[ExI] Trump asks "Why Can’t We Use Nuclear Weapons?"

[John Clark]

On Wed, Aug 3, 2016 at 2:52 PM, Dan TheBookMan <danust2012 at gmail.com> wrote:

> The office should be abolished, the White House turned into a homeless
> shelter, and every last person who has served as president should be
> roughly if not brutally thrown out of polite society.


Maybe that's what should happen, but that most certainly is not what's
going to happen. What's going to happen is that in 3 months the decision
will be made on which one of 2 people is going to be handed the keys to a
Trident Nuclear Submarine. And one of them is a madman. And what's going to
happen is that even after armageddon some people (if people haven't gone
completely extinct) will still say a insecure Email server was more
important.

On Wed, Aug 3, 2016 at 12:31 PM, Darin Sunley <dsunley at gmail.com> wrote:

> If the "serious" politicians, on both sides of the aisle, wanted us to be
> able to take seriously the idea that a presidential candidate like Trump
> could be an existential threat to the country, they probably shouldn't have
> spent the last three decades describing, in turn, Ronald Reagan, Bill
> Clinton, George W Bush, and Barack Obama as similar existential threats.


There is no point in pretending that Trump is just another presidential
candidate, he isn't. George W Bush was as dumb as a sack of rocks and the
worst president in my lifetime but he was sane, I don't think Trump is. If
we have another Cuban Missile Crisis,  if President Trump has to decide
between being personally embarrassed and causing the extinction of the
human race I don't think he will even hesitate, he will reach for his Red
Telephone.

> "But this guy's /really, really/ bad!" just isn't terribly convincing, in
> and of itself. We've heard that story before.


No, you haven't heard that before. No sitting American president from
either political party has ever said that one of the 2 people that will
succeed him is simply unfit for office, but Obama did yesterday:



*"Donald Trump is unfit and woefully unprepared to be president . There
have been Republican presidents with whom I disagreed but I didn’t have a
doubt that they could function as president .  I think I was right and Mitt
Romney and John McCain were wrong on certain policy issues but I never
thought that they couldn’t do the job. And had they won, I would have been
disappointed but I would have said to all Americans: this is our president
and I know they’re going to abide by certain norms and rules and common
sense, will observe basic decency, will have enough knowledge about
economic policy and foreign policy and our constitutional traditions and
rule of law that our government will work and then we’ll compete four years
from now to try and win an election. But that’s not the situation here. "  *
That is unprecedented, that is not politics as usual, that has not been
said in 200 years.

And it's hard to keep up with Trump, just today he said if he loses that
can only mean the election was rigged and the November 8 vote illegal, and
that also is not politics as usual, no presidential candidate has ever said
something like that before.

On Thu, Aug 4, 2016 at 1:06 AM, Rafal Smigrodzki <rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hillary Clinton sent Humayun to his death at the hands of Islamic
> terrorists, for short term political gain.


Apparently Humayun Khan's parents don't agree with you, and he died in
2004; George W Bush was still in his first term as president in 2004. It's
true that as a senator Hillary Clinton did vote to give W the authority to
invade Iraq and that was without a doubt the worst decision of her life,
but at least she has the decency to be ashamed of herself now for doing so;
in contrast to this day Donald Trump brags about wanting to murder the
children of people he doesn't like and torturing opponents in ways that are
"a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding".

And  it would be a bit hypocritical of me to excoriate Hillary too much for
that vote because if I had been a senator back then I probably would have
voted the same way, I too was dumb enough to believe that George W Bush
knew what he was talking about when he said there were nuclear weapons in
Iraq.

> Let's avoid the subject of elections on this list. It is odious.



Shouldn't you have said that at the very start of your post rather than at
the very end after talking about Hillary Clinton and "short term political
gain"?

 John K Clark
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