QOTD: The Greatest Foreseeable Disaster

 

From today's Washington Post op-ed page by conservative national security writer Max Boot, looking at the existential disaster a second Trump term would be:

"The prospect of another Trump term is the greatest foreseeable disaster that can befall the United States and the world. Trump is likely to be 10 times more dangerous this time around, because he won’t allow any adults in the White House to act as a check on his worst instincts — no more Jim Mattis as defense secretary, John F. Kelly as chief of staff or H.R. McMaster as national security adviser. In a second term, Trump is likely to only appoint advisers as unhinged as he is.

We can only speculate what this will mean, but the likelihood is that Trump will cut off aid to Ukraine, pull out of NATO, eviscerate the civil service and the military’s top ranks, and appoint an attorney general who will prosecute his enemies. For a start. He was eager to do all of those things in his first term but was dissuaded or blocked by the 'deep state.' He’s unlikely to allow that to happen again. He has become even more radical and more authoritarian since leaving office, and he now has much more experience in getting what he wants out of the government.

The consequences will be dire enough domestically, imperiling U.S. democracy, but they will be even worse internationally. Among other alarming consequences, a Trump presidency could allow Russian leader Vladimir Putin to defeat Ukraine and remake the 21st-century global order in favor of tyrants and aggressors."  (our emphasis)

Boot writes that the Biden - Harris ticket may be uninspiring, but is the only game in town if you want to defeat American fascism on the rise in the person of the Malignant Loser. It's too late for fantasy Dem tickets with Gov. Whitmer (MI) or Gov. Newsom (CA), with primaries only a few months away. President Biden will have to sell his good record on the economy and on defending freedom here and abroad to a distracted and restive public in the 13 months before the next Presidential election.

 

QOTD -- Historic Rapprochement

"It is hard to exaggerate the significance of Friday’s summit at Camp David among President Biden, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida. This represents another major step toward the establishment of a new trilateral alliance that could help all three nations cope with the growing threats from North Korea and China in a world destabilized by the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

"Such a summit would have been unthinkable only two years ago. The primary acclaim must go to the courageous leader of South Korea and the pragmatic leader of Japan for moving beyond historical grievances. But the Biden administration also deserves considerable credit for enabling this rapprochement..." -- Washington Post columnists Max Boot and Sue Mi Terry on the "major Biden achievement" of fostering a strengthened alliance between South Korea, Japan, and the US.  The three leaders committed to regular summits to cement their nations' economic and military cooperation in the face of North Korean aggression and a growing Chinese/ Russian alliance.

(Photo:  Yoon, Biden, and Kishida at Camp David summit / Nathan Howard, UPI)

MAGA Cult Making Russia "Great Again"

After noting that the contrast between President Biden's recent appearance in Helsinki where he welcomed Finland as a new NATO member, and the disgraceful appearance there by the Malignant Loser in 2018 kowtowing to Vladimir Putin, national security conservative Max Boot closes his latest Washington Post article with this:

"The very real possibility that Trump could win back the presidency in 2024 fills U.S. allies with dread — and offers hope to U.S. enemies. John Bolton, who was Trump’s national security adviser, has said Trump came close to pulling out of NATO in 2018 and would do so if elected to another term. It’s also a good bet that Trump would try to stop the flow of U.S. weapons to Ukraine. Indeed, the very prospect that Trump could return to office encourages Putin to prolong the conflict.

Dmitry Medvedev, former president of Russia and vice chairman of Putin’s security council, said in May that Trump “is a good guy but cowardly” and that “historically, it has always been easier to work with Republicans.” Medvedev acknowledged that, from the Kremlin’s perspective, “the main thing” is that Biden (“the guy with dementia”) not win reelection.

So, if you believe in making America, rather than Russia, 'great again,' it’s imperative for Biden to win in 2024 and maintain the policies that have so greatly strengthened NATO and Ukraine. As long as the MAGA wing remains as strong as it is, Republicans cannot be trusted on national security policy."  (our emphasis)

Also, watching the "MAGA wing" perform at the Republican House "weaponization" hearings last week, where they viciously defamed the FBI with lies, lunatic conspiracies and false accusations aimed at pleasing the Malignant Loser and our foreign adversaries, it's not hard to see that they represent a serious national security threat to the U.S. 

(image: Victor Juhasz for Rolling Stone)

 

QOTD -- Sick And Tired

We're Hackwhackers and we endorse this message:

If you’re sick and tired, too, here is what you can do. Vote for Democrats on Tuesday. For every office. Regardless of who they are. And I say that as a former Republican. Some Republicans in suburban districts may claim they aren’t for Trump. Don’t believe them. Whatever their private qualms, no Republicans have consistently held Trump to account. They are too scared that doing so will hurt their chances of reelection. If you’re as sick and tired as I am of being sick and tired about what’s going on, vote against all Republicans. Every single one. That’s the only message they will understand.

That's from Max Boot, former Republican neo- con, in today's Washington Post.  It's never too late to come over from the dark side (and we don't check past ideological transgressions when we're sharing a foxhole facing a common, existential neo- fascist threat).

Saturday Morning Reading

The topic this morning is the Grand Old Pedophile party.  As always, please go to the links for the full articles.

Charles Pierce leads us off:

The fact is that Roy Moore is very much who the Republicans are. He is representative of a fanatical splinter of American Protestantism that has accounted for a great deal of the success enjoyed by modern conservatism and the Republican Party for over four decades, and there always has been dark sin at the heart of that success. 

The rise of what used to be known as “the religious right” did not begin with the legalization of abortion. That’s a nice story that the various Bible-banging charlatans would like you to believe. No, the institutions that would nurture and produce the religious right were the white-only Christian academies and universities that sprang up in the South as part of the massive resistance to desegregation—the churchgoing end of that strategy. The religious right was not born out of opposition to Roe v. Wade. It was born out of opposition to Brown v. Board. 

There was always something wretched in its founding that invariably asserted itself in our politics. Dishonesty and camouflage were its primary sacraments. As part of their bargain with these people, Republicans and conservatives agreed tacitly to overlook these things, and so they became accustomed to overlooking everything until, today, alleged pedophilia of the most grotesque sort is the latest thing to be overlooked in the cause of tax-cuts and the restriction of women's reproductive rights. (our emphasis)

You could easily argue that the roots of this complicity go back many decades more, back through when a resurgent KKK cloaked itself in religious symbolism, through the Jim Crow era, all the way to this country's founding. The party labels changed, but conservatives were always the most culpable.

Speaking of conservatives, we have a few who want the Grand Old Pedophile party to die.

Jennifer Rubin:

If there is a single idea animating Trump’s GOP, it is that “blood and soil” (or race and religion, if you prefer) — not the American creed (“All men are created equal…”) — is the defining feature of the United States. Whatever else that is not white and Christian is foreign, alien and a threat to “real America.” Whether in day-to-day politics, foreign affairs or domestic policies, there is no right and wrong, only them and us. That’s Trumpism in a nutshell. The Republican Party’s inability to immediately and completely separate itself from and denounce Moore is the predictable result of this thinking. 

I would like to think that Americans have gotten a good look at this Frankenstein-esque party and will repudiate it in 2018 and 2020. I still carry the belief (bolstered by Tuesday’s election) that most Americans have not lost their minds and souls.

Rubin wants a new "conservative" party to replace the GOP. A question for her: what would keep that new party from devolving exactly the way the current conservative party devolved, through shameless and dishonest pandering to the worst instincts of those Americans who have come to internalize the bullshit they've been fed for over 40 years?

Rubin's fellow neo- con Max Boot joins the chorus:

This episode is the sorry culmination of two trends that have disfigured the conservative movement beyond all recognition: contempt for the facts and desire to win at all costs. Republicans are increasingly reliant on “alternative facts” manufactured by the likes of Fox News and Breitbart, which claim that global warming isn’t real and neither is the Russian hack of the Democratic National Committee. The real scandal, they tell us, is the Steele dossier paid for by the Democrats in an attempt to uncover Trump’s Russian connections. Or is it the evidence-free claim that Obama supposedly wiretapped Trump?  

In the final analysis, no indictment of their candidate will convince the faithful. As Trump once said, “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.” Or, more to the point, Roy Moore could molest a 14-year-old girl and not lose votes. Because for Republican partisans, their opponents are “the forces of evil,” and anything is preferable to that. Even Donald Trump. Even Roy Moore. So in ostensibly fighting evil, Republicans have become complicit in it. 

This is a party that does not deserve to survive.

While, again, we would heartily agree with this conclusion, we doubt that American politics would be without a right- wing party of hypocrites, bigots and nihilists for very long.

Tweet Of The Day--Getting The Boot

I'm a lifelong Republican but Trump surge proves that every bad thing Democrats have ever said about GOP is basically true. #NeverTrump

— Max Boot (@MaxBoot) February 29, 2016

Too bad it took you so long to figure that out.