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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region Forumsgeorge will---Sinister figures lurk around our careless president
Sinister figures lurk around our careless president
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Trump administration senior adviser Stephen Miller at the White House. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
By George F. Will Opinion writer October 13
With eyes wide open, Mike Pence eagerly auditioned for the role as Donald Trumps poodle. Now comfortably leashed, he deserves the degradations that he seems too sycophantic to recognize as such. He did Trumps adolescent bidding with last Sundays preplanned virtue pageant of scripted indignation his flight from the predictable sight of players kneeling during the national anthem at a football game. No unblinkered observer can still cling to the hope that Pence has the inclination, never mind the capacity, to restrain, never mind educate, the man who elevated him to his current glory. Pence is a reminder that no one can have sustained transactions with Trump without becoming too soiled for subsequent scrubbing.
A man who interviewed for the position Pence captured, Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), is making amends for saying supportive things about Trump. In 2016, for example, he said he was repulsed by people trying to transform the Republican National Convention from a merely ratifying body into a deliberative body for the purpose of preventing what has come to pass. Until recently, Corker, an admirable man and talented legislator, has been, like many other people, prevented by his normality from fathoming Trumps abnormality. Now Corker says what could have been said two years ago about Trumps unfitness. The axiom that Hell is truth seen too late is mistaken; damnation deservedly comes to those who tardily speak truth that has long been patent. Perhaps there shall be a bedraggled parade of repentant Republicans resembling those supine American communists who, after Stalin imposed totalitarianism, spawned the gulag, engineered the Ukraine famine, launched the Great Terror and orchestrated the show trials, were theatrically disillusioned by his collaboration with Hitler: You, sir, have gone too far.
Trumps energy, unleavened by intellect and untethered to principle, serves only his sovereign instinct to pander to those who adore him as much as he does. Unshakably smitten, they are impervious to the Everest of evidence that he disdains them as a basket of gullibles. He understands that his unremitting coarseness satisfies their unpolitical agenda of smashing crockery, even though his self-indulgent floundering precludes fulfillment of the promises he flippantly made to assuage their sense of being disdained. He gives his gullibles not governance by tantrum, but tantrum as governance.
With Trump turning and turning in a widening gyre, his crusade to make America great again is increasingly dominated by people who explicitly repudiate Americas premises. The faux nationalists of the alt-right and their fellow travelers such as Stephen K. Bannon, although fixated on protecting the United States from imported goods, have imported the blood-and-soil ethno-tribalism that stains the continental European right. In Answering the Alt-Right in National Affairs quarterly, Ramon Lopez, a University of Chicago PhD candidate in political philosophy, demonstrates how Trumps election has brought back to the public stage ideas that a post-Lincoln America had slowly but determinedly expunged. They were rejected because they are incompatible with an open society that takes its bearing from the Declaration of Independences doctrine of natural rights.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/sinister-figures-lurk-around-our-careless-president/2017/10/13/09c9448c-af6e-11e7-be94-fabb0f1e9ffb_story.html?utm_term=.380a7e676429
JHB
(37,161 posts)...and your partys voters are fine with it. Frankly, theyre outright cheery they dont have to hide any more.
Wellstone ruled
(34,661 posts)Bob Murray,the killer of twenty some Coal Miners,as a consultant,what can go wrong I ask.
gratuitous
(82,849 posts)If only someone could have detected this nascent Nazism fermenting just below the surface of American life. If only there had been some clues for the discerning, like a presidential candidate announcing his campaign in an historic locale noted for its past intolerance and violence. Or perhaps if there had been rhetoric to tip us off, like "States' rights" as code for naked racism.
But no. There was no warning, no indication. Latter-day Nazis sprang full-grown like Athena from an unlikely and unsuspected source. And now George Will is concerned about the president's flippant promises and governance by tantrum. Is it now permissible for the rest of us to notice?
scarletwoman
(31,893 posts)bdamomma
(63,875 posts)MineralMan
(146,317 posts)to be killed, just for disagreeing. He can't actually do that, but he'd like to, I'm sure.