In 2016, I never considered voting for Donald Trump. The Johnny-come-lately Republican and his nasty schoolyard jibes seemed to me the worst degradation of American politics. But in 2020, I may be forced to vote for the man.
I don’t need a bumper sticker or a lawn sign to convey my distaste for Trump — his odious tweets, his chronic mendacity and general crudeness. Over the past four years, like an oil slick that besmirches all it touches, Trump himself has managed to obscure his administration’s more-substantive accomplishments, such as focusing the world’s attention on China’s threat to global security and brokering a new era of Middle East peace.
I fear Trump’s erratic, personality-driven decision-making. His contempt for NATO is alarming, as is his delusion that he can manage rogue leaders. I don’t doubt that his eagerness to withdraw U.S. troops from their stability missions in places such as Afghanistan and Iraq will encourage conflict and terrorism. And I fret that his bizarrely isolationist attitude toward international trade will hurt the U.S. economy and splinter the global trading juggernaut that over the past half-century has brought the world amazing prosperity, lifting hundreds of millions of people out of extreme poverty.
But I fear the leftward lurch of the Democratic Party even more.
What is there to be afraid of? I fear that former vice president Joe Biden would be a figurehead president, incapable of focus or leadership, who would run a teleprompter presidency with the words drafted by his party’s hard-left ideologues. I fear that a Congress with Democrats controlling both houses — almost certainly ensured by a Biden victory in November — would begin an assault on the institutions of government that preserve the nation’s small “d” democracy. That could include the abolition of the filibuster, creating an executive-legislative monolith of unlimited political power; an increase in the number of Supreme Court seats to ensure a liberal supermajority; passage of devastating economic measures such as the Green New Deal; nationalized health care; the dismantling of U.S. borders and the introduction of socialist-inspired measures that will wreck an economy still recovering from the pandemic shutdown.
She goes on along the same lines but it is pretty much more of the same. She concludes with what I think is horse-pucky hyperbole, if not borderline paranoid:
Trump, for all his flaws, could be all that stands between our imperfect democracy and the tyranny of the woke left.
It received almost 30,000 comments:
All the comments I read were similar to the small sample below from the top of the comment section from last night when I wrote this:
I'll comment on only one of your points. It's not self-censoring. It's showing respect. I welcome the end of white privilege, which you and I both enjoy. And which I believe is the primary motivator for your remarks. Oh how I long for the day of Bill Buckley, Jr.
Frankly Danielle, I find this opinion piece just as ridiculous as your appearances on the news media shows. As someone else commented, perhaps you need a vacation. Please take it soon.
Move to Russia, you're more their type.
Don't worry about Trump forcing you to do anything. You are not his type.
You didn't just drink the radical right/Trump Kool-Aid, you mixed the pitcher yourself. Jim Jones' followers have nothing on you.
You're so used to the 20,000
lies Trump and the radical right have pedaled for four years that you don't believe the truth when you hear it.
Joe Biden is not a leftist nor is he a tool of the left. He's a center-left Democrat, just as he was when he was President Obama's Vice-President. He's also honest, empathic and sane. Four more years under the thumb of this narcissistic sociopath will destroy our republic, free press, civil liberties and even our very lives, turning our ountry into an autocracy ruled by Donald Trump, enabled by the likes of William Barr, Stephen Miller and Michael Caputo.
So she knows what she’s getting with Trump. Are you kidding me? Where do I begin?
The wealthy and those in charge own everything while the rest of us will have to figure out how to survive. The fun is just beginning
"What is there to be afraid of?" you ask. "I fear that former vice president Joe Biden would be a figurehead president, incapable of focus or leadership, who would run a teleprompter presidency with the words drafted by his party’s hard-left ideologues."
I reply, "You, you really drank the (Trump) Kool-Aid, didn't you? Just listen to you, wow. No, I don't feel that at all." 🤣
One of the benefits of posting diaries on Daily Kos which are about current political issues with little or any of ur own opinion is that the number of comments rarely exceeds 100, and for a very popular diary may go up to 400. This allows for a good discussion and for our readers to express their opinions. Often there are frequent commenters here who are familiar with each other. My comment to the WaPo article was just the first part of Pletka’s Wikipedia profile (below) followed by “NUFF SAID!” Of course it was quickly lost as thousands more commenters weighed in. She obviously struck a nerve.
I agreed with the comments to this Pletka column and in fact couldn’t find any that supported her, although there may have been a few. Of course this was published in liberal The Washington Post which believes that have to balance their columns with right-wingers. They include opinion columns by anti-Trump conservatives like Jennifer Ruben and Max Boot and writers who are Trump sycophants like Marc Thiessen who I won’t read beyond his titles (see my first comment) but when I did read a few I saw that he attracted comments along the lines of calls for the Post to fire him.
Unlike most columnists and OpEd contributors in The Washington Post and The NY Times their name is a link to their other articles. I never heard of her. Her name isn't a link that goes anywhere so I looked her up on Wikipedia to find out who she was that merited a column in the Post.
Oh boy! Here’s who she is.
Danielle Pletka is an American conservative commentator. She is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a conservative think tank, and the former vice president for foreign and defense policy at AEI. She concurrently holds the Andrew H. Siegal Professorship in American Middle Eastern Foreign Policy at Georgetown University's Center for Jewish Civilization. From 1992 to 2002, Pletka was a senior professional staff member at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, working for Republican Jesse Helms.
A neoconservative, Pletka staunchly supported the Iraq War, holds hawkish views on Iran, defends the use of torture, and rejects the scientific consensus on climate change.
Wikipedia continues its reputation for keeping their profiles up to date.
In 2020, she wrote in a Washington Post op-ed that she "may be forced to vote for" incumbent Republican President Donald Trump because "he wears his sins on the outside" while Pletka feared that the Democratic nominee Joe Biden "would begin an assault on the institutions of government that preserve the nation’s small 'd' democracy."[29]
I just don’t buy her saying that she really thinks that I Biden victory “would begin an assault on the institutions of government that preserve the nation’s small “d” democracy.” Does she think Trump turning the country into a small “a” autocracy and small “d” dictatorship is preferable?
Would the abolition of the filibuster, if it were to occur, really create an “executive-legislative monolith of unlimited political power” whatever the hell that is?
Would the Democrats ensure a liberal supermajority on the Supreme Court that would… do what exactly? Would it turn us into a Marxist state?
Would passage of passing Green New Deal legislation really be devastating to our economy?
How would nationalized health care be the nightmare she thinks it would be, like, of say it is in Canada?
Does she really think Democrats would totally open U.S. borders? Maybe they’d start an airlift from El Salvador to bring members of MS-13 into the United States and grant them immediate citizenship.
Okay, I know she hates what she calls socialism, and says she thinks “socialist-inspired measures that will wreck an economy still recovering from the pandemic shutdown” but really “socialist-inspired” is not the same as strictly defined socialism: “a political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.” She is well aware of this.
This highly educated writer with a BA from Smith and a MA from Johns Hopkins who is also the Andrew H. Siegel Professor on American Middle Eastern Foreign Policy at Georgetown University's Walsh School of Foreign Service just spewing horse-hockey hyperbole.
But I should have known she’d write something like this because she co-hosts an American Enterprise podcast (What the Hell is Going On?) with the totally in the tank for Trump Washington Post columnist and torture loving former George W. Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen.
See: The world according to Marc Thiessen — Good news from a Trump defender
Addendum:
From: How to Stop Falling for the “I’m Not a Scientist” Trap
It happened again over the weekend, when Meet the Press hosted the American Enterprise Institute’s Danielle Pletka to talk about the Trump administration’s Black Friday climate change report. “I’m not a scientist,” she said, and then followed that up with a bunch of nonsense about global cooling. The outraged response was swift and immediate: Why was this person asked on Meet the Press to talk about science when she clearly knows nothing about it? Why didn’t more TV networks interview real scientists about the report? Or, as one Twitter user put it:
She has been on MSNBC and other cable networks and there are also 77 videos of her in the CSPAN video library.
Scroll down the comments to read an excerpt from Alexandra Petri’s column which I suspect she wrote in response to Pletka’s OpEd.