Ya, I seriously think that if the shit hits the fan, folks are going to have serious doubts about actually doing what he says. Everyone thinks he’s just a crazy old man… because he is.
But really, most military action isn’t just shooting all zee missles! It usually involves the President rallying the country to the fight. Trump isn’t gonna be able to do that.
No, no way in hell. But you don’t think he could scramble some jets? Call up a couple battalions? Get the nice young gentleman carrying the football standing a few feet away to just come a little closer…
He could do something stupid, sure… basically fuck over the US. But ultimately, the end result is gonna be a net win for the bad guys. He might start some shit, but in the end it’ll all blow up in his face.
The idea that because he’s such an idiot, that he’s unpredictable and thus enemies will be paralyzed with fear just isn’t real.
I recall a talk given by some chess master… I honestly forget which one. But he was asked about what his response was to people who played crazy, unorthodox openings and stuff. And his thoughts on it were pretty smart. Basically, unorthodox openings and crazy shit, while potentially confusing and threatening to middle tier players, was really not a thing at higher levels of play. It ultimately betrayed a lack of confidence on the part of the player doing it. They weren’t confident playing a conventional game, and so they were trying to make up for it with some crazy shit to throw the opponent off. But merely playing conventional game would essentially always beat them… because chess is a game that’s been around for a long ass time. There’s a reason why there are established openings and responses.
Sure, it’s not like it’s a solved game, but generally the reason unorthodox openings are unorthodox? It’s because they are bad openings.
Trump doing stupid shit would essentially be like some guy doing an unorthodox opening in chess. Maybe it would confuse other amateurs who don’t know their shit… but someone like Putin? Putin knows what the fuck he’s doing. He will capitalize on that kind of thing, and at the end of the day, Russia will be stronger, and the US will be weaker.
And honestly, I find it hard to believe that Trump would be able to come up with any action which Putin (or various other world leaders… maybe not NK’s fat idiot child) wouldn’t be able to spin and turn into a disaster for the US.
This is the part that scares me. The response of amateurs who don’t know their shit but have the arsenal to kill a lot of people.
I wonder what the chess master’s counter move to an opponent flinging the board across the room would be.
Sledgehammer to the table of course… then knife everyone in the room. Or so he will assume, so you have to be preemptive of course.
You should go to the tournament director and ask that he rule that your opponent has forfeited the game.
Sadly, there is no tournament director in international politics.
Pick everything back up, reset the position, and wait for your opponent’s next move.
Very likely flinging the table across the room again. Some people don’t have any other move.
He urges Americans to admit the faults of forgetting history because Snyder says, “history gives us a sense of possibility — not just in the positive but mainly in the negative sense that things can go very wrong.”
“Democratic republics in the history of the last 200 years usually fail. And so it behooves us where we’re … in a moment of great stress like we are now to try to get some traction in history … to be able to say ‘Aha, I see some resemblance and therefore I see some possibilities for action.’”
The aversion people have to making the comparison between Trump and leaders like Mussolini and Hitler prevents people from seeing the lessons that history offers, Snyder says.
“It’s precisely in the effort to make comparisons that one finds differences and similarities,” he tells Crowe.
Snyder explains that since 1989, when the Cold War ended, Americans allowed themselves to think “the details of the past don’t matter.”
“And unfortunately we’ve allowed ourselves to basically sleepwalk into the future, and by making that move, we’ve actually summoned back the ghosts of the very past we thought we had dismissed.”
After attending and being a delegate at the county convention today- there really is an energized opposition.
They had triple the numbers of last years- and 96% precinct participation , they had to boost the church.
Decent number of young people, and young people running and winning leadership roles too.
Nevertheless, she persisted was the most common slogan as well. That one has legs.
Hannity literally has an IQ of 85.
I think you’re being generous.
Something interesting/weird is going on in the Kansas 4th CD. It’s the district that used to be Mike Pompeo’s, before he became D-CIA.
Special election to fill his seat is Tuesday.
The 4th Congressional District in Kansas is every bit as Red as you might think. It went Trump +33 back in November. It’s Wichita and further south and west-central to the Oklahoma border.
But in the last two weeks, Republicans have been pouring resources into this race, and that got the attention of the left, who have been pouring their own funds in at a grassroots level to the tune of $240,000 in the last two weeks alone. (The DCCC seems to have been caught completely napping on this one, much to their discredit.) Ted Cruz has campaigned there.
I mean…it would be hell-freezes-over nuts if the Democrat there, James Thompson, beats Ron Estes, the Republican. I think (and most observers think) that Estes will win.
As @Taniel just pointed out on Twitter, this race seems eerily similar to Paul Hackett’s attempt to win a deep red seat in Ohio in 2005. It was an entirely netroots-driven campaign that came up just short. Hackett lost by 3. But it presaged what was coming for the GOP in 2006 in a big way. Will be interesting to see if Thompson can get within single digits in the Kansas 4th on Tuesday.
Y’all are paying attention to this tonight, right?
I don’t think Thompson will win, but the early vote totals just announced in Sedgwick County (the biggest population area in CD 4 in Kansas) have Thompson with 61% of the vote. Which is stunning.
Again, full expect the election day vote to deliver this thing for Estes, but there’s definitely an anti-Trump thing going in these early results.
Pompeo won this district 6 months ago 61-29.