If there's one good thing about life in 2017, is that there is no shortage of unbelievably stupid things to hang your head in shame at. So, with that, let's dive right in:
After spending a significant chunk of his campaign railing against American interventionism, Donald Trump is making noises to launch himself into not one but two wars. There's Syria where the chemical weapons attacks have apparently galvanized him into seeking the removal of Bashar al-Assad from power. The horrors of that attack aren't enough to let Syrians in as as refugees, but it does call him to launch ineffective bombing raids which, to no one's surprise, end up killing more children he's so broken up about but hey, it's the thought that counts. That Trump previously warned about the perils of getting involved in Syria means he was actually right about something but has now changed his mind due to the Washington thinkers he won the election disparaging is just too goddamned depressing to call ironic.
And then there's North Korea. Why exactly Trump feels compelled to antagonize the nuclear cyst that is North Korea is too stupefying for me to want to dive into, so we'll just focus on practical consequences. Now we have stories saying the administration is looking into shooting down test missiles launched by the DPRK; that their last showpiece missile launch was an abysmal failure would make you think that shooting them down is somewhat redundant but what do we know?
The upshot of both things is that Trump is playing fast and loose with stakes he doesn't realize. Because let's say that he does go all-in for a ground war in Syria, what then? Do we start shooting down Russian planes? Because nothing from the Kremlin has signaled that they'd drop their support for Assad in the face of a U.S. invasion so the question quickly becomes how, exactly, are you going to remove Assad from power without antagonizing their biggest ally? The same goes for North Korea, how do you really expect to start an armed conflict with that tin-foil dictatorship that doesn't involve China?
The most infuriating thing about all of this though is the response of the press. Ever since Trump's strike against the Syrian airbase and his MOAB drop in Afghanistan and his belligerence against North Korea, op-ed pages have been tripping over themselves praising Trump for being "Presidential." I wish I could shake every last one of them and scream "The fuck are you thinking!" right in their idiot faces. These are the exact same people who, say, a year from now, will be asking "How did this happen?" as we're looking down the barrel of one, maybe two, hopeless wars and how they could've possibly not seen them coming. Gee, I don't know media, maybe your glowing adoration and respect for a President who desperately craves both of those things could possibly, theoretically, encourage said President to escalate those conflicts to bask in your war-time patriot boners. It's just a thought, though. But really, Trump is on the verge of antagonizing and starting a war with not one but three nuclear powers and instead of recoiling in abject terror, the press is cheerleading him into it. This is one of those things that make me think that we deserve to be ashes on the cinder.
Of course, Trump probably wouldn't feel the need to prove himself with bombings abroad if he could actually accomplish things at home. Granted, that's giving him a lot of benefit of the doubt he doesn't really deserve, but it'd be folly to ignore his about-face towards American adventurism in the face of all the failures he's racking up on the domestic front. Sure, his Supreme Court pick went through after the Senate changed the rules of debate, but, other than that, he's got shit to show for his first 100-days in office. The wall that was supposed to start building on Day One as yet to materialize even as a spending bill, his tax cuts are also a no-show and then there's the whole "Repeal Obamacare!" thing that went down in such glorious flames. The dude's aching for a win here, and there really isn't any substitute for blowing shit up thousands of miles away to make people forget about your incompetence at home.
And, honestly, the whole 100 days thing isn't really a thing. It's a psychological trap that governments have locked themselves into ever since FDR. At the same time, this is one of those "It's real if your mind says it's real" type of things, so we have to play off of it. The whole thinking behind the 100 days thing is that this the time for the President to build up a solid win to springboard his other policies off of once the new car smell wears off. That Trump has proved incapable of doing so is going to lead to bigger problems down the road and the healthcare debacle provides a useful road map to his other major policy initiatives.
All of his future proposals, from the the wall to the tax cuts, involve massive amounts of deficit spending that the Freedom Caucus simply will not swallow. So to appease them, Trump is going to have to make certain budget concessions to cut funding elsewhere that will make the more moderate Republicans in both houses of Congress balk, because the only programs with the kind of money to trim to match Trump's deficit increasing tax cuts, for example, would be Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, aka the most popular government programs in history. There is no way in hell Republicans in vulnerable districts will put themselves so clearly on the wrong side of something for a man literally no one except Republican voters approve of. And since Trump doesn't have the personal clot or political capital to move the Freedom Caucus away from their positions, he'll be just as deadlocked as Obama was.
This dynamic is the reason why Trump named the Freedom Caucus as an enemy to be defeated in the 2018 midterms, but considering that these people come from die-hard conservative districts, it is highly doubtful that those voters would be willing to kick them out for adhering to "true conservative principles" in favor of Trump bag-men in a primary. Trump's cult of personality will protect him personally from the fallout of his failures, I'm sure, but I highly doubt it will galvanize voters to kick out people who are doing exactly what they were sent to Washington to do. Should be fun to watch, all the same.
In lighter news, Alex Jones is trying to pass off as a performance artist so he can convince the court that he is not, in fact, a complete lunatic so he can have custody of his children. This is yet another in a time honored tradition of right wing fuckwads building an audience by being uncompromising and meaning every word they say until suddenly, they don't mean anything at all, everything they do is all a sham. It never surprises me that these brave men of dignity and courage dump everything they've done at the first real sign of trouble, but I will admit to being shocked that there are so many people waiting to be duped by whatever shit-stain comes up to replace them and start the cycle all over again. Then again, there will always be a niche for people willing to tell millions of people that they're right to be ignorant assholes, so, there ya go.
I think that about does it for me this time, so, carry on, and try not get singed
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