[JumpCrisscross]

You’re comparing pre-Watergate, on one hand, and post-9/11, on the other hand, America to a country, today, that’s has strong elements in both parties that are furious about our track record and costs of foreign interventions.

[pessimizer]

Yet that furiousness hasn't ever delayed either of the parties for going on wars of adventure for even a moment. We made Al Qaeda a financial dependent within 20 years of 9/11. We funded Nazi militias to topple a government in order to harass a nearby enemy, who they think of as the Asiatic-Jewish-Muslim invader they want to fight off with pork, and whose language-speakers they'd like to ethnically cleanse from their country. We went out of our way to intervene and hold together a dangerously unstable apartheid state, and basically gave it a stake in our government. We're monsters.

The only unforced delay there has been on a military adventure since Bush Sr. pulled out of Iraq was Obama resisting interventions in Syria and Ukraine that were being heavily lobbied for by both his and his opposite party. Immediately reversed once he had one foot out of the door, and he had made up for it by bombing everyone else.

America, and I mean its electorate, finds joy in murdering nonwhite children, or Slavs, or really anybody that speaks in a language that sounds funny or gutteral. It makes us feel safe. They'll know not to mess with us, because they know we're not afraid to murder even the most innocent and saintly civilians. We'll give them the Nobel Peace Prize and kill them 10 years later. We'll give people the Nobel Prize who kill children. We'll hear about atrocities in Venezuela and wonder how we should invest.

[whimsicalism]

> Yet that furiousness hasn't ever delayed either of the parties for going on wars of adventure for even a moment.

This seems difficult to falsify. I can think of a number of recent post-9/11 potential flashpoints that have been avoided by politicians due to the current unpopularity of foreign intervention.