Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2016/08/11/trump-says-barack-hussein.html
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I would have argued that the Bush administration was the founder of ISIS. However you could argue that the Obama administration was less active than they could have been in eliminating it.
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He’s basically saying that by removing troops from unstable regions, Obama (and Hillary) caused ISIS to exist.
Aside from its rambling incoherence, it’s one of his slightly more substantive points.
…that fails entirely to put the blame for all this on the cowboy yahoos that started the Iraq war under dubbya and lead to a destabilized region where extremists can run rampant…
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"He [President Obama] was the founder of ISIS, absolutely," Trump said.
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–And actively tried to prevent any real planning for the post invasion occupation, because any realistic look at the costs and efforts entailed might persuade people to not support invasion.
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Do I facepalm, or do I assume that he’s actually playing some long-term joke on everyone? I just can’t believe that someone can really think/act like this.
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That’s it. I have run out of memes, face-palms, logical arguments, witty remarks, photo-shopped caricatures, poignant retweets, etc. If someone is still behind this guy, they are hopeless and we have done our best. I am going to go outside and breathe.
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It is still several months until November. You’ll have to come in sometime…
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You could only argue that if you buy the idea that, after seven years of being just on the brink of victory, our troops were finally just on the brink of victory.
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The way he removed our troops – you shouldn’t have gone in. I was against the war in Iraq. Totally against it.
You know credit where it’s due, he almost articulated sort of a point there.
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I’ve often wondered at just how convenient the rise of ISIS has been for the US.
Consider: at some point, the taliban’s advances had ground to a halt, and they were even slowly losing ground. Tales of their atrocities had dwindled to a few headlines a year and their recruitment was down everywhere.
Then poof! ISIS appears! armed, funded, staffed and ready to be the next bogeyman.
I don’t doubt that bullets are flying, mind, but…its painfully obvious there’s just so much more to the story than we know.
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And well you should not: that rests on the faulty premise that this pea-brained bronzerfest thinks.
I’m half-serious: his whole patter is carefully constructed to avoid having to think. For example…
It serves his purpose to just handwave around “oh something happened that looked kind of bad for my opponent a while ago” without having to think about what it even was.
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I would actually argue that many of his ramblings have their origin in some poorly understood and dimly remembered point. But the ability to take a point and warp it into an incoherent stream of consciousness kind of make him the strange mirror image of Ronald Reagan’s image as “the great communicator.”
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I think he acts with a kind of bizarre clarity enabled by madness. See also http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PowerBornOfMadness
In all seriousness though, I struggled with this too. Here’s where I’ve landed for now: Imagine someone who really wants to win whatever contest they’re in, and really believes on a gut level (whether or not he ever read them is beside the point, he could have rediscovered them or learned them informally) all of those things that Sun Tzu and Miyamoto Musashi were saying about strategy (“At the highest levels of military command the distribution of forces approaches the formless,” “The primary thing when you take a sword in your hands is your intention to cut the enemy, whatever the means,” "From one thing know ten-thousand things). But, you have no actual knowledge to draw on, except your own ego, what those around you feed you in the moment, and a deep intuition for how your supporters will react to the emotional content of what you say. I think Trump’s mental life takes place in this kind of extremely narrow and focused world. Like a malicious yet (to some) oddly persuasive chatbot.
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S’all I’ve got. Any editorial board endorsing this cretin come November should commit group hari-kari.
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I’m going to wait until he clarifies this point later today with a tweet.
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While that’s more or less possible, it’s still a very implausible leap of logic. It’s like saying that Leonid Brezhnev is the father of ISIS because they started as an al-Quaeda support group, and al-Quaeda grew from a rebel unit fighting against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
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Those charitable intepretations still dont cover the fact that one of the candidates is not capable of expressing any point of policy with the clarity of thought and expression you would demand from somebody in a high-school debate team.
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Nixon shakes his head; “you use the crazy man strategy after you get elected. Amateur.”
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It’s eyebrows all the way down.
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