I could do my usual thing of itemizing Trump’s insanities/inanities. But you probably have heard them discussed on CNN or supported on Fox or destroyed by comedians.
Instead for this week I’d like to take a broader view.
It’s just that I’m looking at the state of the world. The Russians obviously tampered with the election because they hated/feared Hillary that much. The Senate’s strike back at them was signed into law by Trump because he had no choice; they could have overridden his veto. This obviously infuriated Putin who retaliated diplomatically, which means we are teetering on another Cold War. Meanwhile North Korea continues to test missiles which can reach as far as California, DC, and New York, and I don’t think anyone remotely believes that Trump is capable of handling NK’s dictator if the hammer comes down.
And what I keep coming back to is this:
Let’s say five years ago, someone wanted to tell an end-of-the-world story. Governments have broken down, diplomacy has gone out the window, and lunatic nutbags are running things. If the storyteller wanted to provide a shorthand to establish how things could have possibly gone so wrong, all he would have to do is have a newscaster talking about “President Trump.” Because five years ago, the audience would have snorted and said, “Well, sure, I totally believe that if this country was stupid enough to put Trump into office, then it makes sense that the entire world is falling apart. Hëll, we probably deserve to be nuked out of existence if things have gotten that bad.”
Writers do that all the time. Alan Moore made sure that Richard Nixon was still president in the time of “Watchmen” because you could totally buy into the notion of Nixon overseeing a steady but inevitable crawl toward atomic destruction. In the episode of “Supernatural,” The End, Dean Winchester of 2009 is transported forward into 2014, where mention is made of President Sarah Palin while the world falls apart. It’s a nice writing shorthand to establish a reality on the edge of total destruction.
Except that’s fiction.
And this is fact.
The fact being that we have a man in office whose mere mention in a work published or shown five years ago would have viewers buying into the notion that we are all effectively screwed.
Am I the only person to whom this has occurred?
PAD
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To quote won of my favorite Star Trek moments, and may have been written by you…
Worf: The short answer is no…
Riker: What’s the long answer?
Worf: No sir….
“Am I the only person to whom this has occurred?”
No. No, you are not. I think it occurred to a good many others of us who did not vote for the least qualified presidential candidate in US history.
‘Insert comment of how we didn’t vote for Hillary’… 😉
*Insert the fact that I can’t defend Trump so I’ll bring up Hillary and Obama*
I’m reminded of my favorite comment on the election, from the Weekend Update part of Saturday Night Live: “It’s like the country is sick, and we passed on a surgeon with decades of experience in favor of a guy wearing a hat saying ‘I am a good doctor.'”
This quote from H.L. Mencken could also apply to Trump’s whole campaign and presidency: “Complex problems have simple, easy to understand, wrong answers.”
It says volumes to think that Trump’s own party may believe that he’d be too weak to deal with someone like Kim Jong Un.
And yet, they’re in no apparent urge to do anything about it, which tells you how far we are screwed beyond just having an imbecile as president.
And several more volumes that the Republicans have no problem with that.
Doc Brown: “Ronald Reagan? The ACTOR?!?
The thing that’s really been worrying me this week is the idea that first contact with alien life could happen in the next three and a half years, asking “take us to your leader.” For all the real world awfulness he’s done… can you imagine him being the person the aliens end up talking too?
“The thing that’s really been worrying me this week is the idea that first contact with alien life could happen in the next three and a half years”
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It’s more likely that Trump would get an approval rating of 90%.
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Seriously, THAT is what you’re worried about?
Only if the aliens land in the United States. Nobody else in the world considers Trump to be the “leader of the free world” anymore. To be honest, that was pretty much a title that Americans decided to give their President without asking what the rest of the world thought of that idea anyway.
I keep feeling as if we’re in a “What If-” scenario that started last November… that we are literally in an alternate reality instead of the one that SHOULD have occurred.
Except that it seems unlikely in the extreme that some time traveler is going to arrive and change things back to the mainstream. Hillary wasn’t the best person to be president… but she WAS the best candidate. And some really stupid people felt otherwise…
True.
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But, consider this way of looki9ng at it.
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The United States of America.
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The country which put men on the moon. The country which gave us computers as we know them. The country which was responsible for countless medical and technological breakthroughs. The country which had long built up the world’s most powerful, most robust economy. The country countless people around the world aspired to.
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Yet, out of 326 MILLION people, at a time when unifying, effective leadership was needed more than ever, polarizing Trump and Clinton were all they could come up with to run for President?
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We were screwed long before Trump was elected.
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(I know, I’m Canadian, but there was an item in the papers this week about how strategists were pointing out that, if Kim Il Idiot does go even farther off the deep end, Canada’s under missile flight paths which doesn’t tend to end well.)
StarWolf, you are dead right about the quality of our candidates. It was rather a lose-lose scenario from the start.
But until we can get a candidate who isn’t rich, isn’t kissing the butt of mass media, and can be presented as equal (or, obviously, superior) to the Republicans’ and Democrats’ offering… we’re in trouble.
Part of the issue is the Electoral College… a good idea whose time has passed.
“polarizing Trump and Clinton were all they could come up with”
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Trump was polarizing because half the people recognized the truth of how incompetent he is. Clinton was “polarizing” because the other half believed the lies that had been spread about her for 20+ years.
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Not a valid comparison.
The point is that neither candidate was worth two wet, lumpy, sharts…
And for all of America’s silly bluster about how great “Democracy” is, and how America is great because we have democracy, the candidate that got the majority of the votes lost to the silly electoral college nonsense.
Yeah, it was sort of a lose-lose scenario, but you guys really pooched the job of picking the lesser of two evils.
Actually Derek, the person americans elected (Hillary) lost because of the lie that america is a democracy, Trump won the electoral college (which is antiquated garbage) and accelerated america’s descent into doom