01-23-2019, 01:21 PM
(01-23-2019, 11:34 AM)Bill the Piper Wrote: How about that?
In 2008 Obama was the anti-war candidate, and he won.
In 2016 Trump was the anti-war candidate, and he won. Hillary Clinton was seen by many as the warmonger, the neo-con.
If the Democratic candidate in 2020 is seen as more pro-war than Trump, he will lose.
People are anti-war, but they distrust defeatists and appeasers. I see Trump having made a bad deal with North Korea, and Americans see reports that the deal that President Trump made served his vanity more than it served any of America's friends in the region (South Korea, Japan) or frenemies (China and Russia).
The defeatist is the person against a strong and effective defense because he wants the sort of government that could never win a free election. Think of the Russian Hard left going into 1914 or the French Hard Right in the late 1930s. Such people are simply traitors -- often known eponymously as 'quislings'.
The appeaser is the sort of person who thinks that he can save his life by sacrificing his friends to the crocodiles. The crocodiles are delighted.
Trump is simply a useful idiot for Vladimir Putin.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.