• RunawayFixer@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      It’s real. From the yahoo news article that someone else linked: The defense secretary wrote “Cool story, General” in response to a tweet from retired Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges about Adolf Hitler gathering Nazi generals in 1935 and them being “required to swear a personal oath to the Führer.”

    • jj4211@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      It’s real but articles I’ve found seem to assume he was being sarcastic. I didn’t see anywhere that he declared it so, it just seems to be an assumption based on “he couldn’t possibly have meant that”

      • jve@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        Is there another interpretation of this that isn’t sarcastic?

        Does anybody actually read this and think he meant, “wow, that is a cool story?”

        That said, the two ways I come up with to interpret a sarcastic comment here are:

        “Sounds like bullshit. “. Which is plausible in this post facts era I suppose.

        Or

        “What does this have to do with us?” Which would sure help me sleep at night if I didn’t know exactly what it has to do with us, but afaik, Creepy Pete had called such a meeting for thus far unknown purposes.

        • jj4211@lemmy.world
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          1 day ago

          The only sane interpretation is that it is sarcastic, but this group of folks have said a lot of things I assumed were sarcastic or jokes in poor taste that turned out to be completely sincere.

          Despite the bar being lowered just onto the ground, I’m still on the side of assuming he thinks the comparison is ridiculous and not something worthy of admiration. I just assume he has at least some brain cells active to know how bad the optics would be to engage otherwise, and a hollow ‘macho pep rally’ seems to be more up his alley than anything vaguely substantitve, for good or for evil.

          • jve@lemmy.world
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            1 day ago

            Looking back at this, apparently it was posted at 4am, so he was probably just wasted.

            I also trust his “sarcastic” comment here as much as I would trust a comment that said “yeah but we would never do that”. Which is to say, not at all.