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Author | Topic: The Trump Presidency | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Percy Member Posts: 22480 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 4.8 |
Apropos of nothing, here's another political Chad Mitchell Trio song I liked. Still have the record. "Barry" is Barry Goldwater for you younger folk. Though the year was 1964, a lot of it sounds eerily familiar:
--Percy
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Percy Member Posts: 22480 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 4.8 |
caffeine writes: In a sense Bradley is entirely correct and your response is pretty meaningless. Your categories of repeating events are so broad as to have little meaning. Sure, there's been more than one war, but many of these wars are fundamentally different from one another, especially when we're looking over longer time periods. Santyana, who said, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it," often comes up in discussions like this, but I don't believe that's true, either. I believe history repeating itself, like war, is inevitable. There's no meaningful difference in a war between Cro-Magnons beating each other over the heads with clubs over prime hunting grounds and modern armies clashing over oil fields. The specifics and details are inconsequential compared to the overriding repeating patterns.
Saying that wars repeat is like saying history is the same because it's just people doing things over and over. Well yes, but the things are different. Are they really so different? Is assassination with a fire-hardened stick all that different than with a ricin-coated pellet jabbed into a leg using an umbrella? Are the human motivations that different.
One of the things we can learn from history is that similar situations play out extraordinarily differently when the social, technological, economic and political background in which it takes place has changed. Not really. At heart it's really just human nature playing itself out in front of different backdrops. I think the most accurate saying is, "There is nothing new under the sun." Ecclesiastes 1:9. --Percy
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Percy Member Posts: 22480 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 4.8
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Gee, check the news at halftime and you never know what will pop up. In this case it's an editorial by Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post: The ‘stable genius’ isn’t even functioning as president. She cuts through all the excuses and nonsense to deny even Trump zealots any notion of shutting their eyes to the obvious. Here's the first sentence:
quote: What can you say about someone who, when they're charged with mental instability, responds, in effect, "Am not, nah nah"? --Percy
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Percy Member Posts: 22480 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 4.8
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Halftime's over so this has to be short, don't miss this editorial from the New York Times: Trump’s Petticoat Government
"Petticoat Government" refers to when Mrs. Woodrow Wilson was the de facto president of the United States for several months in 1920 while her husband lay ill after a serious stroke. No one in a position of sufficient responsibility was willing to point out the obvious, that the president was incapable of carrying out the duties of his office. In essence the cabinet ran the country while Mrs. Wilson acted as go-between between the cabinet and her bedridden husband. --Percy
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Percy Member Posts: 22480 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 4.8
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The Huffington Post is running the story Trump Says U.S. ‘Not Going To Look Foolish As Long As I’m Here’
The obvious retort? "The US can't help but look foolish as long as you're here." --Percy
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Percy Member Posts: 22480 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 4.8 |
Who is Stephen Miller, you might ask? He's Trump's senior advisor for policy. What does a senior advisor for policy do? As near as I can tell he advises the president on political positions, actions and initiatives. For example, according to Wikipedia, he worked with with Jeff Sessions and Steve Bannon "to enact policies restricting immigration and cracking down on sanctuary cities." In response to court rulings on the travel ban he has asserted that the president's powers override the judiciary. He has ties to white nationalists.
Stephen Miller is also very argumentative, assertive, and verbally aggressive, as seen here in this very recent interview on CNN Jake Tapper's show State of the Union. I know it's 12 minutes, but watch it, you won't regret it because of the insight it provides of the kind of person who is giving toady advice to our president:
Apparently, after the interview the exchanges continued, Miller was asked to leave the set, refused, and was eventually escorted off by security. Let me repeat that. A senior policy advisor to the president of the United States behaved so badly that he had to be escorted off a premises by security. --Percy Edited by Percy, : Formatting.
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Percy Member Posts: 22480 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 4.8
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I'm going off-topic...
RAZD writes: A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject.― Winston S. Churchill Misattributed quotations are so common that I looked this one up. Every page I checked on the Internet credited Churchill, though some said it was only attributed to Churchill. This page had the most detail, finding the quote in Esar’s Comic Dictionary in 1943, and not finding it attributed to Churchill until 1952. Bartlett's Familiar Quotations includes it, but where it might normally say, "Letter to so-and-so" or "Speech to House of Commons" or some such it just says "Saying," while not defining what that means. My guess? Churchill never said it, and if he did say it then he didn't originate it. --Percy
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Percy Member Posts: 22480 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 4.8 |
During the 2016 election Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) called Trump a "xenophobic, race-baiting religious bigot." He also called Trump "a kook", "crazy" and "unfit for office." Today on ABC's The View Graham reversed course and said, ""No, I don't think he's a xenophobic, race-baiting, religious bigot as president."
What evidence is this Senator looking at? If there's anything that's eminently obvious is that Trump is the same person he was during the election, even more so. If characterization as a "xenophobic, race-baiting, religious bigot" was true in 2016 then it was just as true in 2017 and 2018. My God, he just ordered 200,000 Salvadorans out of the country. That's xenophobic. He's still grumbling about the courts overturning his Muslim travel bans - that's religious bigotry. Then there's his comments about "very fine people on both sides" after Charlottesville, and that's race-baiting. So what evidence is Senator Graham looking at? Obviously no evidence at all. He's become another Trump toady, another Trump pod person. Source: Graham: I no longer think Trump is a ‘race-baiting religious bigot’ Sidenote: Graham is one of the two senators who wrote a letter requesting that Christopher Steele, the former British MI6 operative who authored the Trump dossier, be criminally investigated. --Percy
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Percy Member Posts: 22480 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 4.8 |
Two columns, one of them funny, the other deadly serious, both well worth reading.
First the funny one: Mueller vs. Trump: Time for the White House to 'Unleash the Genius' And now the serious one: My lawyers got Trump to admit 30 times, under oath, that he lied I'm going to have to start paying more attention to the Chicago Tribune. --Percy
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Percy Member Posts: 22480 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 4.8 |
Found this in The Very Stable Genius in the Very Stable White House. It's the obvious response to Trump's claim that he's "really smart" and a "very stable genius":
If you have to tell people you are, you aren't. --Percy
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Percy Member Posts: 22480 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 4.8 |
Here's the YouTube copy of the Stephen Colbert Interview with Michael Wolff, Author of "Fire and Fury". I've seen several interviews with Wolff, and he's often bumbled his explanations of why his book should be believed. If you want a good sense of how Wolff resolved the many conflicting accounts he gathered from White House staff, this is the best explanation I've seen him offer so far.
--Percy
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Percy Member Posts: 22480 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 4.8 |
caffeine writes: There's no meaningful difference in a war between Cro-Magnons beating each other over the heads with clubs over prime hunting grounds and modern armies clashing over oil fields. The specifics and details are inconsequential compared to the overriding repeating patterns.
Well that's just silly. Is there any difference between Trump and Obama? They're both Presidents and they both speak - what does it really matter if there are different words? Is there any difference between Trump and Obama, you ask? It depends on the category. Is the category people? They're both people. Is the category people who have served as president? They both fit. Is the category political party? They're both different. Is the category scumbags? One is, one isn't. In my example the category was wars over access to resources, a recurring theme throughout history.
If your only point was that there will always be conflict, then it's not a response to the original article, since I very much he was arguing anything so obvious. No, my point wasn't that there will always be conflict (though I do think there will never be an end to war). My point was that history, contrary to the claim in the article (What Trump does and doesn't have in common with Hitler), does continually repeat itself. Wars over access to resources was just an example of a recurring pattern of history.
'People engaging in conflict' is not a pattern;... I would disagree that wars over resources are not a recurring pattern throughout human history, but more generally, that there are patterns throughout history is not a novel or fringe idea but is widely held. The phrase "patterns of history" is familiar to everyone. Check out historic recurrence over at Wikipedia. Type "patterns of history" or "history repeating itself" in to Google.
...and the specifics and details are enormously consequential. The specifics and details are what decide whether this or that conflict will erupt into a shooting war or not; and if so how that war plays out and what are it's consequences. Is it a short, sharp affair; a decades-long conflict; localised, global? These things matter. I of course agree.
You may see no meaningful difference between two people getting into a fistfight and a global nuclear apocalypse, but you would understand if no one else agrees with you. I wasn't taking that position, but if I did then I would disagree with me, too. --Percy
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Percy Member Posts: 22480 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 4.8
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Phat writes: I have a theory, which I may have mentioned before. Trump is purposefully being as newsworthy and controversial (yes and stupid and racist) as possible in order to distract the public from the actual Republican Agenda and to lure public opinion into focus on him exclusively. Any other explanation couldn't begin to describe his errant behavior. There's an old aphorism (looking it up it apparently has a name, Hanlon's razor) that goes:
quote: Trump is impulsive, ignorant, manipulative , bullying, arrogant, narcissistic and a pathological liar - these are the primary qualities that render him incompetent and unfit for the office of president by a magnitude unsurpassed by any previous president, including his entirely appropriate (for him) hero, Andrew Jackson. These qualities rule the expressions of his defective character, which include misogynism, homophobia, bigotry, white supremacy, racism, xenophobia and greed. --Percy Edited by Percy, : Fix grammar.
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Percy Member Posts: 22480 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 4.8 |
Interesting week for Trump, ever by the standards of the previous week when the Fire and Fury book came out. I didn't have time to post about these during the week, so here's a summary:
Here's a link to the New York Times webpage enumerating Trump lies through last November: New York Times Trump Lies Page The Washington post has its own lies page, but you need a subscription to view it with Javascript: Washington Post Trump Lies Page --Percy
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Percy Member Posts: 22480 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 4.8 |
A "former White House official" was quoted in The Hill (Trump allies see 's***hole' controversy as overblown) as saying:
quote: About that last sentence, I do not think it true that "more Americans speak like President Trump than speak like Jim Acosta." I think it would be more accurate to say that the more uneducated, racist, bigoted and xenophobic someone is, the more likely they are to speak like Trump. --Percy
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