Bush handled it well. Last year, one of the talking heads says you just don’t speak ill of a gold star mother- if she sets your pants on fire you say “thank you, I never liked these pants much anyway”. That’s what you do. Now we have a toddler who cannot admit error, cannot apologize for anything, and cannot let any insult, real or perceived, go without a nuclear retaliation. Sad.
What this means is that the democratic party and progressives had better come to an agreement to negotiate and compromise on a campaign theme. The Bernie wing of the party needs to join the Democratic party and not run as independents.
The United States is being threatened with nationalist authoritarianism. This isn’t hyperbole; it’s fact and it’s playing out right in front of our eyes.
Probably. But we are really no more doomed than we were 40 years ago. No president in our history has done much of anything to address the fundamental flaws in our socio-economic system, and some of them have striven to make those flaws worse. 44 was a profoundly bland leader who put duck tape on our problems and added a traditional coat of Olympic Looksgood Semigloss. This pass at which we are has been all but inevitable, and it may well call attention, for enough of us, to how truly fucked up things have been all along. Shitgibbon rode in on a wave of discontent, lightly salted with rage, liberally glazed over with befuddlement. If this is how we end up addressing our wants, with full-on stupid, I have to infer that there really was never any reason for hope in the first place.
Okay, but Obama actually took concrete steps toward changing that. He proposed pretty significant healthcare reforms and ended up getting at least some of what he asked for, only to be rewarded by uninspired voters with the Tea Party that threatened to shut down government every year. I agree that Obama wasn’t able to be the FDR many people hoped he would be, but let’s not act like the electorate is the victim here. Trump isn’t an asteroid that fell from space; it’s more like a growing cancer mass in our abdomen that we ignored.
I don’t know what is worse-either Gen. Kelly is not the honorable man everyone believed him to be or the mere contact with Trump corrupts the best of men.
All true. Worse: Kelly revealed something about himself that we hadn’t known–he’s not actually in touch with reality at all. (In the 1950s “women were sacred and looked upon with great honor”…say what?) As one commentator put it:
Kelly is evidently living in a dream world in which all who fail to be straight white Christian men, know their place and stand with heads bowed when their betters enter the room.
We’d counted on him to keep a mentally-ill President from destroying the planet. But now we know that he’s not quite stable, himself. He’s more than a bit wobbly, there in his little dream world.
Was it the prolonged contact with the mentally-ill President that did it? Very possibly. But the upshot is that we can’t count on Kelly to be the proverbial Grownup In The Room.
I’m sick of all of them. If Trump is such a hot mess (and he is) that he needs constant handlers, then what the hell is wrong with Republicans that they aren’t getting rid of him as fast as they can? It’s somehow acceptable to let a completely unqualified maniac fiddle with the controls because he can be “managed??”
I agree with others who have said Kelly, McMaster and Mattis are not the “adults in the room.” They’re enablers who allow the Republicans to carry on with their ruse that it’s somehow acceptable to leave this ignorant, cruel, petty pathetic sub cretin in the most important job in our country, so they can demolish health care, trash Constitutional norms, allow the rise of racist, white nationalist turds and sneak tax cuts for their own handlers past the clueless electorate, all while everyone wrings their hands and acts grateful that the dipshit hasn’t quite yet managed to reach the button.