Wag the Dog

[jducoeur]

Mind, I largely agree with the decision, at least for now. But let's not lose sight of the obvious attempt to distract away from more contentious matters...

Comments

[hudebnik]

As nearly as I can tell, the new strategy is to be tough, win, and beat the terrorists, because nobody's ever thought of that before, immersed as they were in the swamp of Washington business-as-usual.

[jducoeur]

Oh, there's clearly no actual strategy on Trump's part. (I have no evidence to date that he knows what the word "strategy" means.) I just view it as a holding action that might not make things much worse. With Trump, "not getting much worse" is considerably better than my usual expectation.

Regardless, though -- my point is that it's a fairly obvious and transparent attempt to distract everyone from how badly he's flailing, and we shouldn't fall for that ploy...

[hudebnik]

True dat.

The past two years of Trump have been a daily outrage designed to distract media attention from the previous day's outrage (and to keep his name in the headlines, because There Is No Bad Publicity). In the process, he's dramatically raised the bar for what constitutes "outrage", and I doubt the Republic will ever recover its former sense of what constitutes normal, acceptable, decent behavior. After all, he won, didn't he? So there will be an enormous temptation for other politicians (almost certainly more competent, possibly more evil rather than just self-serving) to follow suit.

[jducoeur]

Yeah, that's one of my usual concerns. I often look at the silver lining that at least, if we wound up with a fascist in the White House, we got a *spectacularly* (and perhaps more important, *obviously*) incompetent one, who isn't actually good at making the trains run on time. But I have to imagine that there are some crypto-fascists lurking in the wings going, "Hell, I could do the job a lot better than *that*".

Not to mention that, if Trump *does* leave prematurely (whether due to impeachment or him simply deciding it's too much work), we wind up with Pence, who is a very different sort of monster...