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Instead, new mexico is ruled by a party that
Etc
I would rather have the Taliban start a legit civil war than let the enemy turn the US into a whole new thing.
Let me stop you right there. With the benefit of hindsight, the revival of the Taliban was already a forgone conclusion when GWB invaded Afghanistan. Within the US RoE, there was no way things could have gone differently. The US stayed for two decades -- easily a generation -- and the democratic state collapsed as soon as they left. They could have stayed for another generation and the outcome would have been the same.
(This is not to say that the retreat was well done, but that the alternative -- pouring resources into Afghanistan to keep the Taliban out of power forever -- was not worth it either from a geostrategic or an EA perspective.)
And, more significantly, Joe Biden was implementing the surrender agreement signed by Donald Trump in Doha in 2020.
The Deep State thought they could prevail upon Sleepy Joe to rat out of the deal, but I don't think they had any plans to win the war if they had done so. I don't know how much of the badly botched pull-out was Biden administration incompetence and how much was Deep State sabotage.
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New Mexico has low state capacity by US standards, though. Quite a bit of the lefty insanity from the top in New Mexico doesn't make it past the top.
Even the most "moderate" democrat will toe the party line when asked, or else face bullying or expulsion. All democrats are democrats.
And? I’m not claiming they’re moderates. I’m claiming they’re inneffective.
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Yeah, I think most of the state is mostly Democrat because they want to use the oil money for daycare, extra school, extra Medicaid, and whatnot. But not the "LGBTQ for 5 year olds" kind of school, just the "too bad we don't have more high achieving kids here, maybe we can teach the ones we have to read and do math if they just sit in a classroom for more hours" kind. It's not like the sheriffs want to enforce the governor's orders about disallowing guns or wearing masks alone in the desert, so they don't.
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