... whose results didn't surprise me in the slightest. While I voted straight R, I completely understood the mood that drove the slaughter. Allow me to use a single example to illustrate.
I fully support the Iran War. You can't have a nation chanting, "Death to America!" by governmental direction while furiously pursuing nukes and ICBMs. I don't care what your calculations are about the odds they'd actually use The Bomb on us, you can't take that chance. The downside risk is cataclysmic. It was an act of wisdom and bravery to smash the Ayatollahs.
Once we started, we needed to just finish it, regardless of the cost. The problem is that Americans haven't had direct experience with large scale military actions since the War of Northern Aggression and that was a long, long time ago. Pictures of foreign civilians suffering affect us deeply because we can't conceive of the alternative - our own civilians suffering.
Going all in on the Iran War would have meant taking out their civilian infrastructure - power, roads, fuel, etc. In a modern society, which, despite it's benighted government, Iran is, removing electricity turns cities into abattoirs. No water, no sewage treatment, no gasoline, no medicines, no food. Without transportation, the starving masses would have to struggle out of the city on foot to forage. That foraging would be on land that couldn't possibly support that size population.
Internet connectivity and phone cameras being what they are, we'd drown in videos of screaming, crying Iranian women and children. Lefty media sites would be wall-to-wall with those images.
That's a terrible choice to make, but it had to be made if you wanted to avoid nukes hitting our cities or those of our allies. Dresden and Tokyo would like a word with those who doubt it.
Instead, we got Trump. Every day he told us he was the greatest president of all time, his economy was the greatest, we had defeated Iran, Iran had nothing left, they really wanted to make a deal and on and on and on. It became background noise, albeit the really, really annoying kind. Meanwhile, every day there were reports of ships hit in the Persian Gulf by Iranian forces. It was never in large numbers, but it was relentless.
After a while, Trump's pronouncements became exasperating. Just shut up already. I understood the motivation for going full anaconda on Iran instead of turning the place into a post-apocalyptic hellscape and having to endure constant media coverage of suffering Iranians, but if that was the plan, then there needed to be a PR plan to match. Instead we got "I'm the greatest!" day after day.
I'm not saying that's why the Republicans so deservedly got stomped. I'm just using that to highlight the tone-deaf messaging coming from the party at a time when American citizens were being asked to make sacrifices.
In short, I have become totally exhausted with Trump. I'd be delighted if he just resigned and we stopped having to listen to him. He's been a decent president in terms of accomplishments, but a big part of the job is being able to groom the national mood. He gets an F in that subject.
I also understand that I'm at a stage in my life where I am price-insensitive. I can still remember, however, what it felt like when I was so poor that I had to save my money for a month to be able to afford to take a load of rubbish to the dump. That was the biggest reason for the wipeout, but my argument here is that combining modestly high prices with an endless stream of vacuous self-promotion was a recipe for total disaster.
Good Lord, how I wish we'd elected Ron DeSantis instead.
2 comments:
That has actually been most of my problem with Trump from the outset. I actually agree with a number of the things that he said he was going to do, in particular:
-Eliminating the federal deficit
-Encouraging more domestic manufacturing and primary production (minerals, materials, agricultural products)
-Avoiding getting entangled in unnecessary foreign disputes that don’t directly concern us
But what progress has he made in achieving each of those?
For the federal deficit, he brought in Musk who produced a lot of sound and fury, but unfortunately ended up signifying nothing. Now, over a year later, it is clear that the cuts were made in the areas where the least amount of money was being spent, with the big-ticket items being untouched. Any small savings were promptly blown somewhere else, and the deficit looks about the same as ever
https://bipartisanpolicy.org/report/deficit-tracker/
For the domestic manufacturing and production, he blanket-applied a bunch of tariffs that kept changing on a daily basis, so that business owners had no idea what was going to be the situation in a week, let alone a year. So instead of going ahead and investing in domestic manufacturing, they all held back and waited to see what would happen. And they are still waiting. As a result, he actually made the trade deficit worse for part of last year, and even now it is worse than it was before he started stirring up trouble.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/BOPGSTB
And meanwhile, the unemployment rate is a bit up compared to when he took office.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE
As for the foreign disputes issue, you've already addressed that.
The Germans have a word for this sort of thing: “Verschlimmbesserung” – the act of trying to fix a problem, but in the end just making things worse. Trump is apparently the king of verschlimmbesserung. Even if one agrees with his stated political goals, in practice he is doing as much damage to the objectives of his allies as to those of his opponents.
Which brings up a fourth thing that I agreed with Trump about: when he said that Biden was too old to function as President, he was exactly correct. I don’t care who it is, by the time someone is 80+ years old, their attention span and ability to think coherently is largely shot. I have never met an 80+ year old who could keep up a conversation without losing their train of thought regularly. They may be able to function for daily activities, but they are in no condition to make critical decisions. And now that Trump is 80, he also is incapable of doing the job. He should take his own advice and step down.
The biggest problems I have with Trump is his narcissism and his complete inability to admit any fault at all. Also, filling his cabinet with incompetent boobs. The only qualification for men was feity. Women had 3 more requirements - bushy, bushy blonde hairdo and well 2 other prominent features.
Hegseth had to have had his little green army men taken away from him when he was a kid and that grew into bloodlust. And by God, he's going to play with his army men now.
RFK Jr. Heroin addict, enough said.
They've botched Iran, without a good plan violently executed there was no hope. Iran knew they just had to wait it out and the court of public opinion in the US would solve their problem for them. We'd have been better dropping some bunker buster bombs on the suspected enrichment sites, and head to the bar. Sure, that kicks the problem down the road, but what would Trump care, he'd be dead before they started being a threat again.
I'm not surprised on the overall result. But some individual races were surprising.
For Minnesota, this was our chance to kick all the bums that produced all our fraud to the curb. Instead, because of the war and Operation Metro Surge (where Trumps jack-booted thugs murdered 2 lefty activists), we now have the 3rd trifecta in Minnesota history. 2022-2023 was the last, and started the plummetting of the state. The only hope we have is that Amy Klobuchar will be a much stronger governor than Cockwomble was. Her left hands pinkie finger is smarter that Walz, so there is hope that she will slap down the DSA morons bent on destroying the country.
The only people that won who I voted for was our state representative and senator. They have their work cut out for them.
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