Win, Lose, or Draw, US Special Operations Command Details Dismal US Military Record

By Nick Turse, TomDispatch

27 September 16

It’s the timing that should amaze us (were anyone to think about it for 30 seconds). Let’s start with the conflict in Afghanistan, now regularly described as the longest war in American history.  It began on October 7, 2001, and will soon reach its 15th “anniversary.” Think of it as the stepchild of America’s first Afghan War (against the Soviets), a largely CIA affair which lasted from 1979 to 1989.  Considered a major victory, leading as it did to the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991, it also devastated Afghanistan and created close to the full cast of characters for America’s second Afghan War.  In reality, you could say that Washington has conducted a quarter-century-plus of warfare there (with a decade off).  And in the Pentagon, they’re already talking about that war's possible extension well into the 2020s.

And then, of course, there’s Iraq.  Where even to begin to count?  You could start perhaps with the military aid and assistance that Washington gave Saddam Hussein in the eight-year war that followed his invasion of Iran in 1980, including crucial information that the Iraqis could use to target Iranian troops with their chemical weapons.  Or you could start with that victory of all victories, the first Gulf War of 1991, in which the U.S. military crushed Saddam’s troops in Kuwait, showed off the snazzy techno-abilities of the mightiest force on the planet... and er, um... somehow didn’t unseat the Iraqi ruler, leading to years of no-fly-zone air war until that second, ultimate victory, the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which led to... er, um... a disastrous occupation, various insurgencies, and finally the withdrawal of American forces in 2011 before... er, um... the Islamic State emerged triumphantly to smash the American-trained Iraqi army, taking over major cities, and establishing its “caliphate.”  That, of course, led to America’s third Iraq War (or is it the fourth?), still ongoing.  In other words, at least a quarter-century of conflict and possibly more with no end in sight.

And don’t get me started on Somalia.  Who, after all, doesn’t recall the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu (known here as the “Black Hawk down” incident)?  Twenty-three years later, the U.S. is still bombing, missiling, and raiding that country which is, by now, a terror disaster zone.  Or Yemen, where the U.S. began its drone strikes back in 2002 and has never stopped as that country went over a cliff into civil war followed by a disastrous Saudi-led invasion that the U.S. has backed in a major way, including supplying cluster bombs and white phosphorous to its forces.  And Libya?  From the moment in 1986 when the Reagan administration sent in the U.S. air power to take out “terrorist training” sites in Tripoli and Benghazi, as well as the residence of the country’s autocratic ruler, Muammar Gaddafi, on and off hostilities continued until the NATO/U.S. air intervention of 2011.  That, in turn, brought on not just the end of Gaddafi’s rule, but a failed state filled with actual terrorists.

Syria is, of course, a Johnny-come-lately to American war, since Washington has been bombing there for a mere two years, and Special Forces operatives only entered the country relatively recently.  And Pakistan barely counts: just 424 drone strikes over 12 years.  A mere nothing when it comes to American warfare in this era.  And as if to make the point about all this, just a few weekends ago, the U.S. launched bombing or missile strikes in six of those seven countries (skipping only Pakistan), all six now being either failed states or close to that.  It’s quite a record of unending warfare, largely against -- with the exception of Saddam Hussein’s military -- lightly armed insurgents and terror groups of various sorts in countries that are generally now verging on collapse or nonexistent.

If you’ve ever wondered how those inside the planet’s self-proclaimed mightiest military force assess their handiwork over these last 15 (or for that matter 50) years, it’s fortunately no longer necessary to guess. Thanks to TomDispatch’s Nick Turse, we now have a document from within that military which will answer your every question on war, American-style, even if those answers beg questions all their own.

-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch

Win, Lose, or Draw
U.S. Special Operations Command Details Dismal U.S. Military Record

inning: it’s written into the DNA of the U.S.A.  After all, what’s more American than football legend Vince Lombardi’s famous (if purloined) maxim: “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing”? 

Americans expect to be number one.  First Lady Michelle Obama recently called the United States the “greatest country on Earth.” (Take that, world public opinion, and your choice of Germany!) Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton went even further, touting America as “the greatest country that has ever been created.”  Her rival, Donald Trump, who for political gain badmouths the country that made him rich and famous, does so in the hope of returning America to supposedly halcyon days of unparalleled greatness.  He’s predicted that his presidency might lead to an actual winning overload.  “We're going to win so much,” he told supporters.  “You're going to get tired of winning. You’re going to say, ‘Please, Mr. President... don't win so much’… And I'm going to say, ‘No, we have to make America great again... We're gonna keep winning.’” 

As Trump well knows, Americans take winning very seriously.  Look no further than the U.S. gold medal count at the recent Rio Olympics: 46. The next highest total?  Great Britain’s 27, almost 20 fewer than those of the country whose upstart rebels bested them in the eighteenth century, the nation’s ur-victory.  The young United States then beat back the Brits in the early 1800s, and twice bailed them out in victorious world wars during the twentieth century.     

In the intervening years, the U.S. built up a gaudy military record -- slaughtering native tribes, punishing Mexico, pummeling Spain -- but the best was yet to come.  “Our troops are the finest fighting force in the history of the world,” boasted President Barack Obama in this year’s State of the Union address.  In this he echoed his predecessor, George W. Bush, who, in May 2001, declared that “America today has the finest [military] the world has ever seen.”

In the years between those two moments of high-flown rhetoric, the United States military fought in nine conflicts, according to a 2015 briefing produced by U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM), the umbrella organization for America’s most elite forces including Navy SEALs and Army Green Berets.  The record of the greatest fighting force in the history of the world, according to SOCOM: zero wins, two losses, and seven ties.

This dismal record is catalogued in a briefing slide produced by SOCOM’s Intelligence Directorate last September and obtained by TomDispatch via the Freedom of Information Act.  “A Century of War and Gray Zone Challenges” -- a timeline of conflicts ranked as wins, losses, and ties -- examines the last 100 years of America’s wars and interventions. 

“Gray zone” is an increasingly popular term of the trade for operations conducted somewhere on the continuum between war and peace.  “Traditional war is the paradigm,” the briefing slide asserts.  “Gray zone conflict is the norm.”

While he finds a great deal to fault in SOCOM’s analysis, retired Army colonel Andrew Bacevich, a professor of history and international relations at Boston University, believes its assessment of post-9/11 conflicts “is quite accurate.”  Although American politicians like Hillary Clinton regularly insist that the U.S. possesses “the greatest military” on the planet, they avoid addressing the question of what the country’s armed interventions have actually accomplished when it comes to policy goals -- the true measure of success in war.  “We have not shown an ability to achieve our stated political aims in a conclusive way at an acceptable cost,” Bacevich says.  “That’s simply a fact.”

The Greatest Journeyman Military in History?

Twelve wins and nine losses.  In baseball, it’s the annual record of a journeyman pitcher like Bill Caudill of the Seattle Mariners in 1982, Dave LaPoint of the Saint Louis Cardinals in 1983, or Norm Charlton of the Cincinnati Reds in 1990, to mention just three examples.  It’s certainly not the record of an ace.

Likewise, 12 victories and nine losses is a far-from-dazzling stat when it comes to warfare, especially for a nation that prides itself on its martial prowess.   But that was the SOCOM Intelligence Directorate’s assessment of the last century of American war: 12 and 9 with a mind-boggling 43 “ties.” 

Among those 64 conflicts, the command counts just five full-fledged wars in which the U.S. has come up with three wins (World War I, World War II, and Desert Storm), one loss (Vietnam), and one tie (Korea).  In the gray zone -- what SOCOM calls “the norm” when it comes to conflict -- the record is far bleaker, the barest of winning percentages at 9 victories, 8 losses, and 42 draws. 

“If you accept the terms of analysis, that things can be reduced to win, loss, and tie, then this record is not very good,” Bacevich says.  “While there aren’t many losses -- according to how they code -- there’s a hell of a lot of ties, which would beg the question of why, based on these criteria, U.S. policy has seemingly been so ineffective.”

The assessments of, and in some instances the very inclusion of, numerous operations, missions, and interventions by SOCOM are dubious.  Bacevich, for example, questions its decision to include pre-World War II U.S. military missions in China (a draw according to the command).  “I don’t know on what basis one would say ‘China, 1912 to 1941’ qualifies as a tie,” he adds, noting on the other hand that a good case could be made for classifying two of SOCOM’S gray zone “ties” -- in Haiti and Nicaragua -- during the same era as wins instead of draws based on the achievement of policy aims alone.   

It’s even harder to imagine why, for example, limited assistance to Chad in its conflict with Libya and indigenous rebels in 1983 or military assistance in evacuating U.S. personnel from Albania in 1997 should make the list.  Meanwhile, America’s so-called longest war, in Afghanistan, inexplicably ends in 2014 on SOCOM’S timeline.  (That was, of course, the year that the Obama administration formally ended the “combat mission” in that country, but it would assuredly be news to the 8,400 troops, including special operators, still conducting missions there today.)  Beyond that, for reasons unexplained, SOCOM doesn’t even classify Afghanistan as a “war.”  Instead, it’s considered one of 59 gray-zone challenges, on a par with the 1948-1949 Berlin Airlift or small-scale deployments to the restive Congo in the 1960s.  No less bizarre, the command categorizes America’s 2003-2011 occupation of Iraq in a similar fashion.  “It deserves to be in the same category as Korea and Vietnam,” says Bacevich, the author of America's War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History. 

Killing People and Breaking Things

Can the post-9/11 U.S. military simultaneously be the finest fighting force in history and unable to win wars or quasi-wars?  It may depend on our understanding of what exactly the Department of Defense and its military services are meant to do.

While the 1789 act that established its precursor, the Department of War, is sparse on details about its raison d'être, the very name suggests its purpose -- presumably preparing for, fighting, and winning wars.  The 1947 legislation creating its successor, the “National Military Establishment” was similarly light on specifics concerning the ultimate aims of the organization, as were the amendments of 1949 that recast it as the Department of Defense (DoD). 

During a Republican primary debate earlier this year, former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee offered his own definition.  He asserted that the “purpose of the military is to kill people and break things.”  Some in the armed forces took umbrage at that, though the military has, in fact, done both to great effect in a great many places for a very long time.  For its part, the DoD sees its purpose quite differently: “The mission of the Department of Defense is to provide the military forces needed to deter war and to protect the security of our country.”

If, in SOCOM’s accounting, the U.S. has engaged in relatively few actual wars, don’t credit “deterrence.” Instead, the command has done its best to simply redefine war out of existence, as in Iraq and Afghanistan, in favor of those “gray zone challenges.”  If one accepts that quasi-wars are actually war, then the Defense Department has done little to deter conflict.  The United States has, in fact, been involved in some kind of military action -- by SOCOM’s definition -- in every year since 1980.  

Beyond its single sentence mission statement, a DoD directive delineating the “functions of the Department of Defense and its major components” provides slightly more details.  The DoD, it states, “shall maintain and use armed forces to:

a. Support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

b. Ensure, by timely and effective military action, the security of the United States, its possessions, and areas vital to its interest.

c. Uphold and advance the national policies and interests of the United States.”

Since the Department of Defense came into existence, the U.S. has -- as the SOCOM briefing slide notes  -- carried out deployments, interventions, and other undertakings in Lebanon (1958), Congo (1964 and 1967), the Dominican Republic (1965), Cambodia (1975), Iran (1980), El Salvador (1980-1992), Grenada (1983), Chad (1983), Libya (1986), the Persian Gulf (1987-1988), Honduras (1988), Panama (1989), Somalia (1992-1995), Haiti (1994-1995), and Albania (1997), among other countries.

You may have no memory of some (perhaps many) of these interventions, no less a sense of why they occurred or their results -- and that might be the most salient take-away from SOCOM’s list.  So many of these conflicts have, by now, disappeared into the gray zone of American memory. 

Were these operations targeting enemies which actually posed a threat to the U.S. Constitution?  Did ceaseless operations across the globe actually ensure the safety and security of the United States?  Did they truly advance U.S. policy interests and if so, how? 

From the above list, according to SOCOM, only El Salvador, Grenada, Libya, and Panama were “wins,” but what, exactly, did America win?  Did any of these quasi-wars fully meet the Defense Department’s own criteria?  What about the Korean War (tie), the Bay of Pigs (loss), the Vietnam War (loss), or the not-so-secret “secret war” in Laos (loss)?  And have any of SOCOM’s eight losses or ties in the post-9/11 era accomplished the Defense Department’s stated mission?

“I have killed people and broken things in war, but, as a military officer, that was never the end. There was a purpose, a reason, a goal,” wrote Major Matt Cavanaugh, a U.S. Army strategist, in response to Huckabee’s comment.  He then drew attention to the fact that “Joint Publication 1: Doctrine for the Armed Forces of the United States” asserts that “military power is integrated with other instruments of national power to advance and defend U.S. values, interests, and objectives.” 

Did the wars in Vietnam or Laos defend those same values?  What about the war waged in Iraq by the “finest fighting force” in world history? 

In March 2003, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld laid out U.S aims for that conflict.  “Our goal is to defend the American people, and to eliminate Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, and to liberate the Iraqi people,” he said, before offering even more specific objectives, such as having U.S. troops “search for, capture, [and] drive out terrorists who have found safe harbor in Iraq.”  Of course, the invasion and occupation of Iraq would turn that country into a terrorist magnet, leading to the ultimate safe harbor; a terror caliphate extending over swaths of that country and neighboring Syria.  The elimination of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction would prove impossible for obvious reasons.  The “liberation” of its people would lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands; the forced displacement of millions; and a country divided along sectarian lines, where up to 50% of its 33 million inhabitants may suffer from the effects of trauma brought on by the last few decades of war.  And what about the defense of the American people?  They certainly don’t feel defended.  According to recent polling, more Americans fear terrorism today than just after 9/11.  And the particular threat Americans fear most?  The terror groupborn and bred in America’s Iraqi prison camps: ISIS.

This record seems to matter little to the presidential candidate who, as a senator, voted for the invasion of Iraq.  Regarding that war and other military missions, Hillary Clinton, as Bacevich notes, continues to avoid asking the most obvious question: “Is the use of the American military conclusively, and at reasonable costs, achieving our political objectives?” 

Trump’s perspective seems to better fit SOCOM’s assessment when it comes to America’s warfighting prowess in these years.  “We don't win.  We can't beat ISIS.  Can you imagine General Douglas MacArthur or General Patton?  Can [you] imagine they are spinning in their grave right now when they see the way we fight,” he recently told FOX News’s Bill O’Reilly, invoking the names of those military luminaries who both served in a “draw” in Mexico in the 1910s and U.S. victories in World Wars I and II, and in the case of MacArthur a stalemate in Korea as well. 

Neither the Clinton nor Trump campaigns responded to TomDispatch’s requests for comment.  SOCOM similarly failed to respond before publication to questions about the conclusions to be drawn from its timeline, but its figures alone -- especially regarding post-9/11 conflicts -- speak volumes.

“In order to evaluate our recent military history and the gap between the rhetoric and the results,” says Andrew Bacevich, “the angle of analysis must be one that acknowledges our capacity to break things and kill people, indeed that acknowledges that U.S. forces have performed brilliantly at breaking things and killing people, whether it be breaking a building -- by putting a precision missile through the window -- or breaking countries by invading them and producing chaos as a consequence.” 

SOCOM’s briefing slide seems to recognize this fact.  The U.S. has carried out a century of conflict, killing people from Nicaragua and Haiti to Germany and Japan; battering countries from the Koreas and Vietnams to Iraq and Afghanistan; fighting on a constant basis since 1980.  All that death and devastation, however, led to few victories.  Worse yet for the armed forces, the win-loss record of this highly professionalized, technologically sophisticated, and exceptionally well-funded military has, since assuming the mantle of the finest fighting force in the history of the world, plummeted precipitously, as SOCOM’s Intelligence Directorate points out. 

An American century of carnage and combat has yielded many lessons learned, but not, it seems, the most important one when it comes to military conflict.  “We can kill people, we can break things,” Bacevich observes, “but we don’t accomplish our political goals.” 

Nick Turse is the managing editor of TomDispatch, a fellow at the Nation Institute, and a contributing writer for the Intercept. His book Tomorrow's Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and Secret Ops in Africa recently received an American Book Award. His latest book is Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead: War and Survival in South Sudan. His website is NickTurse.com. 

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Nick Turse’s Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead, and Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.

Trump Slunk Under the Lowest of Low Bars at the Debate

By Jeb Lund, Rolling Stone

27 September 16

Trump could not have conducted himself more poorly

f it had been anyone other than Donald Trump, it might have inspired something like pity.

The first presidential debate of 2016 was nearly totally humiliating, even if it wasn't the humiliation that Hillary Clinton's supporters wished for. Their candidate missed opportunities to deliver a killing blow, instead frequently remaining silent and letting Trump do all the work. No, what was humiliating was watching a candidate, after only a little provocation, completely disassemble his own campaign legend.

Going into last night, the 24-hour news media was determined to set the stakes high for Clinton, low for Trump, remonstrate with themselves for establishing such unequal standards, then keep returning to them anyway.

Clinton had to be commanding without being shrill, empathetic without being a teary woman, knowledgable without being a know-it-all and combative without being defensive. Trump just had to make sure not to murder moderator Lester Holt or call him the n-word.

Instead, Trump slunk beneath the lowest expectations. The man dismissed as the most ignorant, uncivil and unprepared major-party candidate in history could not have conducted himself more poorly if his goal was to vindicate all the haters and losers who bedevil him.

Trump's debate conduct is destined to become a future candidate-training video of what not to do. He sniffed into the mic constantly and grunted again and again. He leaned forward and to the left of the podium, toward Clinton, glowering in between his almost constant interruptions — many of which topped out at repeating the word "wrong." Clearly someone in the Trump campaign must have pleaded with him to not interrupt and reject a woman candidate without evidence and thus reinforce charges of misogyny, and clearly whoever that person was wasted his or her day.

When Holt countered Trump's comments about stop-and-frisk by correctly noting that the practice had been deemed unconstitutional, Trump replied, "No, you're wrong," before elaborating with, "it went before a judge who was a very against-police judge." When presented with his previous comments about Clinton not looking presidential, he tried to pivot to the last few months of conspiracies from the right-wing fever swamps that claim Clinton is afflicted with some wasting disease. (Best guess: chemtrail-induced morgellons.)

"She doesn't have the look. She don't have the stamina," Trump explained. "I said she doesn't have the stamina. And I don't believe she does have the stamina. To be president of this country, you need tremendous stamina." That pop you just heard in your head was a lightbulb going off at the idea of starting an ironic Trump-wigged Bon Jovi/Ratt/Survivor/Poison/Journey cover band named Stamina.

The most ironic part of the assertion is that, by this time, Trump's stamina had clearly flagged. But the humor of the assertion was dwarfed by his comments from a few minutes before. In order to distinguish himself from Clinton, Trump said, "I have a much better temperament." The audience responded with a sudden surge of laughter. 

On actual issues, Trump was almost entirely a shambles. His answers on nuclear weapons never rose above the level of gibberish. He described America as a third-world country, an assertion rejected by almost any measure of prosperity you can cite. He again asserted that African-Americans and Hispanics are "living in hell," which – America's treatment of minorities notwithstanding – might be news to many of them.

More importantly, Trump appeared completely unprepared to handle the most obvious attacks that would be directed against him.

Trump had no satisfactory explanation for his years of enthusiastic birther conspiracy mongering, and his attempt to obfuscate the issue relied on the sorts of conspiracies familiar only to voters who spend a lot of time reading right-wing websites plastered with ads for dick medicine, gun hoarding and Atabrine tablets. If you already knew who Sidney Blumenthal is, you either already knew that the Hillary Clinton campaign didn't invent the Obama birther rumors, or you are someone who expects Clinton to have Sid rubbed out like Vince Foster and a bunch of Arkansas prostitutes.

Once more, Trump deemed his birther crusade a great success, citing Obama's release of his long-form birth certificate in 2011. Unfortunately, Holt pointed out that "you continued to tell the story and question the president's legitimacy in 2012, '13, '14, '15, as recently as January."

Holt continued, "I'm just going to follow up. I will let you respond because there is a lot there. We're talking about racial healing in the segment. What do you say to Americans—"

"I say nothing because I was able to get him to produce it," Trump said. "He should have produced a long time before. I say nothing, but let me just tell you."

He went on, but the damage was done. When the context of the conversation deals with African-Americans who have watched you malign the first African-American president as un-American, your first response cannot be that you have nothing to say to them.

Trump likewise had no explanation for his refusal to release his tax returns and disclose not only his real wealth but also his overseas interests that may conflict with the responsibility of steering American foreign policy. Instead, he returned to his claim that he was told not to release his returns until the conclusion of an IRS audit. When pressed on the fact that this is total BS, he again said that he would release his tax returns if Clinton released "all 30,000" of her State Department emails.

It's a nice gambit, but it overlooks the fact that releasing tax returns is just something that all major presidential candidates do and have done for decades. Tax returns are part of the job application process. They are not a tool for leveraging extra concessions out of your opponent. You release them or you don't. It's on you.

Even if Trump seemed determined to make the debate a total surrender, Clinton's game wasn't perfect.

Clinton enjoyed moments of real laughter and broke into an irrepressible grin during parts of the night. For supporters, it must have been fun. Clinton is not a natural retail politician, and part of what belies her forced laugh and smile on the stump is the fact that the genuine articles are both unmistakable and charming. That said, you could see the conservative critique forming as her smile lingered and before she burst into laughter and asked, "Why not, yeah why not? Just join the debate by saying more crazy things."

Clinton supporters will note the sexual double-standard: Men always tell women to smile, then get annoyed when they smile without invitation. But while Clinton has been victim to this kind of double-standard for nearly a quarter century, any male candidate would expect to take a few shots for indulging in prolonged self-satisfaction at an opponent's implosion.

It's not wrong that Clinton enjoyed Trump flailing around her; it's just that, by the joyless rules of modern politics, nobody is allowed to enjoy that sort of thing too much. This is more or less the same critique Obama backers leveled at the simperingly indulgent smirk Mitt Romney wore throughout the first 2012 debate, as if he were trying to channel a smile that said, Well, there you go again...

On more concrete issues, Clinton still lacks a convincing policy on trade, an issue that Trump owns this election. Trump effectively criticized her for her support for NAFTA and the TPP, which she only rejected after Bernie Sanders made it politically toxic. No one but Clinton die-hards really believes she plans to keep opposing the TPP, if for nothing more than the fact that Clinton and Obama spent 2008 carping about NAFTA before going on to do fuck-all about it.

Last but not least, Clinton missed a huge opportunity during the exchange about Trump's taxes. Clinton pointed out that Trump's financial statements "for a couple of years where he had to turn them over to state authorities when he was trying to get a casino license ... showed he did not pay any federal income tax."

Trump replied, "That makes me smart."

While America might be a nation of 300 million temporarily embarrassed millionaires who see no problem in principle with evading taxes because they will eventually be in Trump's position themselves, there's a lot to make of a statement like this.

Clinton was on a roll, clearly hoping to get through prepared material, and she let Trump off the hook with all the people who play by the rules. Are they stupid? Are people who obey the law morons? Is everyone who thinks they should pitch in for roads and schools a chump? And how ethical are Trump's smarts? Is he legally paying zero taxes, or is he putting himself on the same plane of financial genius as Al Capone?

In the end, Clinton's few missteps didn't matter, because there was one overwhelming conclusion to be drawn from the night: Trump looked incompetent because he's no longer only standing next to other Republicans.

Aside from the repugnant racism, xenophobia and misogyny, the Trump phenomenon remained amusing for months because it felt like it was engineered in some fouler deity's ironic punishment laboratory. Donald Trump flagrantly made shit up every moment he wasn't bullying everyone around him; it's just that his victims were a bunch of wealthy bullies who'd spent their careers haphazardly making shit up and sliming their way upward like a phalanx of slugs conquering a staircase.

Trump cut through over a dozen Republican candidates like an industrial saw shredding a box of Kleenex, and it couldn't have happened to a more dismal gallery of frauds. After years of complaining about deficits while promoting tax cuts that reduced government revenues by trillions, after years of promoting dominionist Christianity while claiming religious discrimination, after years of claiming to be victims while blaming everything wrong in America on homosexuals and college professors and minorities and Islam, after years of saying whatever the fuck they felt like and repeating it until it sounded true, each one of these blow-dried mediocrities got fired from The Apprentice: Republican Party by someone with even more sociopathic contempt for facts, logical consistency and other human beings than they had.

Hell, it wasn't even difficult. Just coming up with mean nicknames was enough on a stage teeming with their brand of puffed-up prevaricating nincompoopery. Donald Trump wasn't a legendary force, and he wasn't a ruthless killer. He was the only guy with a fork in a room full of inflatable clown punching bags – shoving them and waiting for them to rock back and forth, their fixed idiotic grins leaning into the fatal puncture.

Unfortunately, this debate and the rest of the campaign will be conducted in the closest approximation of the real world that American politics can provide. The record still sort of matters, and most of us can remember history as far back as goddamn yesterday. We remember that Donald Trump can't keep a story straight for 24 hours.

Many more of us can remember back a few decades and realize that even the most dishonest predators elected to our nation's highest office put in time and training to achieve a patina of "not overtly malicious" and the imperturbable expertise of the diligent halfwit.

And while we might not be great at arithmetic, most of us can remember enough of it to realize that ISIS is only a few years old, Hillary Clinton is 68, and when Donald Trump snarls, "No wonder you've been fighting ISIS your entire adult life," it sounds like the most dumbfuck failed political burn in a generation.

And if that's not enough, there's still the colossal mismatch of pitting the least knowledgable, least experienced and least disciplined candidate in history against a woman who is in almost every respect his polar opposite.

The only hope for Trump is that, between now and the next debate, he can develop the focus and dedication to learn the policy, talking points and composure needed to win it. All it will take is his suddenly adopting the seriousness and rigor that he's never displayed at any moment of his campaign or, really, any point in his public life.

Or he could just skip the rest of the debates.