Sleep well
Will Trump’s idiot bombast get us all killed? Who knows.
On Wednesday, Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson played down the threat. “I think Americans should sleep well at night, have no concerns about this particular rhetoric of the last few days,” he said.
Oh well, if Rex Tillerson says it, there’s nothing to worry about.
Kidding.
Mr. Trump’s stark comments went well beyond the firm but measured language typically preferred by American presidents in confronting North Korea, and indeed seemed almost to echo the bellicose words used by Mr. Kim. Whether that message was mainly a bluff or an authentic expression of intent, it instantly scrambled the diplomatic equation in one of the world’s most perilous regions.
Supporters suggested that Mr. Trump was trying to get Mr. Kim’s attention in a way that the North Korean leader would understand, while critics expressed concern that the American president could stumble into a war with devastating consequences.
Especially since he is authorized to launch the fucking nukes at any time on his own say-so.
They really need to invoke the 25th Amendment. But they won’t.
“This is a more dangerous moment than faced by Trump’s predecessors,” said Mark Dubowitz, chief executive of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a nonprofit group in Washington. “The normal nuanced diplomatic rhetoric coming out of Washington hasn’t worked in persuading the Kim regime of American resolve. This language underscores that the most powerful country in the world has its own escalatory and retaliatory options.”
Oh shut up. “Resolve” is worthless. “Resolve” just means everybody dies. This isn’t a god damn pissing contest, it’s a blow up the whole world fight. Nobody wins. Being mas macho doesn’t help.
But Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, said it would be counterproductive. “President Trump is not helping the situation with his bombastic comments,” she said in a statement. Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona and chairman of the Armed Services Committee, also took exception. “All it’s going to do is bring us closer to some kind of serious confrontation,” he told KTAR News radio.
And that’s not the good outcome, ok?
Jesus. One stupid tv show, and this is where it gets us.
https://www.facebook.com/144310995587370/photos/a.271728576178944.71555.144310995587370/1626686580683130/?type=3&theater
When Dubya was president, he did what I thought was impossible – he made me miss Nixon. Now that Trump is president, he’s making me miss Dubya. At least Dubya understood that you don’t pick a fight with a nuclear power. He saved his aggressiveness for poverty stricken countries that couldn’t launch a nuclear strike at their neighbors – nasty, to be sure, but at least it didn’t create the level of wholesale destruction.
I’m only sort of kidding. It’s horrifying to see the continued race to the bottom of GOP presidents since Nixon – each seems to want to outdo the last in outrageous stupidity and meanness.
Well now let’s not get carried away. Do you really miss Dubya? As opposed to thinking “he makes even Dubya look not so awful”?
I have the second thought a lot, but that doesn’t lead to missing Dubya.
The GOP has really been on a downward trajectory since Lincoln. Except for him, they haven’t seen a crisis that they couldn’t make inevitably, exponentially worse through graft, inaction, hypocrisy, and incompetence. Perhaps (*perhaps*) Eisenhower wasn’t a complete buffoon, but he did almost nothing to stop the ‘military-industrial complex’ that his farewell address so lamented, and he oversaw the Cold War’s start that set us up with the dynamics that we’re dealing with today.
Just about the only thing Republican presidents are good at is making us think *this one* has to be the bottom, that it’s going to go uphill from here, that surely we’ve found the nadir of perfidy and incompetence and neglect and ignorance, that if we just last through the next four (or eight) years, things will turn around. I remember thinking that in 2003, when I was coming of age under Shrub the Lesser.
But there is no bottom. Trump, if he doesn’t kill us all, will be superseded in every respect by the next Republican candidate, or the one after that (since usually it takes four to eight years of a sane Democrat to make people forget how horrible the Republican was and give them just another shot). Mark my words, in twenty years people will be like ‘I never thought anything could make me miss Trump, but this new guy is just beyond the pale!’
There is no pale. It’s horror all the way down.
Well, Ophelia, that’s sort of what I’m getting at, of course. I do miss Obama – though I wasn’t one of those fans who thought he could do no wrong, I definitely thought he was solid, intelligent, and a decent president that wouldn’t throw nukes at the first person that made him mad. I thought Dubya was weak, unintelligent, and a ridiculous president, that still knew better (or was at least surrounded by advisors who knew better) than to throw nukes at the first person who made him mad. Still, if those “Miss me Yet?” Dubya signs were present now, I might find myself instinctively nodding at least temporarily.
What we need right now is FDR, and instead we get a giant baby man who throws a temper tantrum every time someone criticizes him, one of his children, or his dumb habit of gold plating everything. King Midas, not President Barely Competent like we had with Dubya.