The Trump executive order is illegal and badly written, because it doesn’t list the Department of Energy secretary as attending, contrary to:
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He’s probably wondering how long he has to wait to see himself on some money, rather than wondering if he’s in charge of things.
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If Trump is not careful, He and his crony’s will suffer the fate of this person and his family:
Huh, Trump even looks like him
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It took nearly 20 years for that to happen. Italy was transformed completely by the time the Allies liberated the country and he was strung up on a lamppost unceremoniously. Do you really think that the most powerful country on earth being in the hands of an incompetent mad man for 20 years is what we need, us or the world?
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You’re right. How does this week sound?
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That’s one reason I’m partial to the nickname “Mango Mussolini”.
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Not so much draining the swamp, more like swamping the drains. With what, I leave to my readers.
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Well, they did do one final game with him.
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Ill Douche’.
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Comfort yourself if you can with this thought.
Mussolini lasted about 20 years*.
Hitler’s Thousand Year Reich lasted around 12, depending on where you count from.
Subtract 8 from 12 and you get 4 for the next one, which sounds about right.
*Edit - Single Party State June 1923: deposed July 1943.
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Flaunt does seem to apply to Spicer…
https://cdck-file-uploads-global.s3.dualstack.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/boingboing/optimized/3X/6/b/6b3dcfd44cf4dfc7c7da7ad56c9fcbb9f4c0da4a_1_487x500.jpg
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Adding Bannon to the NSC is on top of adding Dr. Sebastian Gorka to the NSC last week. Gorka, a Breitbart contributor/editor, has received very little attention. His website is down so you have to dig a bit to find his writings but, as you may have guessed, he’s a clash of civilizations guy who makes Cheney and the Neocons look like hippies. His speciality is explaining that we can’t just fight terrorists or even extreme radial Muslims, we have to fight all of Islam, that every muslim is our enemy and the sooner “we” (basically “good” white Americans and far right Europeans) kill, convert, or subjugate every Muslim, the better. No kidding. It’s couched in Breitbart-style thinktanky gobbledygook but Gorka clearly believes that the (“good”) West vs. Islam requires a new World War and the sooner the better. Hitler? Stalin? Wimps. Our new enemy is, according to Gorka, far worse and the conflict will be much larger. (Bannon appears to have similar views.) Here’s Gorka discussing how all of Islam is our enemy:
” . . . Al-Qaeda is just a small part of a much larger and older movement [Islam, essentially] . . . [with] a plan to destroy our system using all means . . . political and economic warfare and very sophisticated and fast information operations . . . The conflict that we are in now is potentially more deadly and more dangerous than the Cold War. Not only is the enemy totalitarian, he is not a secular, godless totalitarian like Hitler or Stalin, because this totalitarian ideology believes it has god on its side.”
I’d guess that Trump and Bannon are laying the ground work for significant punitive bombing in the Middle East. So, the next time there’s any terrorism in the US or against an American, no matter how small, as long as one or more of the perps are not from a country that Trump is doing business in and that country is largely Islamic, we’ll bomb them so that all Muslims will learn the lesson: convert, bow down, or die. The days of “targeted” drone and air strikes, I’d guess, will be over soon. Bannon and Gorka are at least two votes on the NSC for bringing on war, big war. I’m largely against the drone/air strikes that have been a feature of the Obama administration but we have, largely avoided full-scale war and, with some notable exceptions, we’ve avoided a US vs. Islam stance. Those days are over. Very little good came from our ME policy under Obama but, sadly, I can’t see any good in any part of what’s going down at the Trump WH.
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Good gracious. That’s real!
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Incidentally, I leave you with another thought. Mussolini was in some ways a buffoon. But he wasn’t actually doing too badly to begin with - in fact, if they’d had approval ratings, he would probably have been doing as well as, say, Putin. Italians of the period did seem to respond well to having a leader with a strong Caesar complex (not that that could happen today, just ask S. Berlusconi). What happened was that Mussolini fell under the spell of a far right leader who was a genius at making use of modern means of publicity, who then proceeded to lead him into a disastrous war (that Mussolini didn’t want.)
I’m not drawing any parallels, you understand.
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While your number’s are of course correct, The rate at which this mess is speeding up to is alarming.
(IMHO)
In the 20’s it took over a week to cross the Atlantic… Now a few hours.
Things change.
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King Charles walked and talked, Half an hour after his head was cut off.
Not an outcome Trump should be trying to emulate.
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I’m sorry, I know this is OT, but in the 1920s Atlantic crossings took around 5 days, and this wasn’t because it could not be done faster but, just as the reason modern passenger aircraft stay around 600mph, because it was the best tradeoff of speed, fuel, reliability and operational cost. Yes, I am a motor ship nerd.
I don’t really think things happen much faster in politics these days. The speed of communication hasn’t increased very much. A Trump tweet is comparable to the cable messages used by governments and newspapers. In those days a politician in one country could say something late at night, and millions of people around the world could read it in the papers next morning.
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And I suspect that the reason he wants to hold meetings without the DNI and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs is that they will offer reality-based objections to that. How do people within those agencies respond, however, when a crazed president (whom they already despise) starts handing them suicidal orders? I have to think they’re already asking themselves these questions.
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Perhaps with a >=20% markup, soon.
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