewart’s rhetoric about repealing and replacing Norquist-Fong for tighter immigration control suddenly sounded quite a bit more appealing to white voters. A shock victory in Iowa and Phyllis Schlafly’s surprise endorsement put Stewart on top, and even as Fortuño recovered ground in New Hampshire, the momentum had clearly shifted to Stewart. A rousing victory in Texas sealed the deal, and the RNC decided that Lee Atwater was the king of his craft again.

    Ever the underdog, naturally the general election saw Stewart behind. The Democrats had, after bouncing between “candidates of the week” like New Mexico’s Governor Marty Chavez, Pennsylvania’s Representative Ed Rendell, and even less conventional choices like the abrasive businessman Ted Turner, settled on the resounding victor of the New Hampshire primary, Forrest Church. Son of the vice president of the same last name, Reverend Frank Forrester Church IV was also Senator from Idaho with a reputation for thoughtful, principled liberalism. Giving his sermon on the theme of reconciliation and America’s better angels, Church quickly amassed momentum as the candidate to end the war and cool the tensions plaguing the nation. Getting along seemed quite appealing to many Democrats, and Senator Church found himself the party’s nominee. It seemed like the Democrats’ year as well - for the first time the People Power Party was out in the cold, and eventually turned to Vermont Senator Svend Robinson, a persistent critic of American foreign policy. Foreign policy, despite its central position throughout the decade, would come to define the election. Both Church and Robinson agreed on the need to withdraw from Colombia, but where Church sought a measured drawdown with support for the new Colombian government Robinson sought a massive continental drawback and immediate removal of all troops. Stewart, on the other hand, simply campaigned on winning the war and little else. Much light was made of his seemingly secret strategy, with only platitudes provided when asked. If he was to campaign, it would be towards other issues. He lambasted Church’s pro-choice positioning despite his career as a pastor, calling the Idahoan a hypocrite and insisting on appointing only pro-life judges in the hopes of overruling Roe v. Wade. He spoke to crowds in the rural west, providing clear support to the second amendment and any group’s right to bear such arms. He railed against the Caracas Treaty to crowds skeptical of continental integration, calling it a surefire way to let "undesirables" dictate our domestic policy. The media campaign was grisly. Memorable ads accused Forrest Church of supporting the same things as a senior FARC leader and one even implied that Robinson would bring a “godless” perspective to government as a rainbow showed up in the background. These ads were roundly condemned and saw a dangerous drop in Stewart’s favorables, but Atwater knew they were another thing: effective. Then October came and all hell broke loose. Robinson fumbled a debate question about medically-assisted suicide, driving all but his most diehard supporters away. It just seemed that when Church might run away with it, his esophageal cancer diagnosis a year prior was uncovered by a reporter snooping around Boise hospitals.

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    The 2008 Presidential Election, as found on the Digicyclopedia. Stewart is seen in blue, Church in green, and Robinson in red. Stewart ultimately received 286 Electoral Votes while Church received 247 Electoral Votes and Robinson received 13 Electoral Votes.

    Stewart had barely had time to settle into the residence before his plans were halted in their tracks. The Senate had shifted to only plurality Democratic, but a power-sharing agreement between the Democratic and People Power parties created an anti-Stewart front in the majority. His grandest proposals, from repealing Norquist-Fong to a revival of DOTA II to enshrining North’s anti-communist security executive orders into law, were all dead on arrival. But Stewart had surrounded himself with true believers in the power of the executive branch. Through executive action alone, federal funding for any group that promotes abortion was banned. Department of Education resources were stripped out and federal curriculum recommendations altered to reflect more conservative spins on history and government. Refugee resettlement from Peru and Colombia was halted, forcing people fleeing Antauro Humala’s dictatorship or the war to settle in places less equipped. While these actions were legally challenged and the courts spent years sorting them all out, for the time being Stewart’s agenda was put into place.

    Unexpected controversy came when a group of soldiers at Keesler Air Force Base in Mississippi flew a Confederate flag from the base. Over the past few years, some southern states had voted to remove the flag from their state flags, causing local controversies at most. Recently, Mississippi had voted to remove theirs, and in protest the servicemen flew their flag. Immediately, they were ordered to take it down, and life should have gone on. But President Stewart’s Department of Defense overruled, defending the officers’ right to “promote their heritage.” Overnight, this spawned a major backlash over Stewart’s perceived defense of a slavery-based separatist state as simple heritage, a point Stewart doubled down on every time he was pressed. As backlash to the backlash, conservatives began to defend the soldiers, pointing to the flying of any number of other national flags by minority groups to show their heritage. Either way, the people Stewart was signaling to very much got the message that he was in their corner.

    It was not just at home that Stewart made waves in all the wrong places. The Soviet Union’s charm offensive in the United States had paid dividends - images of Vlasov and American visitors attending mass together legitimately swayed public opinion to believe the Soviets were no longer the communist bogeyman. Stewart was an early Russophile in the Republican Party, one who saw Vlasov’s Orthodox Charles de Gaulle as something to be aligned with and emulated. When Stewart’s first international trip included Moscow, European allies were suspicious. When Stewart seemed to have more harsh words for Bianca Berlinguer’s PCI majority government in Italy than he did the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, they were alarmed. A leaked conversation between Stewart and Ralph Reed clarified the issue and sparked further outrage when Stewart said that letting Russia fend off Islamist groups was key in “backing western civilization.” Britain’s Nicholas Soames allegedly summarized it best to an aide after discussing Afghanistan with Stewart - “I wanted to think he wasn’t that much of a damned moron.”

    Leaks of this sort would be a sort of theme for the Stewart administration. The White House offices were extremely competitive and prone to slippage, especially as RNC regulars who had never truly become loyal to Stewart felt no duty to stay silent. Documentation of a meeting between oil company executives, Secretary Bauer, and Colombian President Fernando Botero Zea found its way to the press, hinting about the motive behind the remaining presence in Colombia and causing a surge in the anti-war protests that had become a mainstay for the past seven years. A tape of Stewart calling Senator Richard Vinroot “flaccid” spawned jokes about the president’s own manhood. Meetings between fringe militia groups and white house advisors were exposed anonymously, though records of what was discussed mysteriously disappeared. Controversy after controversy compounded with no end in sight.

    Then John Paul Stevens resigned from the Supreme Court, and the opposition Senate was faced with a dilemma. Total resistance to Stewart’s initiatives and forcing compromise on budgeting had proven popular and doable, but doing so with a Supreme Court nominee with nearly two and a half years left on Stewart’s term was an entire other game. On one hand, it would turn the court to a 5-4 conservative majority, but on the other there was a risk of Stewart gaining popularity for the midterms over such obstruction. So, when Stewart nominated Ninth Circuit Judge Richard Cebull, the Senate decided to go through their due diligence, but not without a fight. Cebull’s history of ruling in favor of militia groups was under fire, but this didn’t seem to faze conservatives. It would take more, and when Cebull’s history of racist remarks hit the news, that seemed to be enough. While conservatives attempted to brush them off as jokes, a digital post in particular about Senate Judiciary Chairman Dennis Archer made after his nomination spread like wildfire, and footage of Archer asking Cebull point-blank to explain the joke to him all but ensured the nomination was dead. Sure enough, when the nomination went to a vote, even a handful of Republicans voted to reject Cebull’s nomination. A bruised Stewart briefly considered nominating hardline Alabama Attorney General Roy Moore as a response, but ultimately he was talked down by Republican Senate leadership into nominating an utterly inoffensive conservative before the midterms, telling Stewart the 5-4 court was more important.

    Even so, it was the final nail in the coffin. Republican control over government, now in its eighth year, had an unpopular war and a controversial president on its hands. Furthermore, the Democratic and People Power coalition had functioned quite well, leading to significant headway in what would become the parties’ merger. Even if the Cebull nomination had seemingly ensured the blowout, the scope hadn’t become clear until the night of the midterms. Democrats swept across the Rockies and coasts, as well as even putting up their best showing in the Great Lakes since 1996. The governorships of multiple key states flipped, coming directly before redistricting. Stewart’s infighting with the Republicans’ persistent defectors and support for primary challengers had only made matters worse - for example, Stewart’s backing of right-wing radio host Dannie Goeb’s splinter campaign simply cost John Connally III his job and let the Democrats through instead of bringing true conservative values to Texas. The situation for the Republicans seemed unimaginably bad.

    And then things got worse. The ASEAN bubble had grown steadily since the late nineties, built on speculation and overpriced assets. Inflating to frankly ridiculous size, the bubble was bound to burst eventually, and it did just that in 2011. Capital flight from Singapore following its financial meltdown turned the local recession into a regional chain reaction. While America avoided the worst, significant investment in the Southeast Asian economies for the past decade and a half drove a stock market collapse, economic woes for large corporations, and a handful of the most directly involved banks folding. The “Long Boom” economy of the past two decades - only broken by the dip in 1999 - had ended. The administration response to the worst recession since the early nineties seemed callous to most. Intervention on behalf of a teetering financial sector to protect its assets seemed out of touch as Republican arguments that protecting the banks would keep things from getting worse fell on deaf ears. Revelations that banking executives had spent relief funds on large bonuses instead of fixing themselves further turned opinion against them and the White House that had authorized that very relief program yet ignored calls for relief for the people.

    Stewart simply couldn’t handle such low poll numbers. Attacking Democratic relief plans as thinly-veiled socialism won him some support from his enduring radical base, but the near-universal condemnation drove Stewart deeper into his own bubble. His ties to radical militias dated back to covert meetings with the Minnesota Militia as governor, but that pact had always been a promise to ignore militia activity so long as they didn’t replicate Little Rock. What transpired during his presidency changed the very core of that arrangement. John DeCamp, a former representative turned lawyer for various constitutionalist and homelander groups around the country had begun arranging contact between Stewart’s office and the leadership of groups ranging from mainstream advocacy organizations to outright fringe groups such as the Texas Emergency Reserve. While relevant testimony, like that of TER chief Louis Beam, revealed that Stewart’s contacts were largely a ploy to cling to power and suppress those he could not win over, at the moment the meetings hardly gained any notice. Stewart’s rhetoric began to change, though - he took on a tone of cataclysmic conflict with the enemies of America, one where our constitutional way of life would burn if left to anyone other than Stewart. Already a strong gun rights advocate, Stewart took his defense of such aims to new heights - another wave of controversy began when Stewart accepted an invite to address the NRA’s annual convention despite the group’s murky history with anti-government violence. The tilt towards such extremism horrified even those closest to its source - allegedly, after a meeting between Stewart and DeCamp, Haley Barbour spoke to RNC lawyers about invocation of the 25th Amendment.

    Amidst all the noise, the economic pain inflicted upon Americans, the division and frustration of the Stewart years, election season rolled around, and polls showed it wasn’t even close. Stewart, a uniquely unpopular incumbent, would be lucky if it wasn’t a total landslide. But curiously, throughout the final months of the campaign, something changed. Armed citizens and militias became more common in major cities, patrolling opposition events and anti-Stewart protests. A protest turned violent in Indianapolis, leading to the Indiana Freemen firing on the crowd, killing over twenty people before police intervention. While the White House condemned the violence, it also condemned the protesters who were decidedly victims. The faux response seemed a signal to such groups to do whatever they wanted, that they had presidential support to take their stand. Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli led four cabinet members to resign shortly after, and the revelation that Cuccinelli had done so because Stewart asked him to “give our friends a pass” only caused the protests demanding Stewart’s removal from office to multiply. But even an approval rating normally reserved for French presidents didn’t shake Stewart. He was sure he would win with such loyal fighters, sure that Americans demanded freedom above all else, he never strayed from the warpath. Come election day, he didn’t seem to truly know what hit him.
     
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