Makes FDR’s court-packing scheme and executive overreach seem tame by comparison. And then, he had plenty of effective pushback that limited how much he could do, even if he did get reelected three times.
I don’t usually care for George Will’s stuff (he was much more persuasive in his younger days), but I really liked a couple of his lines in that piece… very poetic in places.
I think George Will had been phoning it under Obama and to a lesser extent Bush 43. But he announced that he was leaving the Republican party fairly early during the primaries. He is been savaging Trump every since, it is very much high brow humor, but really well done. I’ll show my horrible elitism, but the Pultizer committee doesn’t give prizes to many bad writers.
Yeah, he basically bailed when it became apparent the GOP was going with Trump, who Will found obscene, for obvious reasons. Like literally all the possible reasons.
Meanwhile Charles Krauthammer comes up with a perfectly good solution to the problem.
With near unanimity, my Never Trump friends confess a sense of relief. It could have been worse. They thought it would be worse. A deep apprehension still endures but the international order remains intact, the republic still stands, and no “enemy of the people” has (yet) been arrested.
Admittedly, this is a low bar. And this is not to deny the insanity, incoherence, and sheer weirdness emanating daily from the White House, for which we’ve all come up with our own coping technique. Here’s mine: I simply view President Trump as the Wizard of Oz…
Loud and bombastic. A charlatan. Nothing behind the screen — other than the institutional chaos that defines his White House and the psychic chaos that governs his ever-changing mind. What to do? Ignore what’s behind the curtain. Deal with what comes out in front: the policy, the pronouncements, the actions.
…
What happens when the red phone rings at three in the morning? I’d say: Let it ring. Let the wizard sleep. Forward the call to Defense Secretary Mattis.
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/447347/donald-trump-normalized-scary-north-korea-foreign-policy
Now if we could just get Trump to sleep as much as cats the problem would be mostly solved.
It’s just messed up that the bar has now been lowered, by conservatives, to “Well, he hasn’t literally destroyed the nation or the world, yet.”
It’s just so messed up that this is what their party has been reduced to. That the best thing they can say about their own party’s president, is that he hasn’t yet destroyed the human species.
Whaddaya know, Krauthammer is still a total knob. I for one am shocked.
It’s this sort of degradation of the office and our government in general that has me most concerned. I mean, the House’s healthcare bill was shat out of a clown car, and the President not leaving the world a nuclear wasteland is heralded as some sort of “It could be worse” optimism.
Let’s say Trump gets tossed after his first term or he has to resign earlier due to some sort of scandal or health issue. Look at how low the bar is set now. Disentangling yourself from your private business interests? Don’t worry about it, there’s no problem at all if you’re, say, the CEO of an arms company and deciding when and where the US military will be used. Releasing your tax returns so people can see where conflicts of interest might lie? Who cares? Did you or your campaign collaborate with a foreign government to get elected? Well, it’s all about winning the election, so who cares?
Not to draw on overused and cliche analogies, but I can’t help but be reminded of various lines that were crossed during the decline of Rome.
I’m not sure exactly what this means but it’s now going to be a phrase I say. Thank you.
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-northkorea-usa-idUSKBN18113D
“The Central Intelligence Agency of the U.S. and the Intelligence Service (IS) of south Korea, hotbed of evils in the world, hatched a vicious plot to hurt the supreme leadership of the DPRK and those acts have been put into the extremely serious phase of implementation after crossing the threshold of the DPRK,” the North’s KCNA news agency quoted the statement as saying, referring to the North by its official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
“A hideous terrorists’ group, which the CIA and the IS infiltrated into the DPRK on the basis of covert and meticulous preparations to commit state-sponsored terrorism against the supreme leadership of the DPRK by use of bio-chemical substance, has been recently detected.”
[…]
“They hatched a plot of letting human scum Kim commit bomb terrorism targeting the supreme leadership during events at the Kumsusan Palace of the Sun and at military parade and public procession after his return home,” KCNA said.
"They told him that assassination by use of biochemical substances including radioactive substance and nano poisonous substance is the best method that does not require access to the target, their lethal results will appear after six or twelve months…
“Then they handed him over $20,000 on two occasions and a satellite transmitter-receiver and let him get versed in it.”
Exactly. Leaving aside any actual policy differences between folks, I find it nearly impossible to believe that anyone seriously interested in the well-being of this country can be anything other than appalled by the fiasco in Washington. I truly believe that, whatever the party in power, a certain level of dignity, decorum, rationality, and intelligence–not to mention couth–is essential to a civilized society. There is no definition of the above traits that can be honestly applied to this administration. Even if every pronouncement from Trump’s mouth was something I agreed with as a policy, I’d still be appalled.
Boy, that’s not a very effective poison … sounds more like someone got a diagnosis they didn’t like.
I bitched about a lot during the Clinton administration about the lack of decorum. My defense of Obama to fellow Republican was his policies may suck, but he looks, acts, and speaks Presidential, and like President Reagan did his job of head of state very well.
Trumps vulgarities are cruder than LBJ, he lies worse than Nixon.
his nepotism and pettiness are order magnitude beyond Carter, his syntax worse than both the Bush, his pussy grabbing makes Bill Clinton look like a celibate monk. I think even the small number of folks I know who support Trump, are secretly appalled by his behavior.
The good news is the American public tends to elect the person who has the opposite characteristics of the things that most dislike about the current President. So hopefully #46 is going to walk on water.
Maybe, but after Clinton we got… W.
My fear is that people will vote for whatever the Dems vomit out there as long as it isn’t Hillary Clinton.
People disliked Clinton’s slickness, Bush 43 was plain spoken and not slick.
Sorry to interrupt someone mid-rant but what?
Well, let’s not confuse Carter the President and Carter the ex-President. Two very different modes of behavior. In fact, one of the most presidential things I ever saw was Carter taking full responsibility for the failure of the Iranian hostage rescue mission at Desert One, in 1980 I think it was.
Billy Carter, and IIRC there were some cousins that also got White House jobs. But I’m saying Trump is ten times worse.
Speaking of nepotism, the Trump clan is going to break all records for number and $.
Including this amazing claim.
In an email, the company, said of Meyer’s pitch, “Kushner Companies apologizes if that mention of her brother was in any way interpreted as an attempt to lure investors. That was not Ms. Meyer’s intention.”