Why TDS has gotten worse among many Democrats in Trump’s second term
I’ve noticed that, ever since Trump’s 2024 election and especially since he took office in January, some of my Trump-hating friends and acquaintances have gotten even angrier at Trump and angrier at those who support him, as compared to Trump’s first term. Here are my ideas about why that’s happened.
(1) Trump’s first term victory was considered a fluke and this one was not. Therefore they believe the electorate has become more evil and/or stupid.
(2) In Trump’s first term, they could claim that he didn’t “really” win because he didn’t win the popular vote. In the second term, he won the popular vote.
(3) Efforts to sabotage Trump’s first term – such as Russiagate – were immediately successful in that they convinced a lot of people and also had a restrictive effect on Trump in terms of what he could accomplish and how much energy he could devote to his policy aims versus fighting the lies.
(4) There were many people in Trump’s first administration who either weren’t onboard with his goals or were actively against them. This is far less true in his second term.
(5) He hit the ground running in his second term.
(6) During the Biden administration, Democrats watched Biden undo a great deal of what Trump had done in his first term. And now they’re having the nightmarish experience of watching Trump II undo what Biden did, or re-do what Biden had undone.
(7) One of the most awful things about the 2024 election, as far as the Democrats are concerned, was their loss of support in several of the groups on which their power depends: black and Hispanic voters. They’re not sure what to do about that.
(8) The Trump assassination attempt in Butler galls them, because it was such a close call and many really really wish Trump had been killed. His seemingly miraculous survival is especially frustrating.
(9) They thought that their lawfare against Trump would work either to put him in prison or at the very least to turn more voters against them. Instead it had the opposite effect, another dramatically and deeply frustrating result. It’s something like the classic scene in a horror movie in which the hero or heroine thinks the monster is gone and is finally able to relax and then bam! The monster pounces.
Right after the 2016 election there was an incident, little-noted at the time or since, that stuck in my mind and whose importance I think has only grown since. Joe Kennedy III spoke at a post-election meeting or rally of Democrats and asked a simple, reasonable question – “We need to understand why all these former Democrats voted for Trump”. And he was booed heavily.
It was all right there already, the fanaticism and the denial. Emphasized by booing a Kennedy – I was never a Kennedy idolator even when I was a Dem but what name has been more symbolic of the party for the past 60 years?
There is a lot to go into there, starting with the fact that the MAGA agenda disturbs not only Democrats but Republicans as well because it is based on two issues – trade and immigration – that were the province of the industrial labor unions that used to form the Democrat voter base. I feel that the ultimate source of the Democrat meltdown is the takeover of the party by the hard left which preceded Trump and even Obama. Leftists *never* admit they are wrong, their heads-I-win-tails-you-lose rhetoric is built into them. And confronting Trump honestly would require self-reflection and self-criticism on their part so fugeddaboutit. The main difference between 2024 and 2016 is their malevolence has had eight more years to curdle and rot their brains.
I thought huxley’s comment in an earlier thread was great: (paraphrased) ”Democrats’ goal is tyranny, which they call ‘democracy.’ Many communist countries also call their tyrannies “Democratic.”
“(8) The Trump assassination attempt in Butler galls them, because it was such a close call and many really really wish Trump had been killed. His seemingly miraculous survival is especially frustrating.”
Here you have it. Many Dems really really wish for the death of Trump. They are Leninists, children of Satan. Never to be trusted, to always be opposed.
I agree with all of your comments and would add a few.
– There’s a phrase that the Ds took Trump literally but his supporters took him seriously. His supporters are able to listen past the hype. the boasting and see what he is trying to accomplish.
– his administration is full of people that the Ds took down, like the people who are in HHS with Kennedy. He selected great people and not political boxes. The differences in the cabinet are obvious since they are getting stuff done and they are better at communication of what didn’t happen during Biden. Trump did not have the great supporting voices behind him last time.
– the lawfare against Trump was seen as righteous, but the actions that Trump and his administration are doing against the Ds are viewed as a retribution and abuse of power. Trump’s supporters realize that it is to ensure that the wrongs are exposed. The people may never be put in prison, but the eyes are now open to the dangers.
– Trump took a small executive office that was about technology and repurposed it to DOGE which the Ds could not change. Problems in the government were quickly identified and changes are being made. The grift was exposed.
– Trump’s attitude has changed a bit. He is having fun, enjoying being patriotic, seems more in love with Melania. His legacy will be returning America back to its roots and not seeking more power for himself.
Neo, that was a pretty comprehensive list.
The Democrat tendency to correlate the political divide with The Good People versus The Bad People leads to their putting blinders over their eyes. Consider a NYC cousin, a member of the NYC artist “community.” She said that the violence was coming from the right/Republicans. Yeah, right. It was those MAGA types rioting in LA? I am reminded of a recent tweet from Minnesota AG Keith Ellison which stated that Bernie Bros were peaceful, civil etc. Ellision asked for any examples to the contrary. Steve Scalise replied that he could think of an example. 🙂
My cousin also stated the she was a supporter of Israel. She went on to say that anti-Semitism was found equally among Republicans and Democrats. No doubt it is found on both sides of the political aisle. Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson come to mind. But support for Israel divides thusly: 80% of Republicans versus 33% of Democrats.
Oh well.
The main difference between 2024 and 2016 is their malevolence has had eight more years to curdle and rot their brains. — FOAF
I was thinking of something similar to FOAF, but a bit different. In 2016, people didn’t really know Trump, or how he would behave in office. I think people are sort of accustomed to dishonest politicians. Will he or she actually do what they say? Or is it a case of “Say anything to get elected?”
If a voter is uncertain, they are more inclined to watch, examine, and think about the speeches and actions. (I know… Hell freezing over, cats & dogs sleeping together. But it happens to some extent.)
Now, in 2024 the lefties know they hate Trump. They don’t have to look, or listen, or pay attention. Every negative thing they heard in the legacy or social media must be true.
It is something like basic human nature. You don’t know a person, so you give him or her the benefit of the doubt. Alternatively, you do know the person, and you are inclined to jump to conclusions. Especially if you don’t like the person.
Actually, it works both ways. For people of either high or low repute. I was something of a goody-two-shoes in high school. Top of my class. By senior year, I could get away with murder. Not that I did much that was nefarious, but a few instances truly surprised me.
________
(5) & (6) are rather amazing. It’s even worse from a left-wing pol or power broker’s perspective, if you appreciate that two things seem to be happening so far. A) Trump getting lots of substantive actions through, and B) They actually seem to be working and improving things. So, the only thing they can do right now is declare all-out war on Trump in their media smear campaigns.
” thinks the monster is gone and is finally able to relax and then bam! The monster pounces.” Change monster to Republicans.
Another big change since the first Trump term is that most Americans are saying “so what” or “that’s what I voted for” every time democrats try emotional blackmail, whether it is showing some sob story of a deported illegal, throwing out the race card, Corey Booker throwing histrionics on the floor of the house, and so on. It isn’t working this time. Basically everyone has had enough of that, and the basic response to any of the emotional blackmail attempts by leftists is “I voted for that”.
This is sending liberals up the wall since it served them so well the last 50 years and now it isn’t working. This also dovetails into the MSM not being able to control the narrative anymore.
What the Trump haters fail to understand is that Trump is protecting them… from us. If Trump had been assassinated, it would have convinced millions of Americans that another civil war had become unavoidable. Millions of conservative veterans trained in the past decades on how insurgency warfare is fought.
“Amateur’s talk tactics, professionals talk logistics” Gen. Omar Bradley
The urban environments in which the vast majority of leftists live are entirely dependent upon the importation of every one of life’s necessities.
Neo’s list is comprehensive for all levels of Ds from the party leaders on down. For the more “common man” Democrats I know, 1,6, and 8 are what I see. They are not Leninists/Marxists. They also don’t have a goal of tyranny, but instead want a utopian vision of everyone happy and secure. They are blind as how such a goal leads to tyranny. Instead they project all evil onto Trump and his supporters.
My brother-in-law may be an exception. Was always sort of MotR. All of a sudden, he developed a white hot hatred of Trump. As a result, he now sits at home and watches nothing but CNN and MSNBC which only adds to his hatred. Unfortunately he lives in CT, so I haven’t been able to really talk to him to find out what happened.
I’ll add that to the list that Democrats have lost the White House, both houses of Congress, the Supreme Court. Trump has got the legacy media, academia and Hollywood on the run. Trump has got the whole Obama/Biden agenda on the run.
Democrats feel angry and powerless, which makes them even angrier.
Bad Orange Man. Hulk wants to smash. But afraid to get arrested.
Trump is an easy guy to hate. He’s successful and loves to point it out. He’s brash and loves to talk trash. He’s got a big ego and doesn’t try to hide it. He’s been married three times and always to beautiful women. Yet, his kids are all normal and hard working. Also, he has called out the grift in the government – something the uniparty hates.
His opponents have tried everything. Russia gate, two impeachments, four indictments, two assassination attempts, and as much slander as imaginable. Yet, he has cruised through it all and become more popular, and richer as he’s collected from anti-slander suits.
I am no fan of his oratory. He goes on too long and his language is often imprecise. He brags too much, but when he lays out goals, he has shown he will try to achieve them – promise made, promises kept.
I wish he had concentrated on getting the BBB passed and the economy firing on all cylinders before he began all the tariff negotiations. But I realize he wanted to do as much as possible before the midterms. Also, I think he has accepted the idea that he might be assassinated at some point. So, he’s going for broke.
If I was on the other side, I would see him as a near unstoppable force with uncanny luck. And that would be very scary.
I don’t know what category to put this in, but as a rough rule of thumb, government is a business for Dems and a civic duty for Reps. When a Rep admin loses power, people can go back to their old jobs. When a Dem admin loses power the people in power at all levels go back to phony jobs like NGOs, think tans, etc. that are paid for by Government grants. The Dems look at DOGE and similar programs and realize they are going to be on street if Trump succeeds. Soros et. al. can only feed so many mouths.
Never doubt the power of Neo’s pen. I forwarded this to my liberal sister and – oh wow! Now she’s in a hissing, spitting rage. “He’s destroying our country!”
For the last four years she has reveled in claiming the moral high ground. Her contempt for Trump (and his supporters) is boundless. That’s pretty hard on a sisterly bond.
Of course she’s completely blind to the Obama-Hillary-Biden corruption. “Obama united the country.” “Hillary was a moderate…good for both sides.” “Biden is a sweetheart who just loves little kids.”
We’ll make up in a week or so. Doesn’t anger eventually turn into acceptance? Not holding my breath….
Ruth,
I feel for you. I’ve lost 2 friends of 45 years, and may be losing my BiL whom I consider a good friend and not just family. We were golf partners for over 30 years. Maybe my wife’s sister can reign him in. She’s very apolitical, and is probably not seeing all the stuff he posts on social media as she never looks at that.
He adores our nephews from my other SiL but hasn’t figured out all those boys, ages 30 to 42, are very conservative. When I saw them 2 weeks ago they were all concerned about what was going on with their uncle.
I don’t understand how liberals care so much about politics that they will destroy family. I just don’t see conservatives doing that as much.
The unspoken coda to (3) is that the blatant attempts to thwart every step of his first term have almost conferred on him the right to advance his current policies. The constant moaning from Dems seems to fade into something like the trombone voices of the adults in a Peanuts TV show!
Paul in Boston is onto something. USAID turns out to have been a massive leftist NGO slush fund. Actual charitable efforts have been folded into State and the slush fund is shut down, with the loss now codified through the rescission bill. It’s their livelihood, to which they thought they were permanently entitled.
I’m once again reminded of that Sam Peckinpah movie, The Wild Bunch:
Pike: “….. A hell of a lot of people, Dutch, just can’t stand to be wrong.”
Dutch: “Pride.”
Pike: “And they can’t forget it… that pride… being wrong. Or learn by it.”
The pride gets in the way of explaining it to themselves, or trying to understand it, either. Denial. And if you invite them to explain their thoughts, they might start, but then they sputter and get even more mad.
If the current trends are any guide, it’s going to be quite a shock when they start to figure out just how small their crowd has become – hopefully right around midterm elections. Not that I’m setting any expectations for myself, besides hoping the trends hold up.
These people are mentally ill and should be treated as such. And they REALLY hate this country. Oikophobia.
As to why, I have no idea. Or perhaps I have too many. But it looks, whatever the cause, like elementary school level petulance.
It’s too much to ask them to see themselves from a neutral perspective, but if they did, they’d be embarrassed.
I know two women who have listed, one on FB, a string of terrible things Trump has done. It was, maybe, March after the inauguration. The list was actually of things the Biden and Obama administrations have done.
I know two women who believe the BBB will, by cutting PBS, put Alaskans at risk for the next tsunami. Only warning system. I did a bad thing. Looked up all the radio stations in Alaska. Didn’t mention it to them, but I’ve been tempted. TDS has blinded people to an extent the don’t have a clue how stupid they look.
physicsguy
Perhaps because for many liberals, politics is a substitute for religion. Those who do not agree with liberal politics are, in effect, heretics. And you know how heretics get treated.
One irony about the religious POV here is that my grandmother was a staunch Fundamentalist, yet she maintained loving, cordial relations with family members who did not belong to her church.
I haven’t noticed the Trump haters in my family are any nuttier or any more obtuse than they were seven years ago. They can be peculiarly fixated on what you might call ‘news cycle shizz’ and peculiarly indifferent to actual issues which are staring them right in the face. Either indifferent or offering specious rationalizations. The discourse within the Democratic Party in our time has been largely emotions-driven. It’s emotions-driven from top to bottom. This will not end well.
That list seems quite on-point to me. I might add that there is a sort of shock effect arising from the fact that this administration is so different in tone and approach from “business as usual” in Washington – instead of things just sort of coasting along on that same sort of inertia, things happening in more or less the same sort of way over decades, generations…, here comes the bull in the china shop breaking things and taking a radically different approach to how “government” gets done. It is shocking to see – a good sort of shocking if you’re on board with the goals of Trump and his team, to be sure.
As a corollary, perhaps, is the fact that a lot of what the Trump team is achieving is being done with something of a flipping-the-birdie element directed toward the “establishment”. In both content and style, much of his program is implicitly and some of it frankly adversarial with respect to that “establishment”.
I guess my point was simply that there are not really “new” reasons to hate Trump; most of neo’s points boil down to the fact that Trump has not only persisted but grown stronger. And that drives libs/Dems insane, more like a 3-inch putt by now. To them he is like B’rer Rabbit’s Tar Baby. For them now to ponder the importance of Trump seriously would shatter their view of the world, especially their regard for themselves as the “good”, “smart” people.
In connection with this, here is a link to an article from Ruy Teixeira’s “The Liberal Patriot” blog (I or someone else may have linked this before in another thread but I believe it is relevant here). Teixeira is a liberal Dem and not a Trumpist but he has been begging Dems to take Trump seriously for years, fortunately to little avail. The gist here is how Dems are now losing minority voters. What could be more aggravating to those who reflexively call Trump “racist”?
https://www.liberalpatriot.com/p/a-final-comprehensive-look-at-how
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Unmentioned in that list is the hypocrisy. Before the election Trump was so anti pedo.
But now ?
Refused to know Ghilsaine Maxwell to testify under oath and give the names of ALL people involved in that decades old conspiracy to rape underage girls.
Trump promised to release as ll the files in including tapes .
Trump was be best friends with his bro for decades. Called him a ” fine fellow”
Gave the US Attorney who gave him the sweetheart plea deal a plum job in DC as Sec of Labor
Gave the FL Attorney General who refused to prosecute Epstein after being given the list of dozens of sexual victims by the Palm Beach Chief of Police. That FL Attorney General is Pam Bondi, now Trump’s Attorney General
Yes it is things like that are the vectors of the “disease” you call TDS
John, I’d like to see the evidence that Trump was “best friends” with Epstein for “decades.” There are lots of people Trump has called “a fine fellow” or something similar.
@Kate:I’d like to see the evidence that Trump was “best friends” with Epstein for “decades.”
It’s kind of exaggerated, and I don’t know how someone as busy as Trump is has time for what normal people would call a “best friend”, but in October 2002 Trump did tell New York Magazine
There are dozens of people who said similar things of course. Same article mentions many other famous friends and an occasion that Epstein flew Bill Clinton, Kevin Spacey, and Chris Tucker to Africa in his plane.
That was a piece that hid as much as it revealed
@miguel That was a piece that hid as much as it revealed.
Of course it did. Not only was Epstein rich with powerful friends, he was considering buying New York Magazine, and in 2003 he bid for it. There are nonetheless hints given in that article that seem significant in hindsight: for example, only one named client, 150 employees, 20 of whom are accountants, and the only others mentioned are a “bevy” of “conspicuously attractive young women” assistants. That’s not usual for most businesses.
Not mentioned is his brother Mark, who also worked for Epstein’s company, who also has mysterious money.
Geoffrey Britain says: “The urban environments in which the vast majority of leftists live are entirely dependent upon the importation of every one of life’s necessities.”
This is something that increasingly strikes me. I’ve gotten interested in electricity lately, and the infrastructure which delivers electricity in plenitude to pretty much every place and person who wants it is an absolutely astonishing scientific and engineering achievement. And it’s completely taken for granted by most of us. That’s a mistake, but a more glaring one for leftists, who seem to take the affluence of our society at large as a sort of given, as a “resource” which is just there, like water, but is being distributed unfairly. None of it would continue to work very well if they were in charge of it.
Gringo: “Perhaps because for many liberals, politics is a substitute for religion. ”
Bingo. I would say that it is quite literally a religion. But if I don’t want to get into the attempt to define religion I’ll just say that it functions as a religion for its adherents. That’s an element of the rage that Trump provoked. As I’ve said here before, Trump’s election in 2016, coming after the reign of Saint Barack, was a sort of blasphemy, the desecration of a temple.
Gave the FL Attorney General who refused to prosecute Epstein
==
The functions of the Attorney-General very from state to state, but they do not typically involve prosecution of individual offenders unless the local district attorney has recused himself. The Attorney-General typically offers legal opinions, represents the state government in civil matters (with the assistance of departmental and agency counsel), and prosecutes corporations.
Please note, the people primarily responsible for prosecuting Epstein would have been local prosecutors where he had residences: New York City, South Florida, New Mexico, and the US Virgin Islands. Ghilaine Maxwell’s residence was in London.
Art Deco said: “The discourse within the Democratic Party in our time has been largely emotions-driven. It’s emotions-driven from top to bottom. This will not end well.”
I first noticed this a long time ago, when Barbara Boxer was running for re-election in California. It was all about emotion. Nothing that would require hard choices or sacrifice. Nothing that would prompt a bit of introspection. Promises anything. It was exactly like a high school popularity contest.
And speaking of when these people (and I) were in high school, Buffalo Springfield got it exactly right: “A thousand people in the street, singing songs and carrying signs, mostly say “Hooray for our side.” That’s a world-view, right there.
Related:
“The Desperation To Stop Trump Wasn’t Political, It Was Survival”—
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/desperation-stop-trump-wasnt-political-it-was-survival
Actually it IS political AND survival.
Gringo (10:58 pm) said, in a context (see 10:58 pm): “Those who do not agree with liberal politics are, in effect, heretics. And you know how heretics get treated.”
M J R adds: Heretics or, in some cases (including many “changers”) . . . apostates.
Have a look:
“What’s the difference between apostasy and heresy?”
https://christianity.stackexchange.com/questions/93861/whats-the-difference-between-apostasy-and-heresy
10) the Rule of Law complaints against Trump are starting to be used against Dems. No illegal immigrant is Above The Law.
No Dem govt/ deep state employee is Above The Law.
Maybe not even Obama is Above The Law.
But lots of stuff Trump does, which Dems dislike and claimed was illegal, is being found to Be Legal.
“some of my Trump-hating friends and acquaintances”
Luckily I have none, because a “friend” or in fact a family member I want anything to do with would never vote to take my liberties away, destroy my country or spit on my Christian faith nor Jews/Israel.
They wouldn’t say it’s fine to make Islam, the Democrat party at prayer.
I don’t trust “friends” like that for a moment, so I make sure I don’t keep such “friends.” When I was born in 1947 the Democrats said they were in favor of the little guy, the working man and so forth. That is long gone.
Does it make my life narrow in any way. Not at all, because how can you hold your tongue and remain silent in face of evil.
It’s worth mentioning that Trump is a world class troll who deliberately baits his opponents into crazy reactions. So was Obama, but Trump’s MO seems to include taking whatever was done by Democrats (including to him) and doing it back to them twice as hard. In this, that too.
More importantly, I think that people on the left have a “heroic” view of history in which the “arc of history always bends towards progress,” as they define it. This is what leftists or even left-liberals are referring to when they talk about “Our Democracy.” Of course, “Our Democracy” has very little to do with actual democracy or the actual will of the people, and an awful lot more to do with the ideological predilections that the left happens to hold at any particular time. The unstated assumption was that the ratchet turns only one way, and that the job of Republicans is to consolidate or “conserve” the gains made by the last generation of leftists. Well, no more.
(Aside – I read commentary yesterday from a Democrat in Congress who was actually arguing that the recission bills recently passed by Congress were an example of Executive abuse of power. These people have truly lost their minds – or they never understood how the republic worked in the first place – or they didn’t care as long as they were getting what they want.)
— Barry Meislin
Sigh. Zerohedge is at it again.
This is an example of exactly the kind of hysterical overstatement that could turn the whole thing into a liability for Trump. It takes a real and true thing, that the Bush I, Clinton, Bush II, and Obama Administrations were all examples of the ruling class mindset and thinking, and tries to spin it as some elaborate conspiracy. It’s not and never was.
Going all the way back to Bush I:
“Under his watch, the United States expanded covert operations globally, often under the guise of national security. These operations weren’t just about foreign policy. They included drug trafficking (see: Iran-Contra), money laundering, and manipulation of foreign elections. They funded black budget programs and off-the-books deals. — Zerohedge/Tyler Durden
Yes, that stuff happened, for various reasons, many of them very good. There’s nothing inherently wrong with black budget programs and off the book deals, they’re inevitable and they happen in every era and every Administration. What matters is what and why. As for money laundering and drugs, espionage is inherently a dirty business. Again, it depends on what and why.
The Bush family’s ties to global banking, oil, and weapons aren’t speculation, they’re documented. –Zerohedge
So what? That’s not evidence of any malfeasance.
<Bill Clinton’s administration refined the art of corruption and cover-up. From the Mena Airport drug running scandal to the Chinagate campaign finance scandal, corruption was a feature—not a bug—of his presidency. The Clintons cashed in on global influence and built the Clinton Foundation into a pay-to-play leviathan. — Zerohedge
All true. And all centered on Bill Clinton, the Grifter-in-Chief. Bill Clinton’s actions were about Bill Clinton, either making money or avoiding legal jeopardy.
Meanwhile, the intelligence community continued to expand its reach, especially into domestic surveillance—setting the stage for what would come next.
Half true. The first half is true, the second half is meaningless suggestion.
Under George W. Bush, 9/11 became the catalyst for exponential growth in surveillance, control, and unaccountable government authority. The Patriot Act opened the door to mass data collection on Americans. Wars were launched on false pretenses. Trillions disappeared. And no one was held accountable.
Cheney’s shadow presidency empowered defense contractors and intelligence contractors like never before. Black sites. Torture programs. Secret kill lists. The Constitution was paper to these people. The machine kept rolling, unchecked.
BS. Standard Democratic Party talking points, no different from the TDS they’re spinning now. Cheney was not a shadow president, black sites are a fact of life, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were not started on false pretenses.
Barack Obama ran on transparency and hope. What he delivered was the most refined form of managed decline in U.S. history. Whistleblowers were prosecuted. The IRS was weaponized. The media was co-opted. And the intelligence community was turned inward, not to protect Americans, but to protect itself.
Obama didn’t just look the other way on corruption, he institutionalized it. The “scandal-free” administration was anything but. Benghazi. Fast and Furious. Unmasking of political enemies. Spygate. The Steele Dossier. All of it swept under the rug by a complicit press corps and weaponized DOJ. — Zerohedge
Pretty much all true. But not part of some elaborate conspiracy with the Bushes and Clinton.
It is true that the elite governing class was dominant in all four presidencies. But it was never any sort of elaborate conspiracy. There didn’t have to be. It was just the governing class doing what came more or less naturally to them. Big business wanted cheap labor and access to the Chinese market. The upper middle class and the wealthy wanted cheap nannies and other employees. The educated upper class had an emotional tie to an imaginary world-wide identity.
911 happened, 3000 people were killed (and it was mostly luck that it wasn’t way more), and Bush II wanted to make sure nothing like it happened again. What followed was not evil conspiracy, it was a mixture of good decisions, bad decisions, and class loyalties.
Yes, the big current problems started with Bush I, because Bush I was president when the Cold War was won. That was when a bunch of ruling class tropes and ideas, going back decades, began to be implemented, because that seemed natural to them.
The problem with people like Zerohedge is that they’re doing exactly the same thing that Trump did with Epstein and Ukraine, making elaborate claims and promises and implications that reality will inevitably undercut, leaving you vulnerable to allegations of falsehood or worse.
The truth is bad enough. Hyping it the way Zerohedge and others are doing only hands the Democrats and the ruling class insulation when the hype inevitably falls through.
Prescott Bush, Sr. departed the business world in 1952 and died in 1972. He had four sons and a son in law. One was in the insurance business in Boston and died in 1989. Another worked for Pan American World Airways and then in the insurance business in New York. One founded and ran a modest oil exploration business which he sold for about $1 million in 1963 in order to enter politics f/t. One worked for a scrum of banks and financial firms of varying significance in the BosWash corridor (winding up his career in New Haven, Ct), and one was in the venture capital business in St. Louis.
I guess it was more a confluence rather than a conspiracy as such one could use the delian era of athens after the persian wars as template with the soviet union out of the picture the sort of arrogance that fukuyama had entertained ‘end of history’ no just a reset before 1917 it took some time for Russia and Turkey to reassert themselves with some rival power blocs
One might look at noriega and saddam as the old fashioned nationalists of third world cast so were the likes of arafat and abu nidal for instance arafat was one of the last to leave the stage
Islamists like yassin and bin laden were the ones to see the bigger picture that huntington and robert kaplan saw from different angles the issues of faith and tribe over primarily economic questions
As for cheney who seemed to have the strategic side of bush policy one might say allied with rumsfeld where as powell and oneil lets say took a different tack
The former were reprising their arguments from the ford era where the dems looked terminally naive with the twist that some people in rumsfeld orbit like wolfowitz and perle were more ambitious to reorder the world in impractical ways from some peoples perspectives
Im being charitable to cheney despite his more exuberant remarks toward the President and his more realist perspectives his unwillingness to defend his own aides like lewis libby is another thing altogether perhaps he thought this would all pass the lawfare not only against him but allies like conrad black and the like
Those beats have made skeptical against any of these lawfare exercises
Thanks HC.
Actually, what leapt out at me from that ZH post was that it reminded me of a post on this site from about a year ago (perhaps more) on why, IIRC, the Republican Party “Old Guard”, such as it was (e.g., Dubya), was staying pretty quiet despite all of “Biden”’s manifold abuses and crises swirling about. Moreover, those GOP “leadership “ cadres seemed a lot more tolerant regarding Democratic Party policies of “Transformation”(TM) than they were regarding DJT.
Puzzling, eh? (Or maybe not…?)
Gringo,
I think there is also a clear difference between left and right antisemites. Owens and Tucker are not going to take physical action against Jews and from what I’ve seen neither are most right wing antisemites.
Aggie,
A great example of cognitive dissonance is shown in several “man on the street” interviews where people are asked why illegal immigration rates dropped so significantly.
Those on the right see the issue very clearly. Those on the left don’t.
40 yrs in the wilderness mindset. They lost the big generational moment. The paradigms have changed and what was conventional wisdom is out of date. The world has shifted beneath the our very feet and we are still coming to grips with what that means.
Cheney and Bush apparently had a falling out over what was happening to Scooter Libby. Bush II wouldn’t fight back. That was a theme that echoed all through his second term, he just would not fight back against the Dems. Cheney did try to defend Libby, but he couldn’t do much with the President not helping.
One of the great mysteries of the GOP, all the way back to 1994, is why, when attacked with lies and nonsense from the press and the Democrats (but I repeat myself), they just fell silent and took it. One of the secrets of Trump’s popularity with the GOP voting ranks is quite simply that he fights back, and under his leadership the GOP is starting to do it, too.