So what’s the over/under on when we all get incinerated and die?
Here are some videos to get us prepared.
The question for me becomes, how much smarter and more patient is Bolton than the other ex-staffers who tried to manipulate Trump for their own ends?
That video looks like it was made by the same people who made that stop motion Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer feature that use to creep me the fuck out every Christmas. Between, that, the parents throwing ornaments at each other in violent raging arguments, having to listen to near-constant playing of “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer”, and Jimmy Stewart getting liquored up and hallucinating about an inept angel preventing him from committing suicide, the Christmas season really brings out the childhood post-traumatic stress disorder in me. But it’s still only my third least favorite holiday.
Stranger
Trump was going for the trifecta in firing cabinet members. He’d also planned on firing Ben Carson and David Shulkin
One potential good aspect to Bolton’s hiring: Bolton really, really dislikes the Soviet Un…, er, the Росси́йская Федерaция. So he might actually manage to bring the President back from the path of pandering to President Putin.
That article reports that Carson blames his wife for the $31,000 coffee set.
Classy.
Stranger
In the 3/15 WaPo article that first reported that McMaster was next in line for the short haircut, there’s this (my bold):
Instead, Trump announced the firing by tweet (surprising his admin) and replaced him with John Fucking Bolton. So, well done, Mr. President.
When McMaster and Mattis pull of the military coup that I hope to God they’re orchestrating at this moment, they will call it “operation mustache shave.”
I thought I read he was involved with Cambridge Analytica?
“I let my wife spend government funds” is an interesting defense all on its own. “I let my wife spend government funds and did absolutely nothing to supervise her” is even better.
Yeah, not so much.
From here.
Oh, and Alexander Torshin sounds familiar? He’s the Russian mobster/banker/friend of Putin who has contributed a great deal of money to the NRA.
All that means is that we can look forward to nuclear bombs from Russia in addition to China and North Korea.
Well, it’s a done deal. John Bolton is the real deal when it comes to militarism, a true believer in conspiracy theories and late 19th- and 20th Century aggressive, imperialist foreign policy.
One by one, Trump is losing the (albeit already weak) opposing forces of moderation that were able to at least, at times, make him look presidential and to protect the country from his reckless impulses.
The future is not good. The future is pain. And it unfortunately looks like it will require intense pain to inspire this country to rise up and reverse the dual politics of apathy and absurdity in this country.
But it’s not like all of Trump’s allies have cozied up to Putin. The President is a Putin asset - Putin and/or his oligarchs have some sort of leverage on Trump and nobody is going to be able to undo that. Nobody except Bob Mueller and a Democratic wave at the ballot box this November. And even then I’m not sure.
The thing is that I don’t think Bolton has the temperament to be a spineless sycophant. Trump hired Bolton because he was a hawkish blowhard bully just like Trump and so presumably after the signing of the NDA and loyalty oath they would as soulmates gayly prance hand in hand leaving war and destruction in their wake. The problem is that Trump also demands a level of obsequiousness, and personal debasement on the part of his staff.
At some point Trump is going to utter one to many inanities, or spontaneously decide to reverse course destroying a month of careful preparation on Boltons part, and Bolton is going to lose it. Not, like his predecessors, in a private venting to friends that gets leaked to the Washington post, but loudly and in Trumps face.
I give Bolton six months to a year max and then he’s out.
I’d like to share your optimism, but Bolton having been characterized during his 2005 Senate confirmation hearings as a “quintessential kiss up, kick down sort of guy” makes me fear he’ll do just that.
Six months to a year is plenty of time to get the country into all kinds of horrific warmongering disasters – especially in the runup to the midterms, wherein we will be exhorted to stand united behind our heroic War President.