For reasons I have never understood, Ronald Reagan has a positive reputation among Americans. I’ll grant you that he is the only Republican president of the past 60 years whose term in office didn’t end in defeat, disgrace, or both. But why a dithering old bigot who ignored AIDS, created the homelessness crisis, and unleashed hell in Central America is regarded as some kind of folksy icon of freedom is beyond me.
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Hey, remember when Obama gave a little bow to that Saudi king, and conservatives lost their minds about the president of the United States coming across as weak and subservient to a foreign ruler?
Yeah, I wonder how they would have felt if Obama had “abased himself … abjectly before a tyrant” and committed “one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president in memory.”
We will never know, of course, because regardless of what you thought about Obama, no sane person ever speculated that the man was actually a double agent for an evil dictator.
However, in the nightmare of Trump’s America, serious journalists and earnest politicians are openly assessing whether the president is secretly working for a hostile foreign power. Think about that.
Did anybody ever accuse Bush of being an Al Qaeda sympathizer? Did anyone believe that Reagan was a communist mole? Did anyone ever contemplate, for a moment, that Roosevelt was an undercover Nazi or that Washington was plotting with the British?
This moment is, like so many moments over the past two years, unprecedented and horrifying.
Currently, the odds makers are bickering over possible motivations for Trump’s pathetic sell-out of America. The possibilities include the following:
Trump is an idiot who doesn’t know what he’s doing.
Trump isn’t an idiot, just arrogant and delusional.
Trump is a genius who has formulated some kind of unfathomable master plan.
Trump has a fixation with dictators and wants to be just like them.
Trump is doing anything he can to discredit Mueller.
Trump has financial deals in place with Moscow and doesn’t want to insult the Russians.
Trump is being blackmailed by the Russians.
Trump has been recruited to work for the Russians.
Trump has been an asset for the Russians for the last 30 years, and it’s all just coming out now.
In this way, every American has now become a detective, desperately trying to sort through the twisted, contradictory logic of a man who clearly has little grasp on reality. And the best part is that we are unlikely to ever uncover the whole truth.
But of course, what many of us are missing is that Trump’s motivations don’t really matter.
You see, whether Trump has gone crazy, or Putin has videotape of the guy in an orgy with Russian teenage boys, the fact remains that the president of the United States has delivered a haymaker to America’s jaw, and recovery is far, far away.
And it doesn’t matter in one other way. Trump remains incredibly popular with Republicans. A full two-thirds of Republicans think it’s fine that Putin owns the president and will soon receive a personal tour of the White House.
Trump’s bizarre news conference with Putin lead to cries of treason, even from some of his most ardent conservative supporters.
But in a stunning display of cowardice, “Republicans are grumbling but seem resigned to inaction.” Clearly, Trump could give Alaska to Putin, piss on the American flag, and slap all of the Republican Senators’ children. The GOP would still say he’s a patriot and a great leader.You almost have to admire their honesty, if not their lack of patriotism and total absence of shame.
Other conservative commentators haven’t even bothered to pretend that they are annoyed at a little thing like fucking over the nation in favor of a murderous thug. Many conservatives have sidestepped Trump’s overt betrayal to blame liberals and the media and (my favorite) Latinos for this chaos.
And as for Trump’s fabled base, well, they thought he would put America first, and bring the hammer down on foreigners. The joke, as is so often the case with Trump voters, is on them. Because Trump is helping foreigners — specifically, the Russians — and has done absolutely nothing to improve their situation.
Trump’s disaster in Helsinki shows us that he is not a strong leader, not a good negotiator, and certainly not concerned with putting America first. Basically, all the things his supporters said he was? He is none of those. But he is still a racist narcissist who can’t speak full sentences. So there’s that.
Keep in mind that”Trump won the election with just under 78,000 votes in three states — Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. It is unlikely that those voters were betting on an abandonment of American values in favor of Russian interests.”
But that’s how it has turned out.
So when will Trump’s base finally give up in this cyclone of corruption and incompetence? The answer is never.
After all, the man could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and not lose support.
Or he could commit blatant treason in front of millions of people.
Either way, he’s fucking golden.
When I was a kid a million years ago, during the 1980s, our president was a doddering simpleton who really, really hated communists.
The Gipper once made a “joke” that the United States was going to nuke the Soviet Union. He didn’t know the mic was on, and the chiste didn’t go over so well. In fact, the comment was “taken seriously by the Soviets who stood on alert for 30 minutes.”
As horrific as this gaffe was, at least Reagan wasn’t serious.
The same cannot be said for the current GOP inhabitant of the White House. Trump wasn’t joking, and he knew full well his microphone was on, as he stood in front of dozens of world leaders and threatened “to totally destroy North Korea.”
As many people have pointed out, the man is no Reagan.
In any case, most of the sane people in the world had a decidedly negative reaction to an ill-tempered buffoon with access to nuclear weapons spouting off about starting a cataclysmic war.
But to the minds of conservatives, well, the United States can never have enough death and destruction.
You see, over half of Republicans “support conducting airstrikes on North Korean nuclear facilities.”
That action would, of course, lead to a full-on war, with disastrous consequences for our allies, South Korea and Japan, and possibly massive casualties for America.
At the very least, it would cost us a lot of money, but then again, those would be special war dollars, and we have an infinite amount of them (as opposed to, say, healthcare dollars or education dollars or infrastructure dollars… but I digress).
Regardless, what’s interesting about this latest manifestation of right-wing warmongering is that it comes immediately after many conservatives had declared this whole North Korean thing over and done with.
Remember way back when North Korea was threatening to attack Guam, and Trump tweeted out some belligerent nonsense, and the entire world was on edge because it looked like two sociopathic narcissists were going to plunge the whole planet into hellish nuclear annihilation?
Yeah, we can all laugh about it now.
Oh, wait, it’s only Republicans who can laugh about it. You see, this all went down mere weeks ago. At the time, many conservatives insisted that Trump’s hostility had paid off, and that North Korea had “blinked,” which seems to have meant, “They haven’t nuked Seattle yet.”
Yeah, I’m not hearing any of that talk now — especially because that supposedly cowed country is threatening to detonate a hydrogen bomb over the ocean, in direct response to be being taunted.
So maybe that wasn’t the best strategy after all.
But according to conservatives, all we really need to do is take out that pudgy guy in Asia. He needs a warhead dropped on him — like now!
Of course, we can talk about the GOP predilection for international violence. They truly seem to believe there is no issue that can’t be solved with a hastily planed, poorly designed invasion.
But for people obsessed with preserving the past — from resurrecting a mythical era to putting up statues of their treacherous ancestors — conservatives have no grasp of history. And I mean recent history, from the last decade.
I would like to ask all those people who are clamoring for war with North Korea the following question: “Weren’t you saying the exact same thing in 2003, but about Iraq?”
Yes, for conservatives with poor memories, it was the GOP who insisted that marching into the Middle East was a great idea, and would make the world safer, and would pay for itself, and that we would never ever regret it.
Well, it’s not even a generation later, and we all pretty much regret it (to the point that we even lie about supporting the war in the first place).
So why would bombing Korea be any different than launching missiles at Iraq? If anything, it would be far worse, with an even more predictable result of massive death and chaos.
Maybe Republicans just like to talk tough and act out their perpetual anger. Or maybe their nostalgia for the 1950s has hit a new low.
After all, from 1950 to 1952, we issued “rain and ruin by the US air force. Pyongyang had been razed to the ground, with the Air Force stating in official documents that the North’s cities suffered greater damage than German and Japanese cities firebombed during World War II.” Oh, and by the way, the Korean War also killed 37,000 American troops.
And yet here we are, over 60 years later, still insisting that we can bomb our way out of this mess. We’re still demanding more blood, and more rah-rah, super-patriotic, can-do American warfare overseas.
Because this time it will solve all our problems, despite all the recent evidence to the contrary in Iraq and the evidence of the actual fucking war in Korea decades ago.
Yes, apparently even God himself wants us to bomb North Korea.
So I’m sure it will all work out just fine.
There’s a new horrifying sign that America is on the decline.
I’m not talking about the chaotic state of our politics, or the struggling economy, or even the fact that half of us refuse to acknowledge basic scientific facts.
I’m referring to the recent implication that white conservative guys can’t casually throw around racial slurs anymore. Truly, it’s a sign of the apocalypse.
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As we all know, there are few absolutes in life.
Yes, water freezes at thirty-two degrees, inertia affects all objects in motion, and the Chicago Cubs will find a way to lose. But most other things are open to exceptions and nuance.
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