Sorry, this came out wrong. I meant only that you used the phrase without being aware of the implications in American politics.
I’ve thought about this with much consternation. 9/11 not only unified the nation, but it moved it noticeably to the right. “W” Bush may have never gotten away with his clearly illegal invasion of Iraq without it. If the mid-term 2018 elections go bad for the Republicans, another 9/11 type event might just swing things back into their favor.
Thanks - I guess I wasn’t aware of the specific connotations of that phrase and expected it to be literal rather than nuanced.
You can still use the term literally. Only the usual suspects, who are trying to control what you can, or can not say, complain about its use.
So much irony…
How many people here seriously believe that Trump is cooking up a Reichstag fire and that the CIA, FBI, and every other government agency is waiting and ready to do it at his behest?
My mental image is of him watching TV in his bedroom and grumpily leaving late in the morning to do his actual job. I don’t see him doing any long term planning. He has no long term discipline - he just says whatever stupid thing comes into his head in a tweet within a day or so about hearing whatever distorted vision of reality he gets from his yes-men advisors and Fox and Friends.
The trouble with that conclusion is that it doesn’t make sense unless one believes that the PNAC ideologues in the Bush administration engineered 9/11, which of course they did not. What they did do was exploit it to get the wars they wanted, particularly the invasion of Iraq. In that sense, but only in that sense, the comment in the famous PNAC paper about needing a Pearl Harbor type of event to trigger the desired hegemonistic foreign policy was very prescient.
But Trump and the idiots he’s appointing to key positions are completely different. Trump himself is the opposite of an ideologue. He not only has no ideology, he doesn’t even have principles or beliefs. He’ll do whatever feeds his enormous ego or his bank account, nothing more. And while many of the idiots he appointed are indeed ideologues, they are not ideologues of any consistent stripe like the PNAC goons in the Bush administration, the Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Wolfowitz types. They are more like a motley crew of laughable incompetents. Neither they nor Trump are going to engineer any consistent policy on anything. Like children who are given access to things they shouldn’t be allowed to play with, they’re just going to break a lot of things. If they do start a war, it’ll just be due to incompetence, not some vision of American empire.
The one exception to this characterization might have been Steve Bannon, an alt-right ideologue in the extreme and smart enough to be dangerous, but Bannon is long out of the picture.
I actually kind of agree with this, except that I still believe we engineered 911 of course.
Trump?
Not a chance, but it’s clear he is a puppet. Trump doesn’t care about anything other than how he is perceived. I used to watch Celebrity Apprentice, and he is acting exactly the same as POUTS as he did as the “boss” on that show.
He is still the side show now, there are much stronger forces pulling his strings, but he doesn’t care. He’s in it for the adulation, but he lets it slip sometimes.
That is really the only thing he is good for.
Um yeah, the birther bitch is sobbing about disunity. It’s impossible to trust anything spouted today by that proven, serial liar. Tomorrow he’ll completely contradict himself and crow about the benefits of division.
The only way America unites behind “president” Scumbag would be an alien invasion, when we are all fighting for our lives. Or maybe the Zombie Apocalypse. Until then, he can go fuck himself.
Well, so much for the “unifying” stuff.
Well, we now have our alien invasion. Who knew they would be invisible. And he has totally fucked it up, setting state v. state and state v. feds bidding up prices for PPE and such. Free market in action!
Trimp is doing to America what he did to Ukraine (Slate) and following the successful Hugo Chavez playbook of bluster, distraction, and denial (Guardian) - so that “unifying” stuff is just another fart lost in the wind.