He wasn’t. Let’s not start hyperventilating just yet. Donald is only out for himself, and in this specific situation that’s a good thing. There’s literally no scenarios where a full blown shooting war in the ME with a major regional power could be good for him personally.
Honestly good for the Houthi’s and fuck the Saudi’s. They 100% deserve this and the oil that won’t get pumped because of this will probably be a good thing for the world. It’s long past time for the US to stop viewing the Saudi’s as important partners and start viewing them as competitors in the global oil business. This strike is going to be absolutely great for the oil producers in the Permian Basin for starters.
EDIT: We should all be super grateful Bolton isn’t in the WH right now talking about how now we absolutely have to go to war with Iran or it’ll look like Trump has a small penis.
I’m sure we’re going to find this to be a tightly held principle when a Republican House wants to subpoena President Warren for wearing a tan suit in 2025.
The GOP is going to have to do a full rebuild/rebrand if Warren gets elected and we blow up the filibuster. The demographics aren’t in their favor and five years from now that won’t be any better. Federal action on voter suppression and gerrymandering will finish them off in terms of national politics until they change enough to get people like me (mid 30’s married white guy business owner… I’m supposed to be a core GOP voter/donor) to vote for them.
Yeah that doesn’t play very well with people aged 20-50 now. Five years from now a double digit % of the people who it appeals to today will be dead. Naked white supremacy is a really obvious going out of business sale before the new management sign goes up short term play.
I feel like this narrative of conservatives are dying off and getting replaced by woke liberals has been a thing since WW2 and has yet to pay dividends. Im not too sure thats a future we can really count on. Hopefully this time is different.
Society has definitely shifted dramatically leftward since the 40’s, but it’s also true that young people have a greater capacity to develop reactionary right wing views than most people think. Obama Netflix?
The GOP cheated their ass off from 2005 to present to keep the demographics from overwhelming them. That doesn’t change the fact that the countries demographics have probably already crossed a tipping point.
The most important thing for the left is not to repeat the mistakes that created this current political meta. Over regulation, gangsters, and price controls led to an economic melt down in the 70’s which changed American politics rightward all the way up to the present day.
We can go left, but we have to be smart about it. They went right and were dumb about it which is the only reason we’re even getting another shot. If they had been doing as good a job of running the federal government as they have in running say the state of Utah (I’m speaking purely from an economic/policy perspective) the country wouldn’t be shifting left right now.
If the GOP hadn’t gone full science denial on a wide variety of issues (income inequality and climate change being the big two that stick out to me) and dived into racism things would be very different right now.
It’s the excesses at the end of a political era that cause large scale paradigm shifts. We’re witnessing those as we speak. The seeds of the GOP’s destruction were planted when Roger Stone and co first used racism to win Nixon the presidency, and then sold access to the presidency. If they had been purged as corrupt assholes the GOP would be a totally different party today and a lot of us would probably be conservatives. Instead they got greedy and have been wasting away intellectually ever since.
Liberal millennials is a real thing, but Republicans cheat, are shameless, actually use political power and benefit from shamefully undemocratic institutions like the senate and electoral college.
Don’t kid yourself. If there’s one thing the GOP is really good at, it’s making it look like the world hates us so much that we have no choice but to go to war. They’ll hide behind fake patriotism like they always do. The 40% that support Trump are going nowhere. All you need is another 10% and now all of a sudden the majority of Americans support war.
The reason Trump isn’t interested is because war is a pain in the ass. He’ll get interrupted watching FOX or be woken up in the middle of the night.
I can’t wait til the GOP is fully onboard with man made climate change and blame the liberals for not doing anything about it in the first place. And you’ll have solemn introspections from the NYT from Coalfuck, WV about how liberals are just too busy with cow farts and straws to care about them.
Your cynicism is justified by your personal experience (I happen to share it) but history suggests that things generally stay the same for a long while until the unsustainable stuff collapses under it’s own weight… and then things move very quickly indeed.
I’d argue that we’ve been watching the rapid unraveling of the GOP since Trump got elected. Yes superficially it looks like they are moving fast, but they are actually in a burning plane with no engines left hurtling toward the earth.
They are stick a fork in them done. That 40% of voters isn’t 40% of the population and are dying rapidly (as people in their 60’s+ tend to) and now that they’ve tasted Trump they won’t go back to the boring old days of Romney/McCain/Bush. Now that they’ve jumped the shark they have to keep topping themselves and the more they top themselves the more they drive turnout from the part of the population not glued to Fox News. It’s a death spiral.
The last time we saw politics in a state of flux like this it was the 70’s and the economy was eroding rapidly with inflation well above GDP growth and productivity growth because of a variety of stuff that was almost entirely the liberals fault (which makes sense because they’d been in control of government since the 30’s and were very very complacent about harvesting the spoils… kind of like the modern GOP). What followed was Reagan and right at 40 years of right wing political domination. Now the worm is turning.
This has all happened before and will probably happen again when we’re old. The youngs will be talking shit about us when we’re in our 70’s too.
