Monday, January 30, 2017

Too Late to Put the Authoritarian Genie Back in the Bottle Now...



Seriously though dear readers -- it's not just dirty old fucking liberal hippies like The Gadfly howling at the moon on his shitty little blog who see Drumpf and his gang as a clear and present danger to the constitution and by proxy, the Republic.  There are some very serious and prominent (and sane) conservatives who are of the same belief:

I am not surprised by President Donald Trump’s antics this week. Not by the big splashy pronouncements such as announcing a wall that he would force Mexico to pay for, even as the Mexican foreign minister held talks with American officials in Washington. Not by the quiet, but no less dangerous bureaucratic orders, such as kicking the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff out of meetings of the Principals’ Committee, the senior foreign-policy decision-making group below the president, while inserting his chief ideologist, Steve Bannon, into them. Many conservative foreign-policy and national-security experts saw the dangers last spring and summer, which is why we signed letters denouncing not Trump’s policies but his temperament; not his program but his character.
We were right. And friends who urged us to tone it down, to make our peace with him, to stop saying as loudly as we could “this is abnormal,” to accommodate him, to show loyalty to the Republican Party, to think that he and his advisers could be tamed, were wrong.
In an epic week beginning with a dark and divisive inaugural speechextraordinary attacks on a free press, a visit to the CIA that dishonored a monument to anonymous heroes who paid the ultimate price, and now an attempt to ban selected groups of Muslims (including interpreters who served with our forces in Iraq and those with green cards, though not those from countries with Trump hotels, or from really indispensable states like Saudi Arabia), he has lived down to expectations.
Precisely because the problem is one of temperament and character, it will not get better. It will get worse, as power intoxicates Trump and those around him. It will probably end in calamity—substantial domestic protest and violence, a breakdown of international economic relationships, the collapse of major alliances, or perhaps one or more new wars (even with China) on top of the ones we already have. It will not be surprising in the slightest if his term ends not in four or in eight years, but sooner, with impeachment or removal under the 25th Amendment. The sooner Americans get used to these likelihoods, the better.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ELIOT A. COHEN is the director of the Strategic Studies Program at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. From 2007 to 2009, he served as counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. He is the author of The Big Stick: The Limits of Soft Power and the Necessity of Military Force.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/01/a-clarifying-moment-in-american-history/514868/?utm_source=hpfb

Cohen was one of 50 Republican national security experts who signed an open letter last August warning Americans that Donald Trump:

“lacks the character, values and experience” to be president and “would put at risk our country’s national security and well-being.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/09/us/politics/national-security-gop-donald-trump.html


The Gadfly made sincere efforts on the pages of this shitty little blog to warn you Hillary haters that regardless of whatever it was about her that got your knickers in a knot, venting your misguided anger by electing an amoral, power hungry, narcissistic con artist with delusions of despotic grandeur to the most powerful position in the free world was not the wisest of solutions.  But did you listen to those warnings?  No you didn't.  And now, because of your dumbassery, this country is going to go through a very painful, and dangerous period which puts everything that you Trump supporters loudly proclaim to love about your nation at grave risk.  You very, very, very foolish assholes.



----TFG



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