By most accounts, it hasn’t been a good week for candidate Trump. I say “most” because The Donald has die-hard ditto-heads, like the ones attached to Limbaugh’s ample ass (and there’s probably substantial overlap between those groups). His problem has been his mouth, as usual, though that’s just the thing that makes noise. It’s the policy implications of a Trump presidency that scares the hell out of me, not the fact that he has terminal foot-in-mouth disease. In with Trump would come all of the worst players in the Republican establishment – the war starters, the torturers, and so on – plus a substantial cadre of tea party freaks to fill in all of the gaping holes in his action plan as president. He took zero interest in the drafting of the GOP platform, tossing it off to these rancid constituencies. The result has been a remarkably reactionary document, far to the right of any the party has drafted before.
Does this bother the Republican establishment? Not at all. They get a little bothered by his off-hand comments and rejoinders to everyone who looks askance at him. Overt racist policies, ethnic cleansing, etc., inspires mild concern. I think the turning point was Trump’s reluctance to endorse Paul Ryan and other prominent Republicans – that’s getting their attention, and now the party is openly looking for ways to rein him in or read him out. I don’t think either will happen, frankly. His fellow Republicans worry about their seats, not about the planet – they don’t care that this hyper narcissistic man-baby who seems to have a fascination with nuclear weapons might become president.
Maybe it’s because we’ve had potential world-destroyers in the highest office before, right? Like Truman, who contemplated bombing the border between North and South Korea. Or Kennedy, who nearly blew us up over the right to keep some obsolete missiles in Turkey – missiles we had already secretly planned to remove. Or the unabashed racist Nixon who wanted to use nukes on Vietnam. Or Reagan who almost touched off a nuclear exchange with Russia by repeatedly probing their perimeter defenses until a miscalculation on the Soviet side nearly sent the missiles flying.
Or maybe it’s because they’re too craven to care about anybody other than themselves. My money’s on that one.
luv u,
jp
Oh, hello out there in Real Worldia. No, this isn’t another pointless argument about some instrument none of us plays. We’re just getting ready to record another episode of our Star Trek parody, Ned Trek, now in its 19th episode, featured on our monthly (or near-monthly, at least) podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN. Not to give away any trade secrets, but I do the voice of the Nixon android, an automaton who holds the entire personal and political history of Richard Milhous Nixon in his memory banks. Likes a good stiff drink every once in a while, Nixon does.
Except that it was actually more brutal, as brutal and ugly as the Afghan war has been and continues to be. Vietnam and more generally Indochina was almost totally destroyed during the American war there, particularly from 1962 forward. People are still being killed by that war, by virtue of tons of unexploded ordinance, Agent Orange hotspots all over the south, and more. I don’t want to minimize that fact. For every drone strike Obama launches, there were likely 1,000 sorties over Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia dropping high explosives, napalm, and cluster bombs by the ton. The fact that this likely would not be tolerated today speaks to a gradual increase in our collective humanity. If anything constrains our leaders, it’s that.