WE HAVE A WINNNAAHHH!
YOU have correctly assessed the "toothless" comment.
Everyone else is crashing on zarf for saying it, but YOU have nailed the true villain to the tree: a gutless Congress.
In point of fact, we have the most powerful military force and the most admirable troops on the planet...
BUT...
...all of that means exactly ZERO if Congress won't back them up.
Unless our Congress acts like the legislative branch of a true superpower, we are not, in fact, a superpower. We are nothing more than the paper tiger that Bejing has always accused us of being.
That does not slander our men and women in uniform, nor does it discount the power of our implements of war.
It simply emphasizes that our superpower status relies upon these three supports: manpower, technological power, and political power.
Neutralize any one of those supports and we cease to be a superpower.
Because our Congress is the dominant body through which our national political power is implemented, the "political power" support for our superpower status is, arguably, neutralized.
Friends, we've got a whole lot of voting to do to fix this, and there's no easy way out, nor is there any short-term solution. We're a team in a rebuilding phase, and there will likely be some distasteful losses before we get back to superpower condition, again.
That's just the way it is.
I pray that each of you is doing the most you can to be part of the solution.
Nice post.
Don't you get it? Voting won't fix anything. It's all rigged. It's a chinese finger trap. The harder you pull the tighter it gets.