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NRaleighLiberal

(60,018 posts)
Fri Apr 13, 2018, 08:13 PM Apr 2018

Spot on NYT Op Ed - "Tethered to a Raging Buffoon Called Trump"

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/13/opinion/trump-hitler-europe.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-left-region&region=opinion-c-col-left-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-left-region

by Roger Cohen

We are tethered to a buffoon. He rages and veers, spreading ugliness, like an oil slick smothering everything in its viscous mantle. He’s about to bomb Syria. He’s not about to bomb Syria. His attention span is nonexistent. He attacks the foundations of our Republic: an independent judiciary, a free press, truth itself. His cabinet looks terrorized, the way Saddam Hussein’s once did.

President Donald Trump is dangerous. The main things mitigating the danger are his incompetence and cowardice. We live in a time that teaches how outrage can turn to a shrug, how the unthinkable repeated over and over can induce moral numbness, how a madman’s manic certainties can overwhelm reason. He is very busy; people resist; he opens another front; people shake their heads. It’s hard to remember on Friday what happened on Monday. Trump’s is the unbearable lightness of the charlatan.

Disorientation spreads. Trump’s main war, beyond all the military bluster, is on truth. This reflects his instinct for the jugular: Once the distinction between truth and falsehood disappears, anything is possible. There are plenty of examples these days, from Moscow to Budapest, of how “democracies” can be manipulated to the point where they can yield only one result. This is Trump’s objective, and for it he needs a weakened Justice Department, a weakened press and an American public that will believe anything. He has had setbacks but is stubborn.

In the mid-1930s, when the world was hurtling toward disaster, Robert Musil, the Austrian author of “The Man Without Qualities,” wrote this on the nature of civilization: “That which we call culture presumably does not directly have the concept of truth as a criterion, but no culture can rest on a crooked relationship to truth.”

snip

Important and spot on - read it all - does a great job of capturing what is so dangerous about this particular time...and president
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Spot on NYT Op Ed - "Tethered to a Raging Buffoon Called Trump" (Original Post) NRaleighLiberal Apr 2018 OP
kicking because of its relevance - everyone should read this (if they can - paywall..sorry!) NRaleighLiberal Apr 2018 #1
Well written, excellent insights. R, thanks, NRL. nt Mc Mike Apr 2018 #2
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