The
presidential oath of office contains 35 words and one core promise: to
“preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
Since virtually the moment Donald J. Trump took that oath two years ago,
he has been violating it.
He has repeatedly put his own interests
above those of the country. He has used the presidency to promote his
businesses. He has accepted financial gifts from foreign countries. He
has lied to the American people about his relationship with a hostile
foreign government. He has tolerated cabinet officials who use their
position to enrich themselves.
To
shield himself from accountability for all of this — and for his
unscrupulous presidential campaign — he has set out to undermine the
American system of checks and balances. He has called for the prosecution of his political enemies and the protection of his allies. He has attempted to obstruct justice.
He has tried to shake the public’s confidence in one democratic
institution after another, including the press, federal law enforcement
and the federal judiciary.
The
unrelenting chaos that Trump creates can sometimes obscure the big
picture. But the big picture is simple: The United States has never had a
president as demonstrably unfit for the office as Trump. And it’s
becoming clear that 2019 is likely to be dominated by a single question:
What are we going to do about it?
The
easy answer is to wait — to allow the various investigations of Trump
to run their course and ask voters to deliver a verdict in 2020. That
answer has one great advantage. It would avoid the national trauma of
overturning an election result. Ultimately, however, waiting is too
dangerous. The cost of removing a president from office is smaller than
the cost of allowing this president to remain.
Read the rest here.
LOL wut
ReplyDeletebetter than the alternatve in 16!
ReplyDeleteYou are right about that.
DeleteI see this as only factions of the U.S. ruling class turning on each other as things begin to go seriously "south" for the system as a whole. Donald Trump did not cause any of the problems cited in the editorial. All ofthe problems the NYT is blaming on Trump, are a direct result of the neo-liberal economic and the neo-conservative foreign policy orthodoxies which have held sway since at least the collapse of the Berlin Wall, if not earlier. Trump is a symptom, not a cause.
ReplyDeleteAs Andrei Raevsky (aka "The Saker") put it in a recent editorial:
"Far from being a real superpower, the USA is in a full-spectrum decline and the main thing which still gives it its superpower status are its nuclear weapons, just like Russia in the 1990s.
"All the internal problems resulting from the infighting of the US elites (roughly: the Clinton gang vs Trump and his Deplorables) only make things worse. Just the apparently never ending sequence of resignations and/or firing from the Trump Administration is a very important sign of the advanced state of collapse of the US polity. Elites don’t fight each other when all goes well, they do so when everything goes south. The saying “victory has many fathers but defeat is an orphan” reminds us that when a gang of thugs begins to lose control of a situation, it rapidly turns into an “every man for himself”, everybody blames everybody for the problems and nobody wants to stay anywhere near those who will go down in history as the pathetic losers who screwed everything up."
Is Trump a thug and a gangster? Arguably, he is, but the NYT and the Washington Post are simply mouthpieces for a different set of kleptocrats. I see little to choose between them. The whole business reminds me of the various Triumvirates in the final decades of the Roman Republic.
I think John still believes ideology matters. Trump is not an idealist or ideologue, so he drives a lot of Principled Conservatives crazy. In the meantime, we are in the process of winding down Middle Eastern wars, de-militarizing the Korean peninsula, clawing the supply-side back from the Chinese, dialing down atrocious and unmanageable levels of immigration, and generating excellent employment numbers.
ReplyDeleteSo not only did a brash outsider beat the professional politicians at their own game, he has actually logged substantive successes. This is an impeachable offense.
Impeach Trump because he's embarrassing the upper middle class and their Calvinist values.
ReplyDelete...winding down Middle Eastern wars,
ReplyDeleteNot sure knee-jerk tweeting followed by waffling damage control counts once the military experts get involved counts, unless "winding down" means "very little change but some change":
https://goo.gl/mwpNtC
And there is no plan to withdraw from Iraq.
You may be including Afghanistan in this ( even though it's not the Middle East), but again, knee-jerk tweeting followed by waffling...:
https://goo.gl/MBGz4k
de-militarizing the Korean peninsula,
While the agreements negotiated by Clinton and Bush II were both inadequate, they are more than the nothing Trump has negotiated so far. There's no real possibility on the table yet for denuclearization much less demilitarization on the Korean peninsula.
https://goo.gl/8txeC9
the supply-side back from the Chinese,
You'd need to unpack exactly what you mean by this, though I would assume it is beholden to some form of the voodoo economics Republicans keep pushing not understanding the difference between microeconomics and macroeconomics.
down atrocious and unmanageable levels of immigration,
Unauthorized immigration peaked in 2007 and decreased the entirety of Obama's term:
http://www.pewhispanic.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2018/12/PH_2018.11.27_Unauthorized-Immigration-Estimates_1-01.png
The total foreign-born population in the U.S. is not as high as it has ever been. Foreign-born immigrants represented 14.8% of the U.S. population in 1890 (before racist WASPs criminalized immigration from undesirable countries and cultures, e.g., Catholics and Orthodox from Eastern and Southern Europe, anyone from the Middle East and Asia.) Today, the total foreign-born population in the U.S. is 13.8% and the newer natives are again restless, and just as bigoted as those who problematized immigration in the early 20th Century. Good thing enough Orthodox got in then before those fleeing repression would have been branded "illegals" threatening the American way of life and our culture.
https://www.census.gov/newsroom/pdf/cspan_fb_slides.pdf
generating excellent employment numbers
Do you see a deviation from the trend following Trump's election?
https://data.bls.gov/pdq/SurveyOutputServlet?request_action=wh&graph_name=LN_cpsbref3
The Trump economy is a continuation of the Obama recovery following the Great Recession caused by lax regulation under Bush.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GDP#0
Sorry I wasn't able to provide links from more reputable sources of information and facts like Infowars.
ReplyDeleteTrump continues the good work started by Sts. Clinton and Obama? You're welcome.
ReplyDeleteThe team which unleashed the greatest slaughter of Christians in the Middle East in anybody's current lifetime. Great job.
Ask the Antiochians how they feel about Jewish immigration to the West Bank and the Golan. Ask your Israeli friends how they feel about their wall with Gaza. There's one on the Egyptian side too. The Saudis and the Jordanians like their walls as well.
Orthodoxy - the most unabashedly Local expression of the Faith and worship in the vernacular. I will certainly keep your exhortations in mind.