The solution is to look hard in the other direction
Oh, well, we can all relax, because everything’s fine. The people who know least about it say so, so what more do you want?!
Those silly excitable people who pay attention think it’s a massive dangerous clusterfuck, but that’s only because they pay attention. Paying attention is so elitist and coastal and wrong. Everybody should pay no attention and then we could all drink beer and watch football and be happy!
In record time, the 45th president has set off global outrage with a ban on travelers from Muslim-majority countries, fired his acting attorney general for refusing to defend the ban and watched as federal courts swiftly moved to block the policy, calling it an unconstitutional use of executive power.
The president has angrily canceled a summit meeting with the Mexican president, hung up on Australia’s prime minister, authorized a commando raid that resulted in the death of a Navy SEAL member, repeatedly lied about the existence of millions of fraudulent votes cast in the 2016 election and engaged in Twitter wars with senators, a sports team owner, a Hollywood actor and a major department store chain. His words and actions have generated almost daily protests around the country.
“I’ve never been so nervous in my lifetime about what may or may not happen in Washington,” said Leon Panetta, a Democrat who served as chief of staff, secretary of defense and C.I.A. director during a 50-year career that spanned nine presidents from both parties.
“I don’t know whether this White House is capable of responding in a thoughtful or careful way should a crisis erupt,” Mr. Panetta said in an interview on Tuesday. “You can do hit-and-miss stuff over a period of time. But at some point, I don’t give a damn what your particular sense of change is all about, you cannot afford to have change become chaos.”
Ah but you see he is badly handicapped by knowing so much about it. That completely distorts his thinking and makes him overlook Trump’s many accomplishments in the past 25 days.
Those accomplishments are catnip for the president’s most fervent supporters across the country, said Sarah Fagen, who served as a senior aide and political director for former President George W. Bush. The perspective on the White House is very different far outside the interstate freeway that rings Washington, she said.
“If you’re someone inside the Beltway, you think it’s been really rocky,” she said. “If you are outside the Beltway, you think, ‘That’s why we sent him there.’ There has been a lot of chaos and a lot of growing pains, but they have gotten a lot done.”
For sure. By the same token – if you know a lot about, say, dams, you might be worried about the Oroville dam and the people who live in the valley below it, but if you’re hundreds or thousands of miles away from the Oroville dam and never heard of it and couldn’t care less about it – why then you think everything’s fine! It works every time. Just be far far away geographically and know nothing at all about the object of worry, and hey-presto, you won’t worry about that thing.
Problem solved.
And yet everything he’s gotten done has been (as far as I can tell) fucking terrible…
Seriously, if your own self-interests don’t extend beyond being racist as fuck you may as well take a crimson bath now because your future is incredibly bleak.
And, to be fair, there are a lot of people – a lot – that are outside the Beltway who think it has been a major disaster. There are people on the liberal coasts, people in the illiberal south, people in the conservative midwest, people on every continent, who think Trump has been a major disaster. A small minority of out of touch white males (and too many females) think he’s doing great things, and we are the ones lambasted for being out of touch – with them.
Am I the only one expecting some kind of major terrorist attack on America soon? If you want to cause maximum damage, chaos and vicious reprisal, now seems like the perfect time. And of course, such an attack would be a gift to the Trump administration. It’s often been remarked that the extreme Christian-nationalist right and the extreme Muslim radical Jihadists need each other for their legitimacy and motivation. They are like mirror images, locked in a death spiral.
#3, I’m more inclined to expect a genuine false-flag incident.
@#4:
But that would require planning, coordination, etc… Any attempt by the current administration would be full-on Keystone Kops.
I think you just dated yourself. I used this very analogy earlier today.
I’m 32… So not sure if I have dated myself…
#5; note that I didn’t claim that the false-flag op would be either efficiently planned or successfully carried out. I would genuinely expect The Appresident to be tweeting his outrage and claiming vindication at least three hours before anything went bang.
Wow. You really are retro, then. Keystone Kops were before my time and I’m (cough, cough) several years older than 32. (In fact, my son is older than 32). I’m just used to dealing with my students, who aren’t even familiar with Benji, so it’s very unusual to see someone so young make a Keystone Kops reference.