Miscellaneous And Off Topic Subjects

[CGVT]

I've never heard of this person before in my life until this morning. Where do they find these fucking people?

Katie Britt?

Good question.

[Hannibal]

I've never heard of this person before in my life until this morning. Where do they find these fucking people?

The Party of Stupid strikes again, apparently.

[Mike]

Yeah, her. Apparently she's 42 and United States Senator is the first elected position she's ever held.

[CGVT]

Katie Britt is the girl in Animal House that wears rubber gloves while giving a handjob.

[Dr. Strangelove]

Giving the SOTU response is like being on the cover of Madden at this point.

I didn't watch either speech last night but some some clips of HER this morning and oof, it really was pretty bad. Even MAGA media guys are mocking her.

[iam416]

Katie Britt is irrelevant. The Chairman is relevant. And he remains absolutely unable to do anything w/o a teleprompter. Because he's absolutely unfit to be President.

[Mike]

Having his schedule cleared for the past week really paid off last night. He didn't try to shake a single invisible person's hand.

[iam416]

Setting aside the fact that he's senile or likely senile, shrinkflation is a terrible argument to excuse the economy and there is no earthly way he can successfully blame the Rs for the border disaster he both created and could easily remedy.

[Jeff Buchanan]

Given the reality that DJT will be elected the next US President, I took a trip down the writings of various FP pundits commenting on what would Trump's FP look like? There was a notable polarization of ideas but all the authors I read pointed out that Trump is fundamentally an authoritarian nationalist. At one extreme was the thinking that Trump will continue his bluster about leaving NATO, implementing a 10% tariff on all imports across the board and tease isolationist rhetoric similar to that which was prevalent leading up to US involvement in WWII, but he won't do anything drastic. On the other end was this from Robert Kagan, a neoconservative and co-founder of the neoconservative Project for the New American Century, he is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution:

What will Trump do? Who knows?,” Kagan replied. “Who knows whether Trump himself has a foreign policy.” Trump “will certainly not have pro-liberal prejudices as most previous U.S. presidents have, at least since World War II. He will make common cause with right-wing forces in Europe, as he did in his first term.”

Kagan’s conclusion?

“Trump’s foreign policy will be unpredictable because we haven’t had a dictator as commander in chief. It will be uncharted territory.”

Thomas Edsall, a political commentator for the NYT's wrote this:

During Trump’s first term in office, virtually everyone — his adversaries, his allies, the media — consistently underestimated his willingness to break rules. He is a man without borders, without conscience, without dignity, ethics or integrity, committed only to what he perceives to be in his own interest. He admires dictators who rule without constraint, and if he believes it would be to his advantage to join them, there is nothing — in his mind or his character — that would stop him.

My take on Trump is much like Edsall's, however and IMO, Edsall fails to recognize that US president's operate under significant restraints both political and constitutional. It remains to be seen if those constraints will keep him from making a long list of very bad FP and National Security decisions. In my mind, I try to balance that concern with recognition that during his first presidency, I was very much in favor of his ME policies vis-a-vis Iran and SA, his abandoning of the Paris Climate Accords and his US boarder security policies. Although I've been an ardent supporter of US aid to Ukraine, there is no clear and obtainable military outcome with Zelenski's stated goal of driving Russian forces out of Ukrainian territory Putin has annexed since 2014, a huge and costly long-shot. Like many realists on this matter, I'm wavering

I haven't decided just yet if that is enough to make me vote for Trump with the alternative of not voting at all because I will not cast my vote for Joe Biden, a US president that has taken a path of patent liberalism and associated government spending that sickens me.

[iam416]

The Chairman is also decidedly shifting toward Hamas.

I'm in the same boat. My vote will be an abstention or for DJT. There's zero way I'm voting for The Chairman or any other Prog.

[Mike]

Pretty much the same with me, though I'm a heavy Trump lean at this point. He'll probably be a convicted felon awaiting sentencing during the election. What a time to be alive.

[Da Geezer]

I'd just like to point out that this whole "Trump’s foreign policy will be unpredictable because we haven’t had a dictator as commander in chief.." is a Democrat talking point that has no basis in Trump's behavior during his term as President.

I'd particularly point to how he handled the pandemic. He did it by working with the states and their governors. Even Newsom and Cuomo praised him. No one knew at the time what was going to happen, but his instinct was not to collect power unto himself. He governed in a very republican manner.

Let's also remember how he handled the border. He basically brought the issue to the public as part of his 2016 campaign. When elected, he could not get Congress to fund the border wall and he tried his best to go around Congress by tapping the defense budget, to no avail. All presidents have the constitutional right to halt immigration completely as FDR did with the Jews fleeing Hitler. He didn't do that. He respected the Congress' constitutional power of the purse.

Trump's tax cuts ultimately decentralized power, allowing people to keep more of their own money. That infuriates the statists who need to fund what Trump calls the "deep state". Trump's fundamental problem in his first term was that he just assumed that lifelong bureaucrats would be supportive of the people's decision in the Presidential election. That was profoundly wrong. Now, his team is supposedly preparing Schedule D, a list of 3,000 APPOINTED bureaucrats that would promote his policies rather than fight them. This is what the Dems fear most.

I'd encourage Jeff and Talent to look at how Trump behaved and not at what he says. He is an egotistical prick. He says he would let "Russia do whatever they want" with NATO members who don't keep up their agreed-upon military spending. That is a negotiating tactic, not a policy. NATO is in "America First's" interest. But, as he did with the illegal migration problem, Trump is looking ahead to is the US is going to send American boys to die protecting Latvia. It's an issue.

In the area of FP, Biden has done two things that have gravely hurt the US. First, by "taking" Russia's dollar reserves, he has hurt the dollar as the world's reserve currency. It is hard to overstate how detrimental this will be in the long run, but it can't be undone. Second, Biden has allowed our two greatest enemies to become firm allies. What the Dems viewed as Trump kissing up to Putin was always about keeping Russia and China apart.

And look at how Trump as Dictator dovetails with "we are trying to keep our democracy" or that Trump "will destroy" democracy. Hard to believe, but his line served Democrats well during the 2022 elections. Just remember, "democracy" to a Democrat means that every person of proper age can vote. This worked for them in making California a one-party state, and they plan to do it in the whole country.

We have a lot more to fear from the Democrat statists who keep their power through violating voting law than we do from Trump.

[Dr. Strangelove]

The Chairman is also decidedly shifting toward Hamas.

I'm in the same boat. My vote will be an abstention or for DJT. There's zero way I'm voting for The Chairman or any other Prog.

Sad!!!

[Mike]

The screeching from the Left about what they think Trump MIGHT do vs. what he actually does/did is hyperbolic nonsense. The Reality TV show aspect of his presidency was a clown show and provided fodder for many but his actual performance in a number of areas was pretty damn good, as Geezer points out. I particularly liked his foreign policy and that might have been my biggest concern with him going in. If he was a dictator, he was the worst dictator ever.

[Dr. Strangelove]

We have a lot more to fear from the Democrat statists who keep their power through violating voting law than we do from Trump.

Ok, crash.