HuffPo Links: Story One — Story Two.
Either strategic ambiguity or ad hoc policy making? Trump strategic? Ad hoc? No. It is a desperate attempt by the sane ones to once again normalize Trump. Will Trump grasp their message? Will someone take his Twitter away? Will Trump supporters become the least bit uneasy? Will Republicans in Congress have second thoughts about their cowardice in standing up to Trump? Will any Trump shills just give up and go back to their low profile jobs as baggers at Walmart? No. No. No…..
Rachel MADDOW last night interviewing Conway: Honestly, though, the American position on nuclear weapons worldwide for a very long time now, not just as a partisan matter but over multiple presidents, has been that we are trying to lead the way in reducing the number of nuclear weapons in the world. He’s saying we’re going to expand our nuclear capability. CONWAY: He’s not necessarily saying that. MADDOW: He did. He did literally say we need to expand our nuclear capability. CONWAY: What he’s saying is we need to expand our nuclear capability, really our nuclear readiness or our capability to be ready for those who also have nuclear weapons.
HUH?
This Morning:
NBC’s Matt Lauer asked Trump’s incoming press secretary Sean Spicer about Trump’s comments. LAUER: If there is going to be an arms race...SPICER: There is not going to be. LAUER: He says, so be it, we will match them at every turn. SPICER: But there’s not going to be because he is going to ensure other countries get the message he is not going to sit back and allow that. What’s going to happen is they will all come to their sense and we will all be just fine.
Trump lives in a surreal and perilous world where his paranoid side, his madness, holds sway over his rational side. His is a malignant and dangerous combination of abnormal personalities where, to oversimplify, his extreme narcissism, his megalomania, and his paranoid tendencies combine with his not being a critical and analytic thinker to make
him a menace to world stability.
Trump is proving what psychotherapists have already known. He is psychologically unstable. America has to date avoided the fate of other countries with mad kings, queens, emperors, and dictators.
Likewise we have managed to avoid the fate of countries with sane despots running them.
We have avoided the make-believe “1984” and very real 1939 Germany.
We now are on the precipice of a nuclear winter which will last for four years unless Republicans save us.
How likely is that?
Friday, Dec 23, 2016 · 6:23:19 PM +00:00 · HalBrown
It’s not normal, but it is legal. But Trump’s shills are trying to normalize it. What could go wrong?
"It will expose how well other institutions function when one of them is operating outside the normal framework,” said attorney Robert Bauer, who served as White House counsel to President Obama. “If you have a president who is going to push hard against standing limits and expectations, are other institutions, like the Congress, going to step into the breach? Are they going to take on a more muscular role than they otherwise would?"
When norms or expectations, like releasing tax returns, break down, said Bauer, “the natural answer is that what used to be something available by choice, but expected of a president, has to be turned into a legal command.” The question Trump’s presidency will help answer is whether anybody cares.
Friday, Dec 23, 2016 · 7:12:51 PM +00:00 · HalBrown
From Daily Beast: The message is clear to me. We must not treat him like a normal human being.
Ordinarily, when future presidents speak about nuclear weapons, they do so very, very carefully. (Arms that have the potential to end the world have a way of inducing that kind of caution.) What’s more, because the Bombs are never supposed to be used, the signalling around them—how they’re positioned, how they’re tested, and how they’re discussed—becomes of paramount importance.