You see “largely functional” trade relationships as okay. A little bit o’tariffs and non-tariff barriers makes the medicine go down easier, right? President Trump offered a no-tariff trade with Europe; did anyone accept?

The TCJA has so far produced great results, the best part being 100% expensing. I’m not going to repeat the stats, we all know what they are. And you’re complaining about continuing the dividend and cap gains breaks? Since most Americans don’t like to be taxed on inflation, and virtually all economists agree the US savings rate is way too low, what’s your beef?

The Iran deal. Hmmm. Let’s see. Iran gets billions of dollars, including billions in cash — perfect for funding terrorists — up front, and we get their promise that they won’t develop nucs for ten years. Of course, we can’t have an unannounced, all-sites inspection right, that would be mean! BTW, what are IRBMs and ICBMs for? Dropping four tons of aluminum on a city? Riddle me this, RadMod — why would you develop ballistic missiles if you didn’t plan on having nuclear warheads to put in them when they’re operational?

Yes, I took Econ 101, I know what price oligopolies have to set their product at. But tell me, if it’s so easy to get them to violate what they agreed to at OPEC just a month or so ago, how come nobody else ever did it?

I’m so glad Trump is clueless about wielding the military. Otherwise, he probably wouldn’t have sent three carrier groups into the Pacific to threaten L’il Kim, he wouldn’t have bombed Syrian airbases, and he wouldn’t have killed Russian soldiers. (First time the US has done that since 1921!) I can’t wait to see what he won’t know how to do next.

Speaking of L’il Kim, what exactly did Trump give up? A photo op and postponement of a command post exercise in exchange for the possibility of denuclearization? Has Trump pulled any troops out of South Korea? Nope. Has he withdrawn any nuclear-capable planes or ships out of PACCOM? Nope. Has he relaxed economic sanctions? Nope. So what exactly are you complaining about? That L’il Kim will have lots of pictures of himself shaking hands with Trump to pass out to his adoring fans? And you consider that a bad deal?

And we should pay for the defense of Europe because why? This is 2018, not 1970. Don’t you think it’s about time our European “allies” contributed a modest amount to their own defense, instead of spending the money on increased vacation benefits?

I could go on and on and on, but why bother, I’m sure in your universe everything would be hunky-dory if only the better and wiser of us — meaning you — had elected THE MOST QUALIFIED CANDIDATE FOR PRESIDENT EVER!

It’s just not that way in this universe.

“Tell me how you reduce the national debt when it takes 60 votes to pass a budget and there are 49 Democrats in the Senate?”

You use reconciliation. And I’m pretty sure that it wasn’t the Democrats that larded up the budget resolution. There was a halfway decent markup for the budget and then… oopsy! Everything snuck back in at the last moment.

This might have been forgivable if the tax cut hadn’t been quite so generous, but it was. (BTW: I’m mostly supportive of the corporate tax cuts, in that they give companies the ability to manage their biz upstream of taxation. But given that nobody would even consider adjusting the downstream tax breaks like the dividend and cap gain preference items, it seems quite a bit more craven than it should have been.)

“Free trade is a wonderful idea. When do we start?”

I can tell you how we shouldn’t start. We shouldn’t nuke our largely functional relationships with our western trading partners to show how evenhanded we’re being with China. Pissing off Canada and the EU is utterly insane, and feeds into the foreign policy questions, which I’ll fisk as we go:

“The UN Human Rights Commission?”

Don’t care, and not what I’m talking about.

“The Iran deal?”

Yes, that’s a huge screwup. No matter how bad a deal it was (and IMO it was pretty bad but not horrible), when it’s structured so that you give all the value away up front, and you receive the value from the other side over time, getting rid of the deal before you’ve received that value is pretty stupid.

Surely you don’t really think that the sanctions are actually going to snap back, do you? By repudiating the deal, all we’ve done is ensure that the EU, Russia, and China get full access to the Iranian market, while we get nothing, and a resurgent Iranian nuke program, to boot.

It’s a magnificent achievement: We’ve done major damage to our credibility as a good-faith party and we get exactly nothing in return.

“The Paris Climate Non-Accord?”

Don’t care. Well, not quite true: Since the agreement was purely aspirational, we lost nothing by paying lip-service to it, but we lost still more honest-partner points by repudiating it. Not a huge deal, but vaguely stupid.

“Building up the US military is destroying a foreign policy lever?”

Without any ability to negotiate in what your counter-parties would consider good faith, the military buildup is somewhere between useless and scary. And, given that the CINC is obviously clueless about how to wield the military that he’s building up, I’m not sure what this accomplishes–other than larding up the contracts for the usually defense folks.

“Having a Secretary of State who is more interested in the interests of the US than lining her own pockets is destroying a foreign policy lever?”

I don’t even know what this means. Are you talking about Tillerson or Pompeo? Get somebody in the job for longer than 14 months at a time and I’ll be willing to reconsider. Until then, if you’re simply yelling “not Hillary, therefore good!”, maybe you ought to be reexamining your logic there.

“Trump just got the Saudis to blow through their own self-imposed production limit — I guess Trump must have missed destroying that lever.”

That one’s kinda nice, but of course a half-trained chimp could have achieved this. The Saudis will do almost anything to keep US shale oil shut-in. The only way to do that is to drive the price down to the point where it’s not worth restarting US production.

But I notice that you’ve left out a few:

Trump (with the tacit approval of most of the party, which is of course what I’m more concerned about) has managed to trade most of our diplomatic, military, and economic leverage on North Korea away for a photo op / PR stunt. And that leverage was important: it’s what kept China at least going through the motions on keeping up economic pressure on the Norks. That’s gone now. Punting on the military exercises with the South Koreans has freaked them out, driving them closer to China’s sphere of military and economic influence. And of course the rest of the world is scratching its head trying to figure out if Trump is just stupid or stupid and insane.

Then you have Trump taking potshots at NATO allies (again, with the GOP’s tacit approval) for… what? Because they’re mean stuck-up Europeans? Because we’re gonna cut our own nose off to spite our faces if they drive a hard bargain on their defense contributions? (NB: We should be driving a hard bargain on this, but we’re not even negotiating this–we’re tweeting insanity.)

And Trump’s doing this at exactly the historical moment where Putin’s decided that he’d really like to get the old USSR band back together (maybe with a side of Warsaw Pact for good measure), and Europe actually has some non-US defense partners (China, anyone?) available.

I’m perfectly comfortable with the Nixonian madman theory of foreign policy, where you scare your counterparties into cooperating because they can’t tell what you’re going to do if they don’t. But the madman theory only works if you’re smart and appear to be crazy. Stupid and crazy is just… stupid and crazy.

“But that doesn’t come close to offsetting what he has accomplished, which is why I and many others on this blog support him.”

I assume that, by “what he has accomplished”, you mean the judicial appointments and deregulation. I like that stuff.

But for you to think that this actually offsets all the stuff I have above, you have to think that the price that the GOP is going to pay has already mostly been paid. I don’t think that’s even close to true.

Anybody can have a couple of good years if they’re willing to burn all the fiscal, social, and ideological capital that they’ve accumulated. That’s the Hugo Chavez version of political science. But when things go really, really wrong internationally (and they will), and when the economy goes into a downturn (which it will–sooner than it would without this idiot tariff war) and we’re already borrowing more than a trillion bucks a year (which we are), things are going to get ugly.

Then, after the GOP has pretty much jettisoned every good idea that they’ve ever had, will they reap the whirlwind that they’ve sown. Personally, I’d rather that they take their lumps early, while there’s still some chance of correcting things without having to start from nothing but rubble. To that end, I plan to vote for the other guys, and hope that reason prevails.

I’m not holding my breath. On the other hand, I don’t have much to lose.

I believe it had already happened, as soon as the Jewish people came to be.

Anti-Semitism is exceedingly old.

It is exactly what happened.

Ah, yes, commenter “Ken” (who has commented a few times here before, often under different sock-puppet names) had to make sure that word “Jew” was in there, because the JEW part was so very very important to him.

I wonder—if “Ken” were discussing George Will, would he be careful to put “non-Jew” into the description of Will? Somehow I doubt it.

And yes, Boot is almost certainly not a religious person of any sort, Jew or otherwise. He is the offspring of emigrants from the Soviet Union, and his parents were almost certainly persecuted as Jews in their home country but—like most Soviet Jews—probably were secular ethnic Jews.

I remember reading articles years ago about the influx of Soviet Jews to Israel, and how they had to be taught just about everything about Judaism because they had zero knowledge and training in it (the Soviets had tried to stamp that out). Of course, many never wanted to know; I’m just talking about those who did want to learn something about Judaism. I am not aware of any specific information about the religious habits of either Boot or his parents.

I believe you spelled “globalist functional atheist” incorrectly. There’s no public evidence of religiosity on Boot’s part.

(Or perhaps you just meant to say “globalist,” but a keyboard macro fired-off unintentionally? One can never be sure what words another person types so often, that they’d make them into a macro.)

The God Emperor Trump has no flaws, only characteristics lessers can’t understand.

Also, Max Boot is a globalist Jew, uninterested in preserving and projecting American interests. From the mouth of Boot “I am socially liberal: I am pro-LGBTQ rights, pro-abortion rights, pro-immigration…. I am pro-environment: I think that climate change is a major threat that we need to address.”

He isn’t a conservative and certainly doesn’t believe in America, much less that America has the right to define, maintain, and defend its borders. Fuck him.

But traitors? Traitors we hang.

And you think that voting Democrat will solve the debt problem? After the debt increase since 2009? When any attempt to even FREEZE spending on any part of the budget gets the Democrats to rise up in mutiny?

As they say in Venezuela, Decime otro de vaqueros. Tell me another cowboy story. Tell me another fish tale.