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Despite the current insanity, I’m strongly against your objection. Yeah, those are the standards, and I think the age should be lowered.
Who would you like to put in charge of making more stringent requirements? Perhaps the people in power right now? Or would you prefer the people in power after the election?
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I didn’t personally design the meme; I just thought it was funny in this context.
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It does stand out from his usual random word salad.
I guess that means he thought about this phrase beforehand. You can’t say he actually asked for a volunteer to shoot Hilary Clinton, but the right people will know.
He’s not really very good at ‘subtle’ is he?
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Being terrible at ‘subtle’ is part of his genius. The average american voter hates subtle. He believes that. I hope he’s wrong. The man is not stupid, not even a little. He’s decided exactly how much he’s going to care about certain things and stuck to it.
He had intelligent, consistent viewpoints before he started his political career*. He is a master troll. I am actually coming around to the idea of him winning… He’s certainly not afraid to reverse his positions (and he won’t even try to stick to promises he made when he had less power). He’s the devil we know…
- as demonstrated by this very site: http://boingboing.net/2016/08/08/trump-disagrees-with-every-pos.html
I think you guys just convinced me to be a Trump supporter, holy shit… No, I don’t believe what he says, but I think I’m an advocate.
Have you ever read Putin’s public statements?
I’m afraid that you really cannot compare the loud, thoughtless property developer from New York with the multilingual law graduate from St. Petersburg. Putin is extremely careful what he says in public and takes great care not to be inflammatory.
Despite the nonsense spouted by NATO, arms manufacturers and ex-CIA people, the truth is that Russia is in a position of weakness, not strength. Overtly, Putin and Lavrov have to work through diplomacy.
The reason Trump is dangerous in foreign affairs is that he isn’t up to either the Russians or the Chinese. The reason Clinton would be dangerous is that she seems to have bought into the Cold War narrative, and her time as SoS was pretty bad for US foreign policy*, though not perhaps as bad as Rice. I suggest that thinking Trump and Putin are kindred spirits is a big mistake. They want quite different things and they want to get them in quite different ways.
Currently in Kerry the US has someone capable of supporting US interests abroad. Because both Presidential candidates seem to have such large foreign policy weaknesses, the big question is who is going to be Secretary of State.
*Specifically, things like the irresponsible use of social media to stir up trouble abroad without any real strategy, leading to the misfortunes of the various Arab Springs and helping the rise of militant Islam, as well as fomenting trouble in Ukraine.
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Well his campaign slogan is that he doesn’t think America is great and he’s also invited his Russian friends to launch cyber attacks on his rivals (who are Amercians). Now he’s calling for Americans to be shot. His next slogan should be “nice country you got here, it’d be a shame if someone hurled it to the floor”.
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If he wants to do it, he should do it the traditional way…
And isn’t this what they mean when Republicans want to “take their country back?” and return to good old American traditional life (and death)?
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You need to tell that to the ex-CIA supporter of Clinton who was advocating assassination of Russians and Iranians the other day in order to support US objectives in Syria.
I realise that Clinton’s domestic policies are saner than Trumps. I am very unsure that her foreign polices will be; they may be worse. So far the blowback for American foreign wars has been minuscule, but you cannot assume that this will continue. And after 9/11 and the reaction, we can assume with some degree of safety that the reaction to a new 9/11 would leave millions dead and the destabilisation of a yet wider area.
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“Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?”
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It is really only a matter of time until there is a new 9/11, possibly with more lives lost. The question is whether the American public will accept it as a crime, which we learn to live with just as we live with burglary and shoplifting, or will they react more strongly.
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Fertilized by Babe, the blue ox…
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There was virtually no difference between how US foreign policy was promulgated under Clinton and now under Kerry.
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Really?
Deal with Iran
Pragmatism in Syria
Death of the Monroe Doctrine
The pragmatism in Syria may have been accidental - he didn’t realise his comment about the Syrian government getting rid of chemical weapons would be taken at face value in Damascus and the Kremlin - but he has built on it since.
You are confusing policy with its promulgation. The Secretary of State technically carries out the diplomatic missions, and usually has more foreign affairs influence on the administration than most of the other cabinet members, but any big decisions are those of the executive. As a spokesperson for Obama’s foreign policy Kerry carried on where Clinton left off.
HRC was wildly popular among State Dept. employees, in contrast to her predecessors, and it is to some extent because she brought the idea of diplomacy back to center stage. The primary influences on Bush’s foreign policy by contrast were the Sec. of Defense and the Vice President; his Secretaries of State were a figurehead followed by a judas goat. Compared to them Clinton and Kerry are indistinguishable.
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He’s “a master trolley”, “the devil [you] know” who will reverse his positions on a whim, “won’t…try to stick to promises he made…”, and you “don’t believe what he says”.
And all of that makes you an advocate.
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This is an old but interesting article on “stochastic terrorism”. Mainly talking about Beck, Hannity, O’Reilly, and Savage in their heyday, but relevant now.
Take one person spouting rhetoric like “Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest?”, give them a broad platform like radio or TV to broadcast their message, and stir the pot, knowing that thousands of listeners have the right combination of anger, instability, and propensity to do something.
You don’t know exactly who it might be, which gives the perfect Plausible Denial defense.
“When they go on TV and shout and sputter, rant and rave, and weep and wail, they are not expecting to persuade liberals or even undecideds to change their votes. They are “playing to their base,” that they know includes people who are emotionally unstable. In short they are “stirring the pot.” And if you turn up the temperature and keep stirring, you know that the pot will boil. Little bubbles will come up from the depths and pop.”
There’s a saying, “Once is a tragedy, twice is a terrible coincidence, three times is enemy action.”
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I was pretty burdened by it, actually, so take that. Ah, Mal…
Really, I’m not about to go shout his praises, but seriously, how great would it be if he did get elected and in his first big speech was like “No, I’m not going to build a wall, are you all retarded? Remember when everybody was saying that’s an insane idea? I said that crap so the dumb majority would elect me. Watch my interviews from before I was running for office. That’s the stuff I actually believe.” That is within the realm of possibility at this point.
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If he did that, I think he might end up regretting that comment about second amendment people.
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