The hour of the lunatic
It's the sign of the times that we can't simply award Mayor Pete the nickname "Captain Obvious" for articulating something predictable- and widely predicted- even back when Mr. Trump was first seeking the Republican nomination and blathering his ignorance about foreign policy to so many ears that were either deaf or attached to heads which even now lack the understanding necessary to perceive it. It has become increasingly obvious every day of this Administration, as our loose-cannon of a president reinforces America's status as an international laughingstock. But incredibly, even intelligent people still fail to get the point.
In many cases, of course, it's because they so desperately want to NOT get the point- or can't bring themselves to admit that they get it all too well, and find it easier to play make-believe.
As I've repeatedly pointed out, it's also compromised the integrity of countless conservative politicians and journalists to varying degrees, resulting in a corresponding hit to their reputations going forward. And it will take at least twenty years for the Republican Party to recover from the LSD trip it's been on since 2016 sufficiently to be taken seriously again as an alternative to the more intentional but also escalating craziness of a Democratic Party whose future and perhaps present belong to the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez/Bernie Sanders/Elizabeth Warren brand of extremism.
Warren is even being increasingly seen as the new Democratic front-runner, eclipsing Joe Biden and raising the specter of a second consecutive election in which conservatives and moderates who are somewhat in touch with reality are left without a viable option to vote for by the two major political parties. Hillary Clinton has even chimed in to not only accuse former Green Party candidate Jill Stein of being an agent of Moscow whose third party bid in 2016 was a successful Russian plot to defeat her and elect Donald Trump but to suggest that Tulsi Gabbard, a relatively moderate Democratic candidate who is running this year, is currently performing the same function!
If it is true that "whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad," it would seem that the gods are out to destroy our political leaders. The job seems already to be half-done with the two major political parties, with the emergence of a sane, centrist third party this cycle made unlikely by the widely-recognized necessity of somehow rescuing the nation from Donald Trump. Whether an Evan McMullin or a Tulsi Gabbard makes an independent run next year if the Democrats join the Republicans in utter insanity I don't know. But I am worried about whether I could vote for somebody as out of touch with reality as Elizabeth Warren even to rid the nation of the dangerously unstable Donald Trump.
ADDENDUM: It should be added that Tulsi Gabbard- like President Trump- does seem to have a "thing" for authoritarian leaders and dictators. She seems to be rather fond of Syria's genocidal President Assad, for example. And a good case can be made that Vladimir Putin is quite fond of Tulsi. It's a point her supporters doubtless miss, but one would not be far from the mark, at least in terms of foreign policy, in thinking of her as "Trump lite." And maybe not all that "lite."
Our allegedly Republican president's essentially Democratic foreign policy- one in most respects well to the left of President Obama's- is one of the things which leave me scratching my head as to how the conservative movement can have swallowed him whole the way it has. Yes, there are old fashioned isolationists like, say, the Pauls in the Republican Party, and back when I was born and dinosaurs ruled the earth and Bob Taft was doing battle with Ike's internationalist wing of the party it was the Republican party line. But the Cold War ended all that. That is, until Trump.
Suggesting that Tulsi is a "Russian asset," though, is more than a little over the top. I would have trouble voting for Tulsi, too- and the more I learn about her, the more trouble I'm having even considering it. But I really don't think that she's in the pay of the FSB.
For that matter, I don't even think that about President Trump!
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