This morally rudderless mountebank
Michael Tomasky puts it starkly:
I’d be hard-pressed to argue that JD Vance’s meeting with the leader of the German fascist party on Friday was weakly covered by the press. Yet somehow, it hasn’t registered quite the degree of shock and revulsion here in the United States that it deserves to. That visit, along with Vance’s shocking speech at the Munich Security Conference, confirms every worst suspicion about this morally rudderless mountebank. The argot of diplomats and newspaper editorials, which express “concern” or even “grave concern,” doesn’t begin to describe how we Americans should feel about what Vance did last week in our name.
The Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD) has been declared a “suspected extremist” organization by the German domestic intelligence agency. It has been shunned by all other parties; with a Bundestag election coming up February 23, the leading candidate, Christian Democrat Friedrich Merz, has vowed that he won’t form a government with the fascists. AfD’s leaders have constantly downplayed the country’s Nazi past. And the vice president of the United States just met with its leader. While shunning a meeting with the sitting chancellor.
…
Vance and Musk, and by extension their boss, President Donald Trump, like what AfD stands for, and they want the world to know they like it.
They want to rub our noses in it.
I feel shock and revulsion…but I guess they want more than a party of one. Or how ever many other people frequent this website, since I imagine my feelings are echoed by the rest here.
As for the level of shock and revulsion we should be feeling, the nearly half of the voters who voted for Trump voted for him knowing what he is. At least some of them wanted this, and the rest were willing to make a deal with the devil for their own reasons.
Meanwhile, the left is too busy crying over the trans ‘community’ to notice anything else.
Nick Cohen today in Writing from London:
“Today, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and US Secretary of State Marco Rubio are negotiating away the fate of Ukraine in Saudi Arabia.
“Starmer and the UK government are not represented at the talks. Nor is any other European government. Nor, and most shamefully, is the government of Ukraine itself.
“Like the imperial powers of the 19th century dividing Africa, Trump and Putin are partitioning Europe without Europe’s consent.
…
“(Trump) has shown us that, just as he wants to ‘own the libs’ at home, he wants to own the lib democracies abroad. Quite literally so in the case of liberal Canada and liberal Denmark, whose territory Trump wants America to take in a Putinesque land grab.
“Pity poor Europe caught between Russian and American imperialism – for there is no other word to describe it.”
We’ll be selling the Russians tanks and artillery within months, I expect to help them “win the peace”. I really hope that isn’t true.
For most of our time as a distinct species, we humans have lived within the limits set by the surface resources available, and within an area to be covered on foot. For a tiny fraction of that time, we have lived in huge metropolitan centres, and have been able to cover vast areas and deep underground in our search for resources, at times resorting to warfare; offensive or defensive depending on the circumstances. I see Trump’s relationship with Putin as set within that framework.
In many ways, it is a replay of the 1930s, but involving nuclear weapons and nuclear power stations as military targets, and with God only knows what consequences in the short to medium term: but certainly beyond the intellects of both Trump and Putin, each thinking as hard as he can.
The link to that excellent piece by Nick Cohen is:
https://nickcohen.substack.com/p/the-king-of-toxic-masculinity-and
Thank you, Omar! – for addressing my incompetence!
I have a lecture on Yeats to be given today, and was reminded of His description of ’The Hunchback’ in ’The Vision:
“ He commits crimes, not because he wants to.. or because he can, but because he feels certain that he can; and he is full of malice because, finding no impulae but in his own ambition, he is made jealous by the impulse of others. He is all emphasis, and the greater the emphasis the more does he show himself incapable of emotion, the more does he display his sterility.”
I think that what appalls me most is the fundamental sterility of Trump, Musk, and all those who flock around their banner of death and destruction.
Ukraine really should not have put its nose in the path of Russia’s fist. And traipsing around showing off all its minerals–really, what did it expect?
Trump says that Ukraine started the war.
I dunno. Arresting people for posting memes seems pretty … um …
Hey, ChatGPT, how might one describe an incumbent, dominant political party that calls one of its opponent parties far-right and fascist while enacting laws and policies that get citizens arrested by groups of armed police officers for speech crimes (e.g., posting offensive tweets, making racist jokes, etc.)?
Good bot.