free thoughtpolice wrote:Off topic Steers. You need to post it on the Clinton/deep state thread.
Which you created
after I made that post. Though I might consider copying those stories & comments over there. But you might consider they're relevant if some - not mentioning any names of course - by way of taking a shot at Trump try to whitewash Clinton & the whole "Democratic Machine", or try to elide their responsibility for the mess that Trump and Company more or less have to clean up.
Somewhat apropos of which, and something that I'm sure will warm the cockles of your heart, Andrew Sullivan has a post up (
A Week of Reckoning), linked to courtesy of a tweet by Claire Lehmann (of Quillette), that kind of tears a strip off Trump, at least with some justification. Sullivan starts off by discussing "an irrational president in an increasingly post-rational America", follows up by discussing the ACA and "Sugar Cane" "shafting" the GoP & Trump, and then closes with, I think, a more credible perspective on "intersectionality", Dawkins, and Islam (one out of three is not a bad batting average ...):
https://twitter.com/clairlemon/status/8 ... 3901031424
And, related thereto, a National Review post:
The Great Conservative Rethink Isn’t Going Away
The Right has shown that it knows how to win elections; now it must figure out how to govern.
At first glance, the great rewrite of our politics seems to be off. The new nationalist wave isn’t crashing on the shores, it’s receding. The globalists are winning again. Emmanuel Macron crushed the Front Nationale. Angela Merkel is going to romp to reelection this fall. And it looks like all the people who put their hopes in Brexit or in Donald Trump are smelling the sulfurous odor of reality now. All the native working-class people, all the dissenting right-leaning intellectuals — their hopes have already been dashed. ....
... If 2016 was your Flight 93 election, make your peace with God now. You got control of the cockpit, but you had no plan for going nose up, the engine is just bursting into flames as you give it more juice on the way to back to Earth. Maybe [Trump] causes a few more libs to lose their minds on social media. Maybe they will become as numb to his provocations as you are becoming. Big whoop. Either way, you blew your one chance.
Or did you?
What if sudden-onset political incompetence is just part of the new era that is breaking upon us all? ....
Ruth Davidson [leader of Scotland’s Conservative and Unionist party] wrote a big political coming-out essay this week. Capitalism needs a reboot, she says. Yes, she gushes with libertarian abandon when talking about the invention of shipping containers. But at the same time, there are lines of thought in her essay that address the same issue and the same problem that May and Trump and all the dissidents on the right have been speaking about for some time.
Capitalism has to be a moral enterprise she says. It has to reach out to the people who felt left behind, for whom social solidarity has been absent. She cites Adam Smith’s contention that capitalism will provide the means for public services and praises “intervention. Market restraints. Decisions made at a macro-level by governments to ensure basic fairness for the little guy.” ....
May and Trump just might fail. But right now it looks like conservative parties and conservative thinkers are likely to continue moving in their direction for a long time to come. We may not have the right answers yet, but the problem set doesn’t look like it is changing any time soon.
Indeed. As Einstein is (mis)quoted as saying, "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results". And it sure looks like the status quo wasn't, and isn't, working worth a pinch of coon shit. Although I have to admit that I'm all right, Jack - more or less, all things considered, for the moment at least. But "après nous, le déluge" tends not to be a particularly wise policy, and conditions have a tendency to change in a heartbeat, particularly if we are too careless about our choices, and studiously blind to their consequences.
Sure, Trump is a bit of a loose cannon, being charitable, but the "standard operating procedure", the "business as usual" that Clinton would have endorsed, sure looks like it was a recipe for disaster. Not that that is entirely impossible with Trump, but at least he represents an attempt to stop short of the brink instead of pitching headlong over it. Apropos of which, you might read:
Trump Saw A Disturbing Video, Then He Shut Down The CIA's Covert Syria Program
While we've carefully documented the dynamics in play behind Trump's decision to end the CIA's covert Syria program, as well as the corresponding fury this immediately unleashed among the usual hawkish DC policy wonks, new information on what specifically impacted the president's thinking has emerged. ....
Trump pressed his most senior intelligence advisers, asking the basic question of how the CIA could have a relationship with a group that beheads a child and then uploads the video to the internet. He wasn't satisfied with any of the responses ...
I geddit that survival tends to make for strange bedfellows if not for actually endorsing or condoning barbarisms. But do you really think that the country that is supposedly the leader of the "Free World" should be having any truck at all with those psychotic thugs and barbarians, and whose number is apparently legion, particularly throughout the entirety of Islam? That Obama and Clinton and the whole venal "Deep State" and "Military Industrial Complex" endorsing and promoting that isn't manifest evidence of a profound rot that goes to the core of Western "civilization"?
One is tempted to quote the passage in Genesis [
18:16-33] about Sodom and Gomorrah and the fifty righteous ....
