Colin Powell wasn’t able to keep the US out of Iraq.
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Yeah, I don’t think a SoS normally has that much control over policy. I guess it depends if Trump is actually interested in governing (hah!). If Romney is given the job he might be okay if Trump leaves him to it.
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Fair point, but look who else is in the mix. Romney is certainly the least terrible person there. Aside from his personally socially conservative preferences, which he did a decent job of firewalling from his day job as governor, what would make him a bad Secretary of State? I think he’d be fine and fair negotiator and representative of a stable country. I don’t want some loose cannon representing us globally. Fine, Bain is filthy vulture capitalism, but really, we could do a lot worse.
If, in retrospect, people are realizing that merely four years ago America had two good choices for president running against each other, there will be some cognitive dissonance.
And maybe some crying.
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Do you think Romney was a good candidate?
Better than anyone the GOP put up this time, perhaps. But that doesn’t mean good.
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“You’ll find when you become very successful, the people you will like best are the people that are less successful than you, because when you go to a table, you can tell them all these wonderful stories and they’ll sit back and listen. Always be around unsuccessful people because everybody will respect you.”
That’s from March of this year at a rally on the campaign trail.
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This is one of those “three fingers pointing back at yourself” things, isn’t it?
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Looks like Romney doesn’t have the support of the Moonies then.
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I think the executive branch is going to be irrational, a disastrous mix no matter how you look at it. “Best to avoid getting any of it on you,” the more rational are thinking, “as those stains will never come out.”
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Yeah, there’s a fantastic rationale that no one with any credibility should work with Trump, both in the hopes that the administration should flame out badly, and also that they don’t want to be tainted by history themselves as collaborators or enablers. But for myself as a citizen? I’d much rather see Sec’y of State Romney over Giuliani for sure. The fact that the intelligence community has overwhelmingly pledged not to work with a Trump admin is likewise admirable in all the right “we don’t want to work for a fascist” ways, but personally I’d love to see some actual qualified people pulling the levers wherever possible.
I know, you’re not supposed to equate Trump with Hitler, but the parallels in this respect are uncanny. In that I mean that a main reason why he was able to cement his position was that the “competent and qualified” stuck on in 1933. They too thought a functioning state was more important than their personal distaste. When we talk of the Nazis, we concentrate too much on the war, when they showed how low they could go, but we neglect the six years before when everyone was unaware of how much misery they wanted to cause.
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Hopefully anyone with a conscience choosing to work elsewhere will obviously force the Trump admin to be staffed be complete incompetents who just fail for 4 years and then they’re out. It’s certainly better to rip this particular bandaid off all at once than to have a Romney as the soothing diplomat presenting a reassuring face to the world and making people see the US administration as Not That Bad.
So I get it and agree with it conceptually, I wouldn’t want to be seen as a willing Trump collaborator either. I just wish we didn’t have to fail this hard now in order to recover faster later.
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