04-13-2019, 12:55 AM
(04-12-2019, 08:24 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote:(03-29-2019, 11:40 AM)Eric the Green Wrote: Well, let's keep laughing. Colbert said that Trump is doing the opposite of everything Obama did. Well, Obama got re-elected...Colbert has said a lot of stupid crap over the years. Me, I wouldn't place much faith in what Colbert or any other blue puppet has to say about anything important these days.
Some of the greatest wisdom comes in the form of humor.
“If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you.” -- George Bernard Shaw.
It's what people say in jest about President Trump that often exposes that hollow, reckless, cruel man at his worst. You must recognize how different Obama is from his successor. Even Karl Rogue, asked what he thought was best about Obama, said that he is cautious. Consider this: in a dangerous time, caution is a virtue. It forces people to think things out. Planning the D-Day invasion of Greater Hitlerland went to the person who found the task most odious: General Dwight Eisenhower, someone whose first objective as a general was to keep his troops' casualties as low as possible. Eisenhower was the most cautious of American generals. In view of how Eisenhower planned the invasion, he proved to be the right choice. He overestimated American casualties and underestimated potential German losses. Within a couple weeks of the invasion the more daring George S. Patton was able to get into the rear of German defenses and inflict a military calamity similar in the number of losses that the Wehrmacht endured at Stalingrad. Within a year, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, and Heinrich Himmler would off themselves.
Historians have come to recognize Dwight Eisenhower as a great President. His caution kept him from doing anything reckless. He stayed clear of the McCarthy bandwagon which at first looked like a powerful tool to weaken the Democratic Party. He chose to accept the decisions of the US Supreme Court on race relations as the law of the land and chose to use his authority to enforce the decisions. When Governor Orval Faubus chose to have the Arkansas National Guard to defend the segregation of Little Rock high schools, Ike put them under his direction as Commander-in-Chief and ordered them to facilitate desegregation. His conduct over the Suez Crisis may have stopped a nasty war between Britain and France on the one side... and Egypt. Egypt had the right to the Suez Canal.
Obama acted with caution and integrity. He knew that he could never know everything, so he surrounded people with more specialized knowledge than his. His speeches are coherent, whether you like the content or do not -- reflecting that he rarely spoke off the cuff, and that his public statements as a rule went under the careful scrutiny of people who might find a grammatical error or some other blunder. One always knew for what Obama stood. He may not have been the chest-pounding nationalist, but he respected the intelligence services and the Armed Forces.
I have looked for analogues to Obama, and I find Eisenhower closer than anyone else. I can say this: the next effective Republican President will be more like Obama than like Trump. I would find Trump objectionable were he a liberal because he does so many things wrong, and he would be making a travesty of a liberal agenda.
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.