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Oculus Spirit [83119]
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SINCE THIS IS THE MORONIC POLITICAL BOARD NOW:
Jun 7, 2016, 11:33 AM
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ALI WAS A MUCH GREATER AMERICAN HERO THAN GENERALS PATTON, MacARTHUR, AND CUSTER COMBINED.
THESE BLOWHARDS GOT MANY YOUNG AMERICANS KILLED BECAUSE OF THEIR ARROGANCE AND LOVE OF THE GLORY OF WAR.
THERE AIN'T NO GLORY IN WAR, JUST DEATH AND DESTRUCTION. IT'S JUST A NECESSARY EVIL AT TIMES.
ANYONE WHO PROTESTED VIETNAM WAS A HERO IN MY BOOK. THE WASHINGTON POLITICIANS CROSSED THE LINE BY SENDING OUR YOUNG MEN TO FIGHT A WAR THAT WAS UNWINNABLE BECAUSE THE PEOPLE WE WERE TRYING TO HELP
DIDN'T CARE ABOUT DEMOCRACY OR THE RIGHT TO VOTE, THEY JUST WANTED TO KNOW WHERE THE NEXT BOWL OF RICE WAS TO FEED THEIR FAMILIES. HO CHI MINH REALIZED THIS AND WAS LOVED BY HIS PEOPLE BECAUSE OF IT.
ALI INSPIRED A WHOLE GENERATION OF YOUNG BLACKS AND HELPED MAKE THE WORLD A BETTER PLACE, SOMETHING THAT
PATTON, MacARTHUR, AND CUSTER COULD SAY MAYBE IF THEY HAD SHOWN ANY RESTRAINT AT ALL BY LISTENING TO THEIR HIGHER-UPS MORE TO SAVE UNNEEDED AMERICAN DEATHS.
Message was edited by: josephg®
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110%er [6662]
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Re: SINCE THIS IS THE MORONIC POLITICAL BOARD NOW:
Jun 7, 2016, 11:36 AM
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Thanks for being the moron that you are. It's why they invented the ignore button, you unamerican coot Bafoon.
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Heisman Winner [108390]
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that's not nice...***
Jun 7, 2016, 11:38 AM
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Oculus Spirit [83119]
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All-In [28802]
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Heisman Winner [108390]
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fat boy & little man are heroes 4 all the lives they saved?
Jun 7, 2016, 11:38 AM
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i like it.
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Oculus Spirit [83119]
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I think you nailed it. That brought a swifter end to the
Jun 7, 2016, 11:41 AM
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war and saved thousands of American lives.
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Heisman Winner [108390]
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i believe after kasserine, patton saved lives by ending
Jun 7, 2016, 11:47 AM
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the war more quickly, not to mention the run to bastogne or through sicily.
i could go on, but war being over is better than it lingering and patton helped end the big one, ww2, more readily - he was the allied terrible, swift sword.
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110%er [7207]
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CU Guru [1116]
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Oculus Spirit [83119]
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That's a stretch because we only lost between and 4 and 500
Jun 7, 2016, 11:47 AM
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thousand military in the war. Could have saved hundreds of thousands though.
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Heisman Winner [108390]
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110%er [7207]
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Re: fat boy & little man are heroes 4 all the lives they saved?
Jun 7, 2016, 11:51 AM
[ in reply to Re: fat boy & little man are heroes 4 all the lives they saved? ] |
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1. The number people like to quote is Truman saying half a million 2. The actual estimates at the time were 190,000 casualties, 40,000 deaths 3. An invasion wasn't the only alternative
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All-TigerNet [11934]
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We could have continued to fire bomb cities and to institute
Jun 7, 2016, 12:39 PM
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a cruel blockade which would have slowly starved the Japanese civilian population to death for months if not years.
The fire bombings actually took more lives and destroyed more property than the atomic bombs.
There was no easy solution. The Japanese military was determined to fight to the last man, woman and child. They were not going to ever surrender. Not ever ...
On top of that, we had Stalin poised to get involved and to "help defeat" the Japanese which would have opened up an whole other can of post war worms.
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110%er [7207]
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Re: We could have continued to fire bomb cities and to institute
Jun 7, 2016, 12:51 PM
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cough Japan would have surrendered but the US wouldn't accept the conditions cough cough
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All-TigerNet [11934]
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Says who?
Jun 7, 2016, 2:10 PM
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That's only an assumption, and even if it were true, absolutely no one was in a mood to accept any "conditions" ... and why would they have accepted "conditions" after the huge sacrifice we'd made?
This kind of hind-sight talk is absolutely the prerogative of those who weren't there and who have no feel for the times or the situation.
He!!, the Japanese military still desperately tried to scuttle the emperor's surrender efforts even after the atomic bombs had leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
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110%er [7207]
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This is actually really good Clemson history.
Jun 23, 2022, 11:00 AM
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Jimmy Byrnes (like Byrnes hall Byrnes) was Truman's Secretary of State at this point and wrote the Potsdam Proclamation. Early drafts of the document had provisions for Japan keeping their monarchy and also had Russia's signature. This is important because through cable intercepts and back channel negotiations the US was aware that Japan was willing to end the war, but feared that Emperor Hirohito would be tried as a war criminal (spoiler alert: he wasn't despite the unconditional surrender). There is a lot of speculation as to why Byrnes revised the Postdam Proclamation, but in the end it called for the unconditional surrender of Japan or their imminent demise.
Bonus: There are legends that Byrnes actually gave the order to drop the bombs, but the truth is way more complicated. Truman gave the written order abount a month before the bombs were actually dropped knowing he would be out of the country at the time. Since Truman did not have a Vice President until 1949, this made Byrnes the highest official with the authority to cancel the bombing.
There is also a lot of conjecture about Truman's thoughts on the bombs themselves, but that's a whole nother thing.
A more direct answer to your "says who?", Truman among other. We know from his diary that he was well aware that Japan had been communicating with Russia in regards to brokering a deal.
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All-TigerNet [11934]
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So our option is we sit by and let the Japanese "broker"
Jun 7, 2016, 3:29 PM
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a deal with Stalin?
Maybe there's some truth to it, maybe not. He!!, if you read enough revisionist stuff and suspend your sense of disbelief, you'll come to the conclusion that FDR knew about the Pearl Harbor attack (through back channels) and he let it happen.
But, even IF the Japanese were making serious overtures to the Russians ... and I'm not convinced of it ... I think it was the other way around, the Russians were making the overtures in an attempt to force their way to the table at the 11th hour.
This of course, was just not an acceptable choice for The Allies. No one would have stood for it at the time. It's only become a reasonable discussion for some with the benefit of 70+ years of hind sight.
Since you feature a US Marine Corps insignia in your profile, I'm surprised that you would see this sort of conjecture as a reasonable alternative to what happened.
The average Marine in 1945 was most certainly ready to come home and he was absolutely not eager to have to invade the Japanese mainland, but I would wager pretty much anything that he was not ready to back away from the fight and let the Japanese broker a negotiated surrender to the Russians after what The Marines went through on Tarawa, Tinian, Saipan, Iwo, and Okinawa.
The Russians had a huge stake in the fight with Hitler, but in no way did they rate any sort of say so in ending the war in the Pacific.
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110%er [7207]
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Re: So our option is we sit by and let the Japanese "broker"
Jun 7, 2016, 3:41 PM
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Sorry for the confusion. Japan approached Russia to be the mediator in discussions with the US not surrender to them. At that point, Russia had not entered the Pacific front, and Russia and Japan had a neutrality pact that wasn't set to expire until April 1946.
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All-TigerNet [11934]
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Re: So our option is we sit by and let the Japanese "broker"
Jun 7, 2016, 4:23 PM
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I guess all these years later, it's mostly a matter of what versions of history you accept. I know my US Marine Corps WWII veteran relatives were adamant to their dying day that conditional surrender with Japan was unacceptable given the sacrifices already made. Unconditional surrender was forced on them and rightly so regardless of what kind of back channel stuff might have been going on that would have kept us from occupying the country, saving Japanese "face" and leaving their fanatics with military capability.
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110%er [7207]
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All-TigerNet [11934]
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What's really "odd" is that after Hiroshima, we had to
Jun 7, 2016, 5:09 PM
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drop a second atomic bomb ... having received absolutely no word of surrender ... in fact no response at all from the Japanese regarding the first one.
Honestly, in this day and time I know of no one who wouldn't like to put the genie back in the bottle if it were possible. But, it's not possible and to call the use of the weapons unnecessary and to talk of waiting for the fanatical Japanese military to allow the civilian leadership to capitulate is ludicrous.
Still, the report you cite is a fascinating read:
I love the quotes from Nimitz and Halsey whose Marines had died by the thousands on the beaches just to get our planes close enough to actually drop the bombs and whose fleet had taken tremendous casualties from the Kamikazi onslaughts sent out by the same Japanese "who were ready to surrender" ...
And the one by Curtis LeMay is particularly ironic since it was he who personally stepped up the devastating fire bombing exponentially when he saw that traditional methods were not having the desired affect and that his job was going to be on the line the longer it took.
And seriously, this entire report loses credibility when it includes a quote from MacArthur (via Nixon no less) about the ethics of using the bomb on the Japanese ... MacArthur ... the man who seriously wanted to nuke the Red Chinese at the Korean Border after they flooded over and kicked his a$$ at Chosen Reservoir.
I'm sorry ... I just don't buy the whole premise you're putting forward.
There was nothing sunshine and lollipops about WWII to the people who were actually on the ground fighting it ... which by the way, does not include men like Nimitz, LeMay, and MacArthur. The desire to end it "unconditionally" and as quickly as possible was hard wired into the American psyche at the time.
The men who flew the mission and actually dropped the bomb never wavered in their belief that their effort saved both American and Japanese lives and shortened the war. Of course the thought process can change over time as memories fade and regret seeps in. It was a horrible decision to have to make ... but it was absolutely a necessary decision at the time it was made.
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110%er [7207]
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I think we're having different conversations***
Jun 7, 2016, 5:28 PM
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All-TigerNet [11934]
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You may be right
Jun 7, 2016, 6:41 PM
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We both "know what we know" and "think what we think" and I absolutely do not believe we're on the same page at all.
But that's okay.
It's called agreeing to disagree.
Peace!
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Oculus Spirit [83119]
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110%er [9300]
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Re: And most people don't realize how close physically the
Jun 7, 2016, 2:16 PM
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Josephg thanks for bringing your lungy smarts over here and showing us dumb mangers just how close Russia is to Japan.
We're all better off now - we had no clue - thanks for the geographical clarification - now go the #### back to the lunge
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Oculus Spirit [83119]
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Ouch, just trying to be the Sarah Palin of the mange.***
Jun 7, 2016, 2:55 PM
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110%er [9300]
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Re: Ouch, just trying to be the Sarah Palin of the mange.***
Jun 7, 2016, 3:10 PM
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You're welcome
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Orange Blooded [3881]
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not all men are meant to lead and I believe you have proven
Jun 7, 2016, 12:09 PM
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that today. Good day
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110%er [7207]
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Re: not all men are meant to lead and I believe you have proven***
Jun 7, 2016, 12:13 PM
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Orange Blooded [3820]
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give a guy limited intelligence and a keyboard
Jun 7, 2016, 12:28 PM
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and watch him create an incredible #### of himself.
"saving lives" - please;
by absolutely ignoring and not counting all the lost lives of Vietnamese and, later, all those lives given over to the human degradation of Communism,
you've moved right into role of Southern plantation owners
who, at best, counted slaves as 3/5ths of a person.
Seriously, you liberals need to move to Communist China where you'd be happy.....
the Communist Chinese were, after all, the real proponents of Wars fought in both Korea and Vietnam.
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All-In [28395]
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Re: give a guy limited intelligence and a keyboard
Jun 7, 2016, 12:39 PM
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jesus - give an idiot no job and a keyboard and they wax poetic with nonsense and justify why they should not be allowed to live in this great country. you seriously need to get a life. you know nothing of nam chief. my family was there and it was a disaster.
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Oculus Spirit [83119]
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Ho Chi Minh and the VC were national heroes who drove
Jun 7, 2016, 1:02 PM
[ in reply to give a guy limited intelligence and a keyboard ] |
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out the French. Ho Chi Minh and the VC also fought with us against Japan in WWII. After they drove out the French, we move in with the CIA and advisors trying to prevent them from becoming Communist. How do you think a worn torn country and it's people are going to react to another country from the west moving in and trying to make them democratic?
It would have been like the French coming to the U.S. after we drove the British out and trying to tell us how to govern.
Stupid politicians and stupid military yes men who prolonged the war by inflating the death count.
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MVP [529]
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Re: SINCE THIS IS THE MORONIC POLITICAL BOARD NOW:
Jun 7, 2016, 1:36 PM
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A good example of revisionist history.
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Orange Blooded [4839]
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Re: SINCE THIS IS THE MORONIC POLITICAL BOARD NOW:
Jun 7, 2016, 1:49 PM
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You forgot to blame GWB for Iraq.
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Legend [15216]
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If Ali never lived, what would black people be like
Jun 7, 2016, 1:50 PM
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today? How would our world be different in 2016?
I'm asking. This is not a flame. I like Ali fine.
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All-In [26332]
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Kent State is that way >>>>>>***
Jun 7, 2016, 1:53 PM
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Oculus Spirit [83119]
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"Tin soldiers and Nixon's coming..."***
Jun 7, 2016, 2:09 PM
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CU Medallion [52878]
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How did we get so far
Jun 7, 2016, 2:15 PM
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off the subject........one person does not have any given right to ignore a call from his country, be it right or wrong. This country was founded on the belief that the whole would work together for the betterment(again right or wrong) of the world. Nobody asked me if I wanted to go to Granada for a little party.................where I lost 3 close friends in my Helo Squad. It's f'n life!!!!! Ali was a great man AND a coward to his country
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Oculus Spirit [83119]
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Many British subjects ignored that call and became
Jun 7, 2016, 2:52 PM
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Americans.
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Hall of Famer [23693]
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Oh, shut up.
Jun 7, 2016, 2:45 PM
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Blow hard.
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Oculus Spirit [83119]
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If that is what it takes to get you to post.;) You know,
Jun 7, 2016, 2:54 PM
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the larger the font, the smarter the post.
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110%er [7207]
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Why won't they let us adjust font size?
Jun 7, 2016, 3:03 PM
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I need people to know that I'm yelling the loudest. Maybe bold AND underlined? More exclamation points?
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Oculus Spirit [93668]
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Hey Joe. Where you goin witdat gun in yo hand?
Jun 7, 2016, 4:43 PM
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Bahabum pababum.
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Legend [17915]
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Siriously? SIRIOUSLY?
Jun 8, 2016, 8:23 AM
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drops mic and walks away.
Pausing and turns back to OP - SERIOUSLY? Face palm. Shakes head. Hands in the air, SERIOUSSSSLY?
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