Macron gives a nod to reason and truth
Hm, maybe beautiful friendship not so beautiful after all.
[O]n the last day of his state visit on Wednesday, Macron showed he will not be trifled with. He used a speech to a joint session of Congress to engage in a full-scale takedown of Trumpism, wrapped in a love letter to the United States and a call on Americans to live up to the values embedded in our own history.
Macron, speaking forcefully in English, held nothing back. He warned against “the illusion of nationalism” and politicians who “play with fear and anger.”
No president we’ve had in living memory (I can’t swear to anything about Jackson) has played with fear and anger more enthusiastically than Donald Trump. Macron warned against Trump.
Macron predicted that, despite Trump’s abandonment of the Paris climate accord, the United States would one day rejoin it. Turning Trump’s signature campaign theme on its author, the French president issued his patented call to “make our planet great again.” For good measure, he pointedly asked climate change deniers to confront the consequences if they proved to be wrong. “Let us face it,” Macron said, “there is no Planet B.”
…
If Trump underscored his permissive attitudes toward autocracy by referring on Tuesday to North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un as “very open” and “very honorable,” Macron spoke of the obligation to stand up for democracy and against authoritarian threats across the globe. And he reminded his American listeners that the chief architect of the multilateral institutions defending democratic ideals was — the United States of America.
“The United States is the one who invented this multilateralism,” Macron said. “You are the one now who has to help to preserve and reinvent it.”
If Trump understands that, he won’t like it.
Again and again, the French leader took on the policies Trump has pursued over the past 15 months. “Massive deregulation,” which is what Trump has been up to, is a bad idea, Macron said. The founder of a new down-the-middle French political party may well be a centrist, but he held nothing back in assailing “the abuses of globalized capitalism” and “financial speculation.” He also urged joint U.S.-European regulation to protect the users of social media.
And he put all he said in the context of a thoroughly Gallic nod to rationality. “Without reason, without truth,” he said, “there is no real democracy.”
There’s only an orange man shouting in rage.
I’ve not looked into that “friendship” at all, but anyone on the planet with Trump has a need to try to mitigate his damage. Part of that – certainly the part that’s comfortable next to our care for that planet, its people, and their institutions – is making sure that we never regard him and his antics as normal or a part of the range of acceptable behavior. There’s the stand to take, and Macron’s not shy about making that publicly here.
But another part – which shouldn’t be comfortable, and can easily go wrong, and can be hard to combine with the first – is to try to nudge him and those who may, in whatever way, support him in whatever fashion, toward any less dangerous action, or back into decent territory. That may not be today or tomorrow, and with Trump himself, it may not be in his lifetime for any of the really satisfying redemption, but somewhere, some people who think he’s okay in some fashion almost have to be a part of the solutions if they’re ever going to work. Playing up any common points, even places where the rhetoric can be adjusted just a little to get a reasonable end, is something a good politician is supposed to do with a loose cannon like this jackass.
Part of that last is just working to make sure that, when the U.S. is off this violent drunk Trump binge, it’s going to have friends who maybe are going to accept apologies and let us help clear out the wreckage.
Maybe Trump will be flattered that it was all about him, assuming he can figure that out if Macron didn’t use Trump’s name.
I suspect France’s idea of centrism roughly coincides with what America would call the left. Perhaps not far left, but definitely left.
COMMENT: Fair enough, OB. But the stumbling block in that is the question ‘does Trump understand it?’ That, in relation to anything, will always be open, whether Trump is in the White House, or has quit it, or has been ejected.
It would appear that Kim Jong Un of North Korea is, or has been, in one helluva dilemma. To maintain credibility among the North Korean populace, he has to convince them that their country is in constant existential peril, and that his hereditary socialist dynasty is the only force capable of preserving it and them. To do that, he thought it best to develop nuclear weapons. So he had to have a nuclear bomb development, construction and testing program. But there is only one area of North Korea remote enough and mountainous enough to provide a site apparently suitable for nuclear testing: the northeast of the country, close to the Chinese border: specifically, up near the incredibly beautiful (I have been there) Mt Diamond: at Punggye-ri, where since 2006, all six of the regime’s nuclear tests have taken place.
According to the link below, the subterranean testing has now caused the mountain to collapse internally, with associated earthquakes.
So now Kim is euchred. The world knows that he has buggered his only test site, and God only knows how much of the surrounding mountainous area. He is now counting on Trump and the South Koreans to come to his rescue, while trying to appear that he sits in the Power Chair, and is coming to the rescue of THEM..
Neither South Korea nor nearby Japan are nuclear powers, but are incredibly scientifically and technologically sophisticated, while nuclear North Korea is mired in Stalinist Mediaevalism.
It would not surprise me if Kim were to clear out in the dead of night with a selected entourage, taking as much bullion as possible with him. Because when the North Korean populace eventually sees him for what he is, and rises in revolt, he could well meet the fate of that other Stalinist monster, Nicolae Ceaușescu of Romania.
And that was not pretty.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/26/north-korea-nuclear-test-site-collapse-may-be-out-of-action-china
Omar, that was, if not edifying, at least informative. Thank you!