(Edited--PS added) Your mistake,
by BeijingIrish (2024-02-14 12:23:55)
Edited on 2024-02-14 13:02:29

In reply to: It was far from just Britain. America First, Lindbergh, ...  posted by Barney68

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and the mistake of so many on this board, it your fixation on Trump as the author of our travail. The disintegration, the slouching, began long before the advent of Trump. Remember that Yeats wrote his poem in 1919 in the aftermath of the Great War. Ireland’s struggle for independence was just getting underway, and his wife had become a victim of the flu pandemic (she survived).

Since then, no few writers, film-makers, and others have borrowed Yeats’ images and phraseology—Joan Didion, Lou Reed, Joni Mitchell—to describe the end of the gyre. Remember Gordon Gekko in Wall Street? “So the falcon's heard the falconer, huh?” Robert Bork wrote Slouching Towards Gomorrah in 1996.

“And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” I guess we could debate how much time we have left until the next rough beast arrives. In the meantime, we should acknowledge that, If arson is the metaphor, Trump didn’t set the fire. He is merely an accelerant.

I’m sure Liz would be flattered, but she ain’t Churchill.

PS: You can't bet serious about "shake free of MAGA's grasp". Are you powerless? Instead of standing there sucking your teeth and wringing your hands, go about replacing Biden with a candidate who will win convincingly. I want to puke every time I hear the stuff about what a good job he's doing, slow and steady, blah blah.


I'm not sure about shaking free of MAGA.
by IrishJosh24  (2024-02-14 13:33:32)     cannot delete  |  Edit  |  Return to Board  |  Ignore Poster   |   Highlight Poster  |   Cannot reply

I'm not so sure the way to shake free of MAGA's grasp is to have the party already not embracing it nominate someone else who isn't embracing it but will "convincingly" defeat its progenitor (again). I don't think we will move on from MAGA's grasp until the party that openly embraces it rejects its influence.
Responding to your PS ...
by Barney68  (2024-02-14 13:25:24)     cannot delete  |  Edit  |  Return to Board  |  Ignore Poster   |   Highlight Poster  |   Cannot reply

Apparently you think I'm a Democrat. This is not true. I am not now, nor have I ever been, a member of the Democratic Party.

Thus, I have little input to the decisions made by the Democratic Party. And the Democratic Party has not shown any interest in listening to me, anyway.

I do not mistake Trump for the author if this mess.
by Barney68  (2024-02-14 13:22:02)     cannot delete  |  Edit  |  Return to Board  |  Ignore Poster   |   Highlight Poster  |   Cannot reply

There are multiple factors involved, but briefly ... as though I can be brief ...

In '64 or '68 (Goldwater on principal, Nixon because he was Nixon), the GOP started doing things that attracted the folks who had been offended by the Civil Rights legislation of the Johnson years. They started with a wink and a nod, but became ever more obvious. It's my fault that I was in denial about this until around 2010, but there you have it. It was still there and growing.

They added all of the culture "stuff" along the way. It fit with the underlying message about keeping the right demographic in charge. A modern version of "Gone with the Wind" developed. A fable about a time that never was.

Along came a fellow with the skills of an old time vaudevillian, he could read the room, and the ethics / morals of ... what? Doesn't matter. He became the leader of the MAGA band, a group who believed that he would take them back to that time that never was.

All this was enabled by Watergate.

Post Watergate, there were a lot of reforms. One of them was to eliminate the "smoke filled rooms" full of professionals and replace them with the will of the people as demonstrated in primary elections.

It is through the primary election process that the MAGAs can impose their views on the GOP. And the so-called leaders of what was once a great political party have avoided confronting the problem since 2016, by which time, it was really too late. Insert here the Churchill quote you used in your post. It fits exactly the GOP response to the rise of MAGA power, a rise that began in earnest around the turn of the Century. But the first crisis came when those leaders had at least three clear shots at confronting the problem: impeachment 1, impeachment 2, and election denialism.

Finally, when those opportunities were wasted, the fate of the GOP probably sealed. Not this year, not next, but before the decade is out, it will probably have turned into a minority party akin to the Libertarians. Hopefully a new party, Forward?, will rise to take its place in the center-right of our nation's political spectrum.

In closing, I do not mistake Cheney for Churchill, save for their shared experience of being cast out for their commitment to telling the truth as they saw it. And, while she ain't Churchill, a lot of the folks in the GOP have to stand on tiptoe to see eye to eye with people like Chamberlin and Quisling.

I weep.
And her father's miscalculation and mismanagement
by Raoul  (2024-02-14 12:45:48)     cannot delete  |  Edit  |  Return to Board  |  Ignore Poster   |   Highlight Poster  |   Cannot reply

of Iraq and Afghanistan has done incalculable damage to the collective psyche of America when it comes to discerning how and when to use our power and leadership.

There are few respected voices on the path forward for us - on Ukraine, Middle East/Iran or Taiwan.

This is true. *
by Barney68  (2024-02-14 13:26:12)     cannot delete  |  Edit  |  Return to Board  |  Ignore Poster   |   Highlight Poster  |   Cannot reply